“Hold the line!” I bellow it once more, my hands raising. My erevas flickers to life, but I hold it. Beside me, Lyra does the same, twin flames of light erupting. Eres pulls free the staff he prefers, coaxing it to life until it sits solid and steady in his hands.
Darian stays still, a dagger in his hand.
They’re close enough for me to see the whites of their eyes. A screaming, frenzied horde, determined to wipe us away.
For a moment, my heart stutters.What if she can’t—
It happens in the span between heartbeats. Between one breath and the next, the mounted section of the Lightbringer army… ceases to exist. In the same moment, I throw up a shield to prevent any return, extending it to cover the Darkwielder line as shocked cries ring out.
But the screaming is louder.
Lyra is pale. “What… what was that?”
Because the ranks that were barely a few feet away are now nothing but mist. It hovers in the air, thick and devastating and blanking out the rage they aim at us from the other side.
And close to athirdof Vaelion’s forces.
Eldritch’s voice reaches me, high with shock. “I didn’t think she could still do it.”
I turn once more, searching for my mother as the sun enters my eyes. She lowers her hands slowly. One blast. One blast is all the power she can use; hundreds of thousands of specks of shadow that blew through the Lightbringer forces. A single, deadly strike, to give us what she can. She and my father would fight together in battle. My mother, with her single strike, and my father who would sweep in behind her.
And now it’s my turn.
I turn back—
The glint catches my eye. I watch as it slows. As everything slows.
As I turn, and that thin, golden blade of pure light strikes my mother directly in the hollow of her throat.
No.
The roar catches in my throat as I stumble. Darian grips my arm as she staggers to the edge of the rampart.
Andfalls.
Darian
Kaelen isscreaming.
Screaming as if his heart is ripping out through his chest, as Maelira’s body hits the ground with a thud we can’t possibly hear, but that Ifeelas if the ground has shifted. He lunges against my grip, my arms banded tight around him, as if he’s forgotten he has power that could throw me the length of the battlefield.
Grief constricts my chest, but she’s only the first. The first, and the rest of us will follow. “Kae. Kaelen!”
“The shield.” His body sags. “The shield wasn’t high enough. I should have made ithigher.”
There’s no time. Behind us, the remaining Lightbringers—still thousands, still far too many, are rallying. A thousand or more pour down the field toward us, racing through the mist that still hovers in the air, coating them in a sheen of scarlet thatthreatens to turn my stomach as I spin Kaelen around. “They’re coming, Kae.”
Breathing heavily, he looks behind him once more. “I know.”
Eres and Lyra watch us silently. Everyone watches us—watches him, and I wait as he pushes his grief down, locks it away as his shoulders straighten.
This time, the shield is tall enough that I can’t see the top. My lungs constrict as Kae’s face twists. It’s too late—there’s nobody to benefit from it now. But I don’t say anything as we brace for the influx.
There will be no other blasts. Only us, fighting with everything we have before we fall. And the longer that Kaelen can hold his shield in place, sheltering us from the worst of the influx while we pick off who we can, the longer we give Neela and those racing across the Barren Lands to try and find safety.
The first wave smashes into his shield with a crash that rings in my ears.
He's skilled enough that only those with a significant amount of power could break through it. Most will need to carve their way through individually, Kaelen patching it as best he can until his strength fails him and he falls back on the Voids.
