My furyfire surged, stronger than ever.
Behind it, three more Frostwights advanced. Around them, Obsidian soldiers fanned out, black-eyed and eager, their blades gleaming dully in the smoke-choked dawn.
“Come on, then,” I muttered, raising Dorcha. “Let’s see what Hel’s gifts are really worth.”
I lunged.
Metal met ice. The impact jarred to my shoulder, but the blade bit into the seam between plates of bone. I twisted and felt something crack.
The Frostwight’s free hand clamped around my wrist.
Cold rushed through me like an avalanche.
For a heartbeat, the world went soundless and white. My muscles locked; my breath froze in my chest. Frost crawled up my arm in delicate patterns, burning as it went.
My mark flared.
The rune at my throat blazed so hot it hurt. Something inside me—something deeper than furyfire, older than the Fates, older than this realm—stirred and bared its teeth.
Mine, a voice whispered.
The next breath I took ripped down my throat like I’d been drowning.
Power surged up from the mark, racing down my veins, crashing into the Frostwight’s touch. For a second, the two magics tangled—Winter and Hel’s own darkness, ice and fire—and then the connection flipped.
The cold stoppedpouring into me.
I started pulling it out.
The thing convulsed. Its hand spasmed around my wrist, bones creaking. Frost smoke poured out of the seams in its armor, streaming toward me. The world sharpened, every color too bright, every heartbeat too loud. The roar of battle drew into piercing focus—the clash of steel, the crack of exploding tents, the distant boom of something Slade and Thorne had set off.
I drank in the Frostwight’s life force like a drowning woman gulping air.
It didn’t have a heartbeat. It didn’t have blood flowing in its veins. Whatever magic had animated it was older and stranger than mortal flesh—a knot of foreign magic and bone-deep cold. It slashed at me, trying to break contact, but every second our skin touched, more of its life force ripped free.
Its armor dimmed. The ice in its blade cracked. The hollow behind the mask went thinner and thinner until the thing was just a cage of bone, its movements failing.
Then it wasn’t anything at all.
I didn’t stop with just one.
With my next inhale, the rest were consumed. Their life forces sucked down my throat and soaked into my veins. Magic soared, my vision going white as the realm itself breathed through me for a fleeting, uncontainable moment. In that space, I was nothing. I was everything. I was Menryth itself. Something More than the gods had intended. A kernel of Life itself.
When I blinked, reality resumed.
The smoke, the advancing army, the burning tents.
As one, the Frostwights crumpled, collapsing into blackened ice and splintered leather at my feet. Whatever Heliconia had bound inside them came pouring out in a last rush—a torrent of icy magic that streaked for my mark like it had always belonged there.
Then, the Obsidians fell with them.
Then their horses.
The sheer volume of what I took from them nearly broke me then.
I staggered.
Heat flooded me, wild and intoxicating. The ache in my sword-hand vanished. The bruises along my ribs smoothed out, pain receding as if it had only ever been a dream. Power crawled over my skin, beneath it, through it. I felt every heartbeat in the valley as my own. Every breath. Every life.
