Jassyn didn’t know where to begin, only that if he hesitated, someone else would drown for it.
Lightning serrated the sky around him, jagged bursts of violet sparks blinding him as he flew. The charged air lashed his scales, every wingbeat a burn through his joints as he dove faster, speed blurring the world beneath him. The constant companion of beastblood flared hot under his skin—begging for frenzy instead of precision—but Jassyn wrestled the impulse deep, locking his body into obedience.
Air thinned in his lungs, but he didn’t have space to register the height or the drop waiting below it. His mind tunneled toward the lake swallowing lives. Desperation tightened to a single, urgent need to reach the dying before another heartbeat fell silent.
Half the Blackreach glittered in unnatural stillness, a frozen sheet of ice trapping a few ships. Rimeclaw’s doing, he assumed, before Skylash had forced him out of the Maw.
Jassyn flung out a hand to catch a wild current of lightning just as it raked toward the rangers circling the burning fleet. The Blackreach writhed, a graveyard of shattered masts and overturned hulls, bodies tumbling through the heaving dark.
Essence whirled around the king’s surviving forces, clinging to what remained of their ships. The storm no longer punished magic, but still pulsed hungry enough to strip flesh from bone.
And above it all, Skylash hunted, her sleek silhouette a blade carving through the roiling clouds.
Wind shrieked along Jassyn’s wings as the shoreline rushed up to meet him—barren stone, no whisper of earth to answer him, nothing green to draw healing from. He tore the tether from his finger and shoved the ring into his armor. Only Essence rose to his call, and the bodies drifting in the waves told him his Well would bleed dry long before the dying stopped.
Vesryn’s voice barreled through the bond, his presence now bright across the lake.“What are you doing?”
“Saving whoever’s still breathing,”Jassyn answered, dropping lower until spray from the water joined the rain to sting his face.
Fallen dracovae thrashed in the Blackreach, their soaked wings slapping uselessly at the waves. A scattering of razorwings had reappeared, darting between the wreckage, their keening shrieks flaying the silence like steel scraping tendon.
“Send someone to Asharyn,”Jassyn added, words a half-clipped command even though he didn’t mean them to be.“Warn them the wounded are coming. And I need someone with me who can open portals.”
Vesryn acknowledged him and went silent, relaying through his officers.
Jassyn angled toward a sliver of shoreline that hadn’t been frozen. Each beat of his wings seared a burning line from his shoulders to his spine as he locked the joints for the landing. No room remained for weakness, not with lives still slipping beneath the waters.
He hit the ground hard, boots skidding, knees jolting as he shifted back to skin. A relieved exhale slipped through his teeth,beastblood slinking back just enough to finally let him breathe as himself again.
Movement snagged Jassyn’s eye as he straightened. A tangle of wraith floundered around a drift of shattered planks. Three warriors fought to keep a fourth afloat, but the limp body sagged with every swell. His head dipped under each wave until only a thin ribbon of bubbles marked where he vanished each time.
Jassyn lifted a hand, reaching for the lake. Pressure coiled and water heaved upward, splitting clean down the center to expose a corridor of silt. He winced as the wraith dropped onto the wet earth with jarring thuds before staggering upright, hauling the fallen warrior with them as they stumbled toward the shore.
Jassyn waited, lungs steadily expanding but muscles still trembling. The storm flashed overhead as Vesryn’s words skimmed through the bond once more.
“Zaeryn reported that Asharyn is evacuating.”
Jassyn’s pulse lurched.“Evacuating? Why? Did the razorwings attack? Lykor—”
“The city is safe,”Vesryn cut in.“Lykor will be opening portals for you.”
The bottom dropped out of Jassyn’s stomach. Lykor should’ve been guarding Asharyn—bound there by the command Jassyn had driven into him with too much force and not enough choice.
He barely finished the thought before Lykor dropped out of the sky in a punishing descent. His boots struck hard enough to rattle stone and send shards of gravel flying.
For one dangerous heartbeat, Lykor didn’t move. Snow wheeled around him in a spiraling drift, his gaze locked onto Jassyn as the rest of the Maw blurred out of existence. Something low in Jassyn’s chest tightened—the same place that had betrayed him on the plateau when he’d sent Lykor away,the same place that hadn’t forgotten the press of Lykor’s mouth against his.
The moment stretched until Lykor looked away as abruptly as a blade snapping back into its sheath. His glare cut upward toward Vesryn streaking by on Naru, lips peeling back from his fangs.
“Kal’s already been sent to reverse the order,” Lykor growled—words Jassyn realized were spoken for his benefit but flung through the telepathic link Vesryn surely had in place. “Now get the fuck out of my head,” he added, still aloud despite the prince flying too high to hear.
When the wraith staggered onto the shore, Jassyn dropped to his knees beside the most wounded—half-conscious, ribs caved inward, lightning scars branching across his face like charred roots.
Essence flared beneath Jassyn’s palms, crimson lattices spinning to probe a collapsed lung and the burns fusing skin to armor. The warrior’s chest rattled with every faltering breath, the stench of scorched flesh burning behind Jassyn’s eyes.
Around him, survivors gathered. More wraith hovered stiff and silent, and druids landed. Farther down the shore, a tattered cluster of the king’s sailors dragged their injured out of the water. All of those near him watched and waited for a command he wasn’t certain he knew how to shape.
Jassyn’s throat locked. The academy had never trained him for this, the moment when a battlefield full of desperate eyes turned toward him for answers.
