Bloodline (Cradle Book 9)

by Will Wight

  The weight of the Dreadgod’s attention caused the blood aura in the area to flare in power. Lindon reacted immediately, flooding out the Hollow Domain and his own willpower to push against the pressure.

  He defended his family and some of the others from Sacred Valley, but he couldn’t cover everyone. He hadn’t been out of Sacred Valley’s suppression field for long, and hadn’t regained his full strength.

  One man from the Li clan keeled over, blood running from his eyes. Several others collapsed, their bodies twitching.

  Bloodspawn didn’t rise from them…at least not yet.

  The cloud fortress had a script specifically to protect it from sudden destruction by Sages and Heralds. It protected them from the worst of the Phoenix’s attention. So this could only get worse.

  Lindon could feel the script, all around the ship. It blazed bright red, overloaded by the Phoenix’s power. The protection was only meant to stop glancing blows, and wouldn’t protect from an all-out attack. Or sustained pressure.

  Beneath them, the scripts began to crack.

  Under the Dreadgod’s stare.

  What can we do? Lindon demanded of Dross. He was already going over every weapon and ability he had. Sages were supposed to be able to help against Dreadgods.

  [Lindon, I…] Dross was at a loss for words.

  Yerin whimpered behind him. He spun to see her curled up in a ball in the corner. Her knees were drawn up, her six Goldsigns covering her in a cage. Her red eyes were filled with absolute terror.

  “It wants me back,” she whispered, and Lindon heard Ruby in those words.

  A stone sank into Lindon’s gut as he realized it was true. The Phoenix wasn’t focused on the rest of them. It was looking for Yerin.

  Lindon focused as he hadn’t since pulling Dross back from Northstrider. He felt space bend and buckle beneath this will, desperately drawing his power together to get them away from here.

  The Phoenix’s willpower brushed his aside like a passing ship shoving past a fish.

  It let out another cry, and Yerin staggered to her feet. White light gathered around her as she prepared to activate the Moonlight Bridge.

  She was running. Trying to draw the Phoenix away.

  Lindon lunged for her…but her Divine Treasure faded on its own. It hadn’t recovered yet.

  The scripts in the cloudship cracked further.

  And suddenly, the pressure on them lifted.

  The Dreadgod’s great head snapped up, focusing on a new figure. A tiny dot in the distance, to Lindon’s eyes, shrouded in a spiraling serpent of red light.

  Northstrider slammed his fist into the head of the Dreadgod with an explosion of force. Trees far below were stripped of leaves. Even miles away, the broad windows on their cloudship cracked. The sound was deafening.

  The Phoenix was hammered down from the sky, almost slamming into the earth before it caught itself on its massive wings and a cushion of wind aura.

  Lindon took a deep breath. If it had crashed into the ground, the impact might have destroyed the entire Desolate Wilds.

  He sent pure madra flooding into the controls so they drifted away from the fight as the Monarch of the Hungry Deep met the Bleeding Phoenix in battle.

  Legions of spirits rose from the Phoenix, tiny versions of itself splitting off from its body. They looked like red raindrops rising upward from its body. Northstrider responded with another punch that launched a serpentine dragon of scarlet madra. The dragon devoured the cloud of phoenixes, roaring as it did.

  That was the only exchange slow enough for Lindon to catch.

  In the next second, the Dreadgod unleashed lightning, a wall of sword-madra slashes, a smaller cloud of bird-spirits, and a beam of concentrated destructive light from its beak. All of its techniques were tinged blood-red. It moved constantly as it fought, a blur of motion covering half the sky.

  Northstrider conjured dragons, he struck with blows that split the clouds, he summoned planes of black force that shielded him, and he moved even faster than the Phoenix. They spiraled around one another so that even Dross couldn’t track them perfectly.

  But it was obvious, even to Lindon, that Northstrider was out of his depth.

  The dragons he Forged were torn apart by the slightest brush of the Phoenix’s talons. His walls of force—no doubt created by a sacred instrument of some kind—shattered before they could cover him. And the feeling of the Phoenix continued growing by the moment.

  Even so, Northstrider wasn’t overwhelmed. The battle was tilted against him, but not so terribly as Lindon had imagined.

  He understood for the first time the dilemma the Monarchs faced with the Dreadgods. They could fight on an almost even level, but if the Monarchs pushed too hard, the Dreadgods would awaken and work together. And the Monarchs had people to protect, while the Dreadgods didn’t.

  But there was something to that explanation that didn’t quite satisfy Lindon.

  The Monarchs were that close in power to the Phoenix; Malice had fought it more or less to a standstill for three days the last time. And even if the Dreadgods joined forces, they were still outnumbered by Monarchs.

  There had to be something else. Something…

  A feeling of utter cold passed over Windfall like a glacier shooting through the sky. Lindon’s body and spirit shivered together as it chilled him on a more-than-physical level, but it was past them in a second.

  The Phoenix’s head came up, and it snapped its beak onto one of Malice’s glistening blue arrows. The missile shattered.

  A purple-armored fist followed it an instant later as Malice punched the Dreadgod in the ribs.

  This time, the impact did blow out Lindon’s windows.

  He was ready for it, pushing out with force and wind aura to blast the glass shards back before they slashed all the Sacred Valley refugees to ribbons. The crowd was screaming, but Lindon couldn’t hear them.

  Now darkness was interspersed with red light as the second Monarch joined the battle. If Lindon had thought it was hard to follow before, it was chaos now.

  And devastating for the land beneath.

  Malice strode through foothills, and they became a plain. The impact from one of Northstrider’s strikes stripped a forest bare. One of the Phoenix’s techniques was deflected, and bloody fire rained down.

  There was only one saving grace: the Monarchs were pulling the battle away from Sacred Valley. Every second, they were further north.

  Lindon’s heart hammered, and he checked the viewing constructs in the fortress. Some of them had blown out, or the scripts that controlled them had, but some were still intact. An image floated over his console, flickering and indistinct because of the damage.

  The eastern slopes of Mount Samara were covered in rubble. And filled with bodies.

  As he watched, armies of bloodspawn rose like ants.

  He quickly turned the projection to another direction, trying not to vomit all over the control panels. How many people who had left Sacred Valley on foot had survived? Had anyone?

  His own spiritual sense told him that the suppression field had stopped the worst of it for the people inside, blunting even the physical force from the blows. Crowds still pushed their way out of Heaven’s Glory…though the human tide slowed with reluctance as they saw the bodies piled on the eastern side.

  Then he found the Titan.

  It was standing just outside the ruins of Mount Venture, still except for its lashing tail, watching as the northern horizon was lit red by the battle. Lindon’s heart tensed as he waited for it to go join the fight. If it did, would the Monarchs be overwhelmed? Or did they have some kind of plan? Maybe an ambush?

  His first breath passed while the Wandering Titan stood still, except for its writhing tail. Then his second breath.

  His third breath caught in his throat as the Titan turned. Slow, lumbering, the giant turned back toward Sacred Valley.

  The yellow beacon that had once rested inside Mount Venture was still dim and flickering,
but the Titan marched over in one stride, ignoring it. The Dreadgod took one purposeful step after another, marching across Sacred Valley.

  And leaving it in ruins.

  Its footsteps crushed trees like grass. Its tail lashed out behind it, knocking more chunks from the ruined Mount Venture…and as it continued walking, its tail cut into more and more.

  Lindon felt like his heart had stopped beating.

  From their vantage point, high above Samara’s ring and moving south quickly, the high-quality viewing constructs from the Ninecloud Court picked up the destruction in great detail. Not all of them had been damaged, and this projection was crystal clear.

  So Lindon missed nothing as the Dreadgod waded into the Wei clan.

  The central avenue, the artery that supplied traffic for all the major businesses in the clan, vanished beneath its colossal foot.

  Earth aura flashed out in a golden wave, and the earth rippled like water. Entire housing districts were torn apart by rolling earth, including the Shi family. Somewhere in that chaos of destroyed buildings and uprooted trees rested the remnants of Lindon’s childhood home.

  A black tail slashed through the middle of Elder Whisper’s tower, and the top half toppled slowly to shatter on the ground.

  If the elder hadn’t escaped when he had the chance, then he was dead now.

  The Titan didn’t even notice as it kicked aside the arena where the last Seven-Year Festival had been fought. Where Lindon had met Suriel. Where he had first seen this vision of the Titan wading into Sacred Valley.

  The vision he’d failed to stop.

  With inexorable steps, the Titan was heading their direction. It seemed to be drawn to Samara’s ring, but not in a particular hurry. To the Dreadgod, it was simply time for a stroll.

  Mercy laid a hand on his shoulder. “You should turn that off,” she said quietly.

  Only then did Lindon remember that the construct was projecting this image into the air. If he could see it, so could everyone else.

  His family, and several dozen other refugees from Sacred Valley, had just seen their home destroyed.

  “Apologies,” Lindon whispered.

  The view cut off.

  But he could still see it. He could feel it, his entire being focused on it.

  Tears tracked down his sister’s face as she approached him. “Is there…is there something we can do?”

  Lindon barely saw her.

  “Maybe we could go back? We can find more room. Even…even if we can save one more person…”

  The Titan wasn’t in a hurry, but Sacred Valley wasn’t a long walk for it. If it continued walking in the same direction, it would reach Mount Samara in a matter of minutes.

  Lindon stopped the cloud’s propulsion. They could go back. At the very least, they’d be able to pick up a few more people.

  His spirit screamed a warning, and he looked up at the windows that were once full of glass. All he could see was a wall of purple crystal.

  Mercy threw herself at it, leaping forward. “Stop!” she shouted.

  Akura Malice’s fist closed around the cloudship, and they were swallowed in shadow. For a few long heartbeats, Lindon was alone in the darkness.

  He couldn’t even feel his own body. All he could feel was the space twisting around him and the sinking numbness of failure.

  [It…it wasn’t a failure,] Dross said. [It wasn’t! …Lindon?]

  The darkness fell away.

  They floated over a dark city. Spires of smooth black stone reached to the violet-tinted sky, and the shadow aura was thick here. Luminous flowers shone white, pink, or blue from carefully cultivated public gardens, and Remnant horses pulled carriages through the sky on tracks of purple flame. All around the city, walls stretched up, black and imposing.

  Some of the remaining Irons cried out, groping blindly as their senses weren’t strong enough to penetrate the haze. Lindon had to steer the fortress away from a smaller cloudship before it crashed directly into them.

  Far below, a scripted spire stood proudly from an open courtyard. A teleportation anchor.

  Even for a Monarch, it would have been hard to send their entire cloudship through space in one trip. Malice had sent them to the one place she could reach easily.

  Moongrave. Capital of the Akura clan.

  The fight for Sacred Valley was over.

  17

  The cloudship was anything but quiet as they drifted in the wind over Moongrave.

  While Lindon had been focusing on the battle with the Dreadgods, bloodspawn had risen all over the ship. Some of them had been destroyed, but others were still attacking, and it took him and Eithan a moment of concentration to destroy them.

  In the meantime, virtually everyone was shouting something.

  “What happened?” Lindon’s father demanded. “We’re not moving!”

  His mother clung to Kelsa, holding a glowing blue-and-yellow sword in one hand and a matching shield in the other. Products of her Soulsmithing, which she must have been hiding somewhere. She looked to Lindon with terrified eyes. “Where are we?” she asked, and she probably meant to sound demanding, but it came out as a plea.

  Kelsa pushed her way free of her mother, dashing aside to the open windows to peer down, getting a look around and shouting descriptions of their surroundings.

  Orthos was a burning lump of shell in the corner, and his head snuck out of his shell. He let out a long breath of smoke. “Safe. We are safe.”

  Yerin wasn’t shuddering in the corner anymore. She was slumped against the wall, her head hanging. “Useless,” she mumbled.

  For Lindon, every second crawled by as though Dross was speeding up his thoughts, but that one word from Yerin speared him through the heart.

  He turned around and gathered her up. She let him, all eight arms hanging limply to her sides.

  “Lost my spine. Almost buried you all.”

  No. She wasn’t the one who had led them all to the edge of their deaths.

  “I’m so sorry,” Lindon whispered into her hair. “Yerin, I…I’m just…I’m so sorry.”

  She gave a dry laugh. “Sorry for dragging us along?” Yerin tapped the side of her head. “Mostly, there’s only one in here. For a blink there, we had two again. Both of us about to ruin our robes, and curled up like we’re looking to die.”

  Lindon squeezed tighter. That wasn’t what had scared him.

  She hadn’t frozen up. She’d tried to leave. He had seen the Moonlight Bridge begin to activate.

  If she could have, she would have tossed herself to the Bleeding Phoenix.

  A hand rested on Lindon’s shoulder, and he turned to see Eithan looking serious. “Ziel isn’t here,” he said in a low voice. “Nor are Jai Long and Jai Chen. They’re resourceful enough that they may survive, but in a battle like that, there are no guarantees.”

  Kelsa straightened up. “Jai Long? They left. They’ve been gone for…what, two days?”

  Eithan gave her a sympathetic smile, but he didn’t correct himself.

  And Lindon knew just as well what Eithan wasn’t saying.

  Dross, what happens if the Wandering Titan keeps heading east?

  [He might stop at the mountain. If one of them had a huge power source like that, best to guess that they all do. Then maybe he’ll feed on that and go back to sleep!]

  And if it doesn’t?

  […there’s no source of aura to interest him for who knows how many thousands of miles east. The Desolate Wilds and Blackflame Empire are too weak. He’ll probably stop to feed on something, but more likely he just keeps wandering until he gets tired.]

  And that was assuming the Titan didn’t stop and turn Sacred Valley upside-down looking for whatever prize it wanted. Lindon had been assured several times that ancient security measures had stopped that from happening before, but there was no guarantee it would be the same result this time.

  The most likely scenario was that it wandered east, wrecking the Desolate Wilds and the Blackflame Empire. Th
e same way it had destroyed Sacred Valley.

  Lindon pulled away from Yerin and removed Suriel’s marble from his pocket. The candle-flame burned as steady and blue as ever, but its calming aura felt like a lie.

  The vision of his own future had stopped when he died, so he hadn’t seen what the Dreadgod had done after destroying Sacred Valley. Maybe in this reality, they had averted a worse future. Even if that were true, the fate had come a lot sooner.

  And Lindon had failed to stop it.

  [Ah, but look at it this way,] Dross said. [Did you fail?]

  Dross drew his attention to the dozens of lives still remaining in the cloudship. They were battered and cut and bruised and in terrible shape, but they were alive.

  Not to mention the hundreds—maybe thousands; Lindon couldn’t be sure—who had made it out on the Akura ships before. Dross pulled up that memory and shoved it right into his mind’s eye.

  The spirit prodded him further. [What did you really set out to do?]

  To save Sacred Valley.

  That was the answer, and they were the words he’d always used to himself when he thought about his purpose for gaining strength.

  But what did that mean, really?

  Saving his family? They were safe. Here in Moongrave, with Mercy’s endorsement, they could be as safe as anywhere. Once their cloud fortress was repaired, he could take them with him or even leave them here.

  Lindon had always pictured himself saving his home, but deep down, he had wished for something else as well. He’d wanted to stride back into the Wei clan and show them his great power.

  He mocked himself for that now. The people of Sacred Valley hadn’t been impressed even when they should have been.

  The best he’d accomplished was bullying them into obeying.

  As a distant third, he’d wanted to preserve the place he’d grown up. He had been gone from Sacred Valley for a long time now, but it had been his home for longer. He had almost as many fond memories there as painful ones.

  Now…it was too late for that. It was gone.

  The images of the bodies, spilled all over the foothills of Mount Samara, cut him as though the memory was razor-edged. They had died outside Sacred Valley, just as they would have died if they had stayed home.