Six shadow dragons this time, rising from below like nightmares birthed from the earth itself. Their scales absorbed light, their eyes burning with that sickly green infection that marked them as Nyxarian war beasts.
“Fuck,” I breathed, and felt Kaelen’s muscles bunch beneath me.
“Hold on, wildfire. This is going to get rough.”
The black fire answered my call like a lover, eager and hungry and absolutely devastating. It poured from my hands in twin streams of cold flame, reaching for the nearest shadow dragon with malicious intent.
The creature shrieked as my fire found it, scales blackening and crumbling like ash. But the moment the flames left my body, white-hot agony tore through my skull.
Pain erupted at the base of my neck and raked down my spine like claws dragged along bone. I gasped, nearly losing my grip on Kaelen’s scales as the sensation threatened to split me open from the inside.
“What the?—”
No time. Another dragon was diving at us from above, its rider’s spear already drawn back to throw.
I shoved the pain aside—compartmentalised it the way I’d learned to compartmentalise everything else—and unleashed another torrent of shadow flame.
The dragon dissolved into screaming darkness, but the pain came again. Worse this time. Like someone had wrapped barbed wire around my spine and pulled tight, then set the whole thing on fire for good measure.
“Isara.”Kaelen’s voice cut through my mental haze.“Your magic, something’s wrong.”
“I’m fine,” I snarled through gritted teeth, already gathering the fire again. Because three more shadow dragons were closing in, and fine or not, we needed them dead.
The flames erupted from me in a blast that should have incinerated everything in a fifty-foot radius. Should have. Instead, they sputtered and flickered, reaching half the distance before guttering out like candles in a storm.
What the fuck?
I reached for the power again, felt it coiling beneath my skin like always. But when I tried to pull it forward, it resisted. Not the magic itself, but my body, like there was a barrier between the fire and my ability to wield it.
“Wildfire, stop.”Kaelen banked hard to avoid a spear that came too close to his wing membrane.“You’re burning out.”
“I said I’m fine.” But even as I shouted it, I could feel the lie. The world was starting to tilt at the edges, going soft and blurry like I was looking at it through water. My hands trembled where they gripped Kaelen’s scales, and there was a persistent ringing in my ears that had nothing to do with wind or altitude.
Another shadow dragon dove at us from the side. I raised my hand, felt the fire gather?—
The pain exploded through my skull like a thunderclap, so intense my vision whited out. For a heartbeat I couldn’t see, couldn’t think, could only feel the agony racing through every nerve ending like liquid lightning.
The fire answered anyway. Weak, flickering, but enough to make the dragon veer away.
Not enough to kill it.
“Stop,”Kaelen’s command cracked like a whip.“Stop before you tear yourself apart.”
“Can’t.” The word came out slurred, my tongue thick and clumsy in my mouth. “They’ll—we’ll?—”
A shadow dragon materialised directly in front of us, its jaws open wide enough to swallow us whole. I didn’t think. Didn’t calculate. Just reached for the fire one more time and let it loose.
The explosion of shadow flame was pathetic, a guttering burst that barely singed the creature’s scales. But the pain that followed wasn’t pathetic at all.
It was annihilation.
My spine became a column of white-hot agony, every vertebra screaming in protest as something fundamental tore inside me. The world spun violently, sky and earth trading places while my vision tunnelled down to a pinpoint of grey static.
Lightheaded didn’t begin to cover it. I felt hollow, scooped out, like someone had reached inside my chest and removed everything that made me solid. Real.
My hands loosened on Kaelen’s scales.
“No.”His voice was sharp with alarm. “Isara, hold on!”
