Batty pressed herself tight against my neck, her claws trembling as she burrowed against my throat. I swallowed and edged toward the rim of the pit, cognizant of Draven’s steady presence behind me.
The webbing shuddered once.
Click. Click.
Then twice more.
Click.
Both Skaldwings below us froze mid-motion, heads snapping toward the far wall of the trench.
A faint crimson ember flickered in the darkness.
Then another. And another.
One by one, eight ember-bright orbs blinked open beneath them, illuminating jagged stone in a sickly red glow.
Eyes. Eight of them, all staring straight up at us.
And in the span of one heartbeat, I saw the moment it decided to act.
The tension in the webbing. The way the frostbeast’s crimson eyes narrowed. The faint coil of its monstrous body drawing back?—
Everything happened at once.
The Korythid surged upward, the earth shuddering as the monster’s massive limbs scraped against the frozen ground. Draven reacted instantly. Frost exploded from his hands in violent waves, slamming downward. Mana stretched outward, freezing the upper layers of webbing into solid ice.
But the Korythid didn’t hesitate.
With a single, precise movement, it extended one long, razor-thin leg and slashed cleanly through the frozen strands anchoring the web to the walls in a clean, deliberate cut.
The entire lattice shuddered, and then it collapsed.
Time slowed to an agonizing crawl as the soldier dropped first. There was no scrambling, no last-minute catch. The ice-stiffened strands snapped beneath him, and he fell straight through, like a stone through fractured glass, vanishing into the pit before I could breathe.
Keira fell right after him.
Her wing snagged on a breaking filament, spinning her sideways as snow and shattered ice drifted around her in a glittering veil. She reached upward. Blindly. Desperately. As if she could claw her way back up through empty air.
Kaelen was already diving after her.
He didn’t hesitate or even look at the monster waiting below. He folded his wings tight to his body, cutting through the shower of falling debris with a single, lethal line of motion. His expression was a mask of frozen terror.
Below them, the Korythid stirred.
Its eyes flared open, too bright, too aware, filled with the unmistakable glint of hunger.
A crown of frost-sheathed sensory spines trembled atop its head—thin, quivering filaments arranged in a jagged ring just behind its cluster of crimson eyes, each one vibrating as it tasted the air for movement.
A cold certainty settled in my gut.
I’d dreaded this moment… fearing we’d have to face a much larger Korythid. And here she was. Massive and terrifying, even from deep below the surface of the ground.
It happened in an instant.
Her mandibles spread wide, the plated joints along its jaw clicking apart like the opening of a nightmare. Venom drizzled from the stinger arched over its back, hissing where it struck the frost-laced stones.
Keira’s scream finally tore free, and Kaelen pushed harder, wings snapping open just enough to slow his descent. Frost glinted along their edges as he stretched himself toward her, his fingers trembling, his chest heaving…
