“Is this all you have, traitor?”Anees hisses, his own fire, an imitation of my own, washing over my obsidian scales.“You’ve grown soft, nesting with these vermin.”
I ignore the taunt, my focus absolute on finding that moment of weakness. That gap in the plates at his throat, the joints of his wings.
He twists, and I dive under him, my claws gouging deep furrows in the softer plating of his underbelly. He roars in frustration more than pain and brings his tail around in a sweeping arc. I meet it with my own, the impact a jarring shockwave that I feel in my bones.
He is my brother. The thought is a splinter of ice in the furnace of my rage. The same blood flows through his veins. But as we circle each other against a backdrop of burning towers and screaming darkbloods, a cold certainty settles in mysoul. With Arrynth, my every move was calculated to subdue, to disable, to preserve. My instincts fought against a killing blow.
With Anees, there is no such resistance.
I look at the smug cruelty in his amber eyes and feel nothing pull me back. I don’t know when his bitterness took root—only that it must have grown slowly, a poison seeping in over years. I never remembered him like this before I left. He resented me for leaving him and our people after our mother died. He resented me even more for the stone sky that was sealed over his head while mine remained open and blue.
None of that matters now.
He killed our father.
The betrayal is absolute. Irrevocable. There is no path back from it, no forgiveness waiting on the other side. For that, he cannot be allowed to live.
I see the gap in the armor at the base of his neck, where the gilded plates meet the thick muscle of his throat. A single, well-aimed strike. A twist of my claws. It would be over. The thought is not born of rage, but of a chilling, surgical clarity. I can kill him. Iwillkill him. I never thought I would stand ready to commit fratricide. But Anees has dragged me past the last boundary I had left.
Then a sound cuts through the din—completely wrong for a scene of battle.
A low, keening howl rises from the very heart of Darkbirch’s academy, a vibration that seems to resonate beyond flesh or blood. Beyond anything mortal.
It sounds like… a door opening, to a place no living thing should ever see.
Anees falters, his head cocked. Even he, in his arrogance, feels it. From the central spire of the academy, a wave of pure, silent darkness erupts. A tide of liquid black that spills outward,washing over the grounds. It moves too fast, pouring across the courtyards and over the battlements.
I watch as it touches the darkbloods below. Every single one of them—soldiers, medics—stiffens. Their heads snap back, and for a single, horrifying second, their eyes turn to solid, glistening black.
“P-Parlor tricks.”Anees sends, though his eyes shine with doubt and unease.“This still changes nothing.”
He comes at me again, a renewed fury in his charge, trying to gain an urgent advantage. I meet him, my teeth sinking into the armored plating of his shoulder. The metal groans but holds.
But somethinghaschanged. A network of incandescent light flares to life across the entire coven, tracing the ancient spiritual grid that protects it. It shimmers for a second, a web of silver—then the darkness touches it. The light curdles, turns a diseased, necrotic black, and surges upward.
A dome of pure, silent darkness snaps into place over the entire academy, an impenetrable bubble of void. To Anees’s horror, and my own, dozens of dragons are caught beneath it. Their screams are silent. One moment they are magnificent beasts of fire and scale; the next, they are... unmade. The black energy of the dome touches them, and they wither. Scales flake away like ancient parchment. Flesh turns to gray, brittle dust. Their roars die in their throats as their bodies become weathered, rotten husks, collapsing inward on themselves before dissolving into nothing. Screams of terror erupt from the dragons still outside the dome. They see their brethren erased from existence in a heartbeat.
And I see it. I see the terrible truth of what the darkbloods—or at least their elders—have been chasing. This is more than a weapon. It is erasure. A way to remove an army without a battle.
A door that never should have been opened.
“Anees, pull back!”I roar, the wordstearing from my mind.“For the sake of all the gods, pull back! This is not a power you, we, can fight! Fall back NOW!”
He looks at the empty spaces where his soldiers once were, at the silent, black dome, and his displeasure curdles into pure, vain rage.
“Never.”He turns on me, his tail whipping around in a massive arc that catches me across the wing, forcing me backward through the air.“And you will die with them, traitor!”
Then he ignores me, turning his full, terrible might on the dome. A sun ignites in his throat, and he unleashes a continuous, blinding torrent of golden fire.
The blaze slams into the black surface, a silent, cataclysmic explosion of energy that illuminates the entire battlefield. The fire does not penetrate. It washes over the dome, turning the impenetrable night into a roaring inferno.
But I’m out of time for his foolishness.
I need to find… Esme.
As my eyes scan the smoke-choked ground, I see her suddenly, near the base of the black dome. She… levitates. Effortlessly. Her slender form untouched by the heat that still rages around her.
But her eyes are not the storm-gray, intelligent pools I know. They are pits of absolute blackness. The power of an Ide.At leastone, by the looks of it.
