by Sarah Hawke
Jorem took them straight toward the southern wall, and she couldn’t help but be awed at the sight of all the shimmering blue domes hovering over the battlements, shielding the walls from attack. Her mind flashed back to Icewatch where a group of Highwind wizards had attempted the same strategy against the Roskarim. They had been stretched too thin to pull it off, but hopefully the Knights of the Silver Fist were strong enough to hold the line.
“Wyvern riders!” Kaseya called out. “They’re heading for the barrier!”
Valuri followed the amazon’s gaze out to the river where a trio of wyverns had just launched from the decks of a Vorsalosian caravel. The storm was clearly making it difficult for the beasts to gain altitude, but it was also shielding them from retaliation—the archers on the walls didn’t have a chance in the void of hitting anything. And when the wyverns soared over the walls and the barriers, their strategy became clear.
“This isn’t a real attack,” Valuri whispered. “It’s a cavalry raid.”
“What?” Kaseya cried out.
“They’re not even going to try and breach the walls,” the Huntress explained, shouting over the wind. “Not from the outside, anyway.”
Kaseya’s face twisted into a scowl as she shielded her eyes and stared down at the fleet of filling the river. “We watched their warships deploy landing craft in Ostvara. There could be thousands of soldiers below decks of the larger vessels!”
“I’m sure there are, but I guarantee they won’t be trying to climb the walls,” Valuri said. “I know how Marcella thinks. She’s not a Roskarim warlord or an orc chieftain—she prefers diversions to brute force. Remember Nol Krovos? The entire battle in the sea was just a distraction to thin out the Fount’s defenses.”
Kaseya grimaced at the mention of her homeland. “We cannot allow them to succeed.”
“No shit, Red,” Valuri snapped. “But we also shouldn’t—”
Her voice caught in her throat when Jorem abruptly banked hard to his right in pursuit of the wyverns. Unfortunately, the smaller beasts were quicker and more maneuverable, and their riders unleashed a volley of fireballs as they strafed past the Highwind Academy. Explosions engulfed the old tower and sent flaming chunks of masonry and glass raining down upon the streets.
But the riders apparently hadn’t realized just how close Jorem had gotten in the fog, and they didn’t leave themselves enough room to climb and scatter before the dragon was upon them. Valuri felt Jorem’s entire body shudder as he inhaled a deep breath of frozen air, then unleashed a massive cone of flame at the nearest wyvern.
Neither the beast nor the rider stood a chance. Jorem’s fiery breath was so bright that Valuri had to squint to protect her eyes, and she never even saw a corpse fall from the sky. In one instant, they were bearing down upon a frantically fleeing enemy; in the next, the wyvern was simply gone.
“Zor Kalah!” Kaseya stammered as a wave of heat washed over them. It only lasted for a moment, but Valuri swore it completely melted the frost and snow from her face.
Jorem wasn’t finished. The other two wyverns wisely (or accidentally) darted in opposite directions, and he banked hard to his right in pursuit of the one that had chosen to streak north toward city hall. As Jorem closed in, a shimmering barrier materialized around the wyvern as the rider tried to defend his mount. Valuri wished more than ever that she could draw her crossbow and shoot, but even without the storm, she doubted she could shoot accurately under these conditions. The wind continued blasting over her and Kaseya, threatening to freeze them both to the saddle—
And then Jorem struck again. He inhaled so quickly that Valuri barely felt his lungs fill, though his flaming breath also seemed far less powerful—it barely even reached his target’s tail. The wyvern still panicked and lurched out of the way without his rider’s direction, and when the channeler nearly fell out of his saddle, Valuri belatedly realized that Jorem had never intended to vaporize his target outright. The barrier flickered when the channeler’s concentration faltered, and Jorem reached out with a mighty talon and swatted the wyvern instead. A stifled shriek cut through the storm as the beast spiraled out of control, and a heartbeat later it crashed into city hall and vanished in an explosion of debris.
Valuri couldn’t help but snicker on Serrane’s behalf. She had always hated that bloody building anyway…
Jorem surged upward without warning, wiping the smirk from the Huntress’s face. She nearly retched when he rolled hard to his left—she and Kaseya would have surely fallen to their deaths if not for the saddle. Valuri’s vision went black for a moment, and she squeezed the amazon’s waist for dear life.
“We have to get down,” she croaked into Kaseya’s ear. “You and I are useless up here!”
“He is taking us to the river!” the amazon called back. “We can capture one of the caravels while he attacks the command ship.”
“No,” Valuri warned, the hairs on the back of her neck abruptly shooting upright only to be smashed flat by the wind. “We can’t take the bait.”
“Wait?”
“I told you, this is all a diversion,” the Huntress said, shifting in the saddle and scanning the buildings whipping past beneath them again. “Don’t you see? That fleet will have dozens of ballistae trained on us the moment we leave the protection of the walls. She’s trying to bait us into overextending.”
Kaseya visibly tensed. “We cannot allow them to set fire to the whole city!”
“I know, but we need to be smart about this,” Valuri shot back. “Marcella hasn’t made her move yet, I promise. But when she does, we need to be—”
Before she could even finish the sentence, one of the shimmering barriers protecting the southern wall flickered and vanished. The resulting gap was enormous, and the wyverns pounced on the opening with a coordinated assault that was so swift and precise it seemed impossible. A barrage of fireballs struck the battlements, engulfing dozens of archers in a blazing inferno, and mere seconds later, another group of wyverns soared through the smoldering gap with massive crates clutched in their talons.
“Son of a bitch!” Valuri snarled, memories of the bloodbath at Icewatch flashing through her mind. She could see the Roskarim hordes pouring out of the crates and into the fortress…
But despite the odds, she and the others had ultimately held the line in the north, and they would do so again here. They might have been outnumbered, sure, but they also had the fucking Dragon of Highwind on their side.
Marcella could be as clever as she wanted. After a decade of tyranny, the reign of the Raven Queen was about to come to an end.
“Set us down near the wall,” Valuri said, triggering her claws. “It’s time for some payback.”
***
The Gray Citadel was quiet, dark, and uncomfortable. None of the guards had come by since Jorem had walked out of her cell, not even to leer at her through the bars. Under different circumstances, Selvhara would have worried about going mad from sheer loneliness.
Right now, however, she was about to go mad from the pain.
In the span of a few short hours, the Wasting Echo had gone from a dull, distant ache to a clawing, full-body burn. Perhaps the One God had done something to accelerate the condition’s effect, or perhaps this was simply the result of being bound to the power of a Valathrim for so many centuries. Either way, she didn’t know how she could possibly endure this torment much longer. Her entire body was trembling as if wracked by a persistent seizure, and if her restraints hadn’t been holding her upright, she would have surely collapsed to the cold floor long before now.
Perhaps the Echo will kill me before Dathiel sets me free. I can’t imagine a more fitting punishment than having his own cruelty deny him vengeance against the Wyrm Lords…
Deep down, Selvhara knew she wouldn’t be that fortunate. She never had been, so why should now be any different? The wolf’s blood was already boiling in her veins, eager to defend her the moment she surrendered to its bestial call. She doubted that even the Ec
ho could destroy a werewolf. Her curse had allowed her to survive the centuries unscathed by time, and without the One God’s will to keep it in check, it would soon consume her mind as well as her body. She would be reduced to little more than a feral beast.
I don’t know that for certain. The wolf’s blood broke me free of Dathiel’s control during the siege, and I was able to retain my own mind somehow. There must be some way to do that again…
Selvhara was still alone in her cell, desperately trying to withstand the pain, when she heard the first rumble of a distant explosion through the wall. There were no windows in this lightless prison, for obvious reasons, and she couldn’t have turned her head to look even if there had been, but she doubted that more than half a day had passed since Jorem and his harem had departed. They hadn’t been expecting the Conduit to attack until the next day…
Another distant rumble shuddered through the walls, so faint that even a normal elf would have had trouble identifying the source. But thanks to the power of the wolf’s blood, Selvhara could hear practically everything, even the mice skittering about in the empty cells a hundred feet away. The din of a distant battle was practically deafening by comparison.
“The dragon will prevail,” she whispered into the darkness, gathering her strength for the ordeal to come. “The Wyrm Lords will rise to confront the last of the Valathrim. A new era will…”
She trailed off when she heard a muffled thud from somewhere across the cell block. When she held her breath and closed her eyes, she could make out the subtle scraping of serrated stiletto heels on stone growing louder and louder…
And then came the screams. They were so brief and stifled that they were barely noticeable, and the bodies that made them never actually hit the floor. If Selvhara didn’t know better, she might have assumed she were imagining the sounds altogether.
But she did know better. She was hearing the last gasps of hapless guards being murdered—not by random thugs or soldiers, but by a professional assassin.
A Senosi Huntress.
The assassin’s footfalls were little more than a faint scratch on the stone, but Selvhara swore they sounded like rolling thunder as they approached. A heartbeat after they reached a crescendo, she saw the shadowy outline of a hooded, distinctly feminine figure clad in black leather armor stalk into view outside her cell.
“The mistress said you would be here,” a husky voice said. “An invincible beast disguised in the frail body of an elf…”
The shadowy figure stepped forward and pulled back her black hood. A pair of faintly glowing green eyes illuminated the bars to the cell, and when her arm emerged from within her cloak holding a ring of keys, the exposed skin of her bicep was covered in intricate, luminescent vatari tattoos.
“You hardly seem worth the trouble,” the Senosi Huntress sneered, her cruel, pretty face lit by the emerald glow of her markings. “The amazon will surely carve you to ribbons.”
“Then leave me here,” Selvhara replied hoarsely.
The Huntress smirked wickedly. “The Raven Queen demands your service. If you attempt to betray us, I will butcher you myself.”
The woman pushed a key into the lock and opened the door. Selvhara clenched her teeth in anticipation, desperate for something—anything—she could use to prevent this. If she attacked, the Huntress might fight back…but that would only unleash the wolf and deliver Selvhara unto madness. No, she needed to figure out some way to keep herself restrained or—
The time has come, Sarodihm.
The One God’s voice slithered into her mind. Selvhara gasped as his power once again flooded through her body and washed away the biting pain of the Wasting Echo like an angry tide. At any other moment, she would have been grateful for the relief. But not today.
“No,” she growled. “No, I will never—arrgggg!”
Her voice transformed into a guttural snarl as Dathiel unleashed the wolf’s blood in her veins. Fur sprouted across her hairless limbs, and she felt her teeth and jaw snap and twist into a bestial muzzle. The Citadel’s shackles held her fast, but even the Senosi Huntress seemed taken aback by the scope and intensity of the transformation. Selvhara growled so loudly that the sound echoed across the Citadel like thunder rolling through a canyon. Yet even her cursed blood couldn’t free her from the One God’s yoke. If anything, his control was stronger than ever before.
“You know what needs to be done,” the Huntress said, keeping her glowing eyes warily focused on the wolf even as she unlocked the chains. “The Raven Queen demands your obedience!”
Selvhara wanted to tear out the Huntress’s throat. Instead, she leapt across the cell the instant her limbs were freed. Dathiel didn’t even let her acknowledge the Huntress—the druid simply sprinted through the dark tower on all fours, past bodies crumpled in puddles of blood, her heart pounding in her ears and her curse searing through her veins. After a thousand years of waiting to serve a Wyrm Lord, her final act would be to betray him.
You are mine, Sarodihm, the One God said. Now and forever.
***
The Dragon of Highwind roared he swooped overhead, a curtain of flames spewing from his mouth and engulfing yet another wyvern. Julian Cassel never saw the beast or its rider emerge on the other side. Their blackened carcasses must have either disappeared into the fog or been incinerated outright.
Unfortunately, the wyvern and its comrades had already dropped their troop carriers into the Iron District. The dragon could continue harrying the flyers and perhaps even pick them off one-by-one, but the real battle for the city was about to take place in the streets.
And it was about to get ugly.
“Son of a bitch,” Cassel swore as he knelt over the body of the fallen knight lying at the bottom of the steps. The young man—Sir Randel—had only been knighted a few weeks before the Shattering, and Tahira had restored his powers just yesterday. Now he was dead in a tangled heap, a trio of perfectly clustered crossbow bolts sticking out of his armor. The Senosi who’d shot him had already vanished back into the fog, but not before the gap in the barrier had allowed the enemy wyverns to set fire to the battlements and kill several dozen defenders.
“We need to get the militia off the wall and into the streets!” Sir Kerth said, holding his shield protectively in front of them. “The soldiers in those crates will burn half the city to the ground if we don’t contain them!”
Cassel squeezed Ranus’s unmoving shoulder one last time before he rose back to his feet. “If there are any channelers stashed in those crates, they’ll roast our soldiers alive without us there to shield them.”
“And if there are more Huntresses out there, they’ll be waiting on the rooftops to pick us off one by one,” Kerth countered. “We can’t take the bait, sir!”
Cassel grimaced as he glanced back up at the smoldering wall above and behind them. He and the rest of the knights were still spread around the base of the southwestern tower. They had intentionally fortified this position since its proximity to the river made it the most obvious initial target, and their suspicions had been proven correct. The problem was a simple question of mobility: they had to defend a massive static target with a relatively small army while the enemy flyers could attack practically wherever they wanted from the sky.
And that didn’t even take the Senosi into account—the Inquisitrix could have had dozens of her operatives concealed in the darkness and the fog. Kerth was right to be cautious. The closer the knights stuck to the wall, the harder it would be for any Huntresses to pick them off. Staying here was the safer option.
But they were paladins, not militiamen. They weren’t here to play it safe.
“It’s our job to protect these men,” Cassel said. “I won’t send them to their deaths because we’re scared of fighting the Senosi.”
Kerth’s cheek twitched. “But sir, we can’t—”
“Do you see any enemy soldiers landing on the coast or trying to climb the walls?” Cassel asked. “The barriers are important, but we’r
e not trying to stop a breach. The game just changed, and we need to adapt.”
Kerth started to argue, but then his eyes abruptly flicked up into the sky. “Maybe they can help.”
Cassel heard the beating of powerful wings that heralded Jorem’s approach before he turned all the way around. The dragon’s bright red scales were clearly visible even through the fog thanks to the reflection of the streetlamps lighting up the snow, and Cassel still couldn’t believe that there was a man somewhere inside that beast. Every nearby soldier clutched his weapon as the dragon descended, dreading that this might be the moment where the Wyrm Lord showed his true colors and betrayed them.
But the dragon didn’t incinerate anyone with his fiery breath. He came to a heavy landing in the streets less than a hundred feet away, a tempest of debris swirling beneath his wings. Cassel could make out two figures leaping down from the saddle on his back—Kaseya the amazon warrior and Valuri the former Senosi Huntress.
Before anyone could approach, the dragon abruptly rushed forward and leapt back into the sky to chase another group of wyverns. Escar willing, he and Serrane could hold off any more reinforcements…
“There you are, Golden Boy,” the Huntress called out, her red scarf fluttering in the wind. “Looks like you could use a little help.”
“Golden…what?” Kerth stammered, his eyes narrowing at the Huntress. “The Knight-Commander is in charge of—”
“We need to contain the enemy soldiers as quickly as possible,” Cassel interrupted. “I’ll take any aid you can give.”
“That already makes you smarter than half the paladins I’ve met,” Valuri said, drawing a pair of sleek crossbows from her belt holsters. “Where do you want us?”
Cassel grinned. He had only met Valuri once (and briefly at that), but Serrane had warned him about the Huntress’s irreverence. The amazon, by contrast, wore the cool, determined look of a veteran warrior despite the fact that she was probably the same age as half of the aspirants and squires.
