Craize lands in front of me with a furious snarl, talons gouging deep into the soil. His wings snap open, unleashing a gale-force gust that scatters a cluster of enthralled wielders like leaves in a storm.
‘Left!’he snaps through our bond.
I turn without thought.
My shoulder crashes into the chest of a man twice my size, driving him backwards into a tree hard enough to shake the canopy. The tenari shield catches a beam of stolen light midair and hurls it back with brutal precision.
It slams into his sternum.
He gasps as his body goes limp, the shadow bleeding out of his veins. His eyes clear, wide and panicked.
“What did I—” he starts.
“No time!” I shove him aside. “Fight or hide!”
The ultimatum snaps something awake in him.
His jaw tightens. He reaches down, snatching a twig from the ground—nothing more than brittle wood, snapped and useless.
For a heartbeat, itisnothing.
Then the airwarps.
Power whispers through his fingers. The twig elongates, hardens, reshapes—fibres smoothing, edges sharpening—until a gleaming blade rests in his palm, flawless and deadly, unmistakably forged rather than carved.
A weapon born from will alone.
My breath catches.
A fellow Xoro.
He meets my eyes, nods once, and turns back toward the fight—new steel flashing as he charges.
“Don’t kill them.” I remind him, and he nods. “They just need to be shocked enough for the Siphon to loosen his grip.”
More of the entranced pour toward us, their movements jerky and wrong, limbs snapping with borrowed speed as their Gifts spark violently out of control. Every clash is a gamble—every strike a risk—but each time I meet one head-on, redirecting a blow, slamming them to the ground, letting their stolen power recoil harmlessly back into them, somethingbreaks.
They wake. They gasp. They cry out, terrified and disoriented, suddenlyaliveagain.
One by one, the trance shatters.
But the tide doesn’t stop.
It just keeps coming.
A blur moves at my side.
River slips into step beside me, close enough that I feel the rush of air as he moves. A bandolier of knives crosses his chest, each blade dusted with shimmering blue powder that hums faintly as if eager for the throw.
He doesn’t say a word.
He doesn’t need to.
One knife leaves his hand—then another, then another—each thrown with effortless precision. They carve through the air in clean, controlled arcs, guided by his Gift tograzerather than kill. Just enough. It seems the closer the sun gets to us, the more of its power we can feel, no matter how weak it may be.
The powder detonates on contact in sharp flashes of blue, jolting the goo loose from its hold. Enthralled soldiers stumble mid-charge, weapons dropping as they blink in sudden clarity.
Before the blades can even kiss the ground, they whip back toward River, snapping neatly into his palms before sliding home along his strap like they were never gone.
