This is new.This fire burning through me and around me was my love, a searing need to cherish every moment with My Flame.
I’m coming Izzy, hold on!
VYNSIEL
My spirit explodedwith light and love and power.
It could only be one thing, one person.Izzy.The one whose spirit was inexorably connected to mine, my mate, my shining star! Her strength surged through me, and it instantly snapped me out of my cycle of nightmares, losing her over and over again.
I roared with righteous indignation at the sylphim around me, furious that they’d trapped me in such a horrific vision for who knew how long. I blasted light, probably harder than I should have at everyone around me, sylphim and elf alike. That cleared a wide swathe and gave me a moment to recover, but it also drained me, for I hadn’t realized how beaten up I was. The elves had done a good job carving me up. I used what little remained of my strength to heal myself, then summoned a sword and shield of light. Elsewhere on the battlefield, Rook had become living fire. I guessed he’d suffered as I had and Izzy had snapped him out of it, because that’s how I felt, so full of righteous fury that it leaked out of me physically.
Bayn also shook off the effects of the sylphim, just as Izzy was… stabbed through the stomach with Valnea glorifying in victory.
“No!” I cried out and my wings flashed to life, only… they weren’t wings of white and gold feathers, but of white and gold light.
This was new!
I didn’t know if they’d carry me, but when I flapped them, I rose as if they were solid. And when a sylph tried to get in my way and I flew straight past him, my wing of light cut the sucker in half.
I could get used to this.
Myel swooped down next to me, gliding on wings of steel. Okay, that was pretty damned badass… though wings of light were better.
“Izzy!” he called, pointing. Like I didn’t already know.
But then Myel laughed, a curious sound. “Actually, she’s got this,” he said and peeled away to slice through a horde of sylphim and elves to help Bayn, who was being swamped.
Through my spirit… where I might have felt pain and confusion and fear, I felt only a swelling of light and life and power.
Oh…
Maybe Izzy did have this?
If anyone could come back from a sword through her body, it was Izzy. She’d been beaten to shit by Saldrea then gone all boss-bitch on the false princess. Still, I wanted to keep close to her, so I did similar to what Myel had done, only to those around Izzy, slicing through the foes to keep them back, make sure they didn’t interfere with whatever my Angel had planned.
You’ve got this,I whispered to her in my own mind.AndI’ve got your back.She wouldn’t be able to hear me, but my spirit would transmit my confidence and pride and what little power I had to her.
Time to end this fight.
BAYN
“I commandyou to ignore those fucking Sylphim!”
The words sliced through this all-wrong, fucked-up vision of Izzy dominating me. It vanished in an instant as her binding on me pulsed with power, her command sinking in.
Had she just saved me?
Again.
First, against my father, now this.
How could I ever have imagined Izzy hurting me? But I hadn’t imagined it at all, had I? It was those damned sylphim. I roared, unleashing my earth magic. Spikes of stone eviscerated anything withing twenty feet of me, reaching high enough to spear those damned flying angels too. But it seemed the enemy thought I was a significant threat, as even more of Valnea’s forces rushed me.
More sylphim tried to penetrate my mind, but Izzy’s command forbade it, keeping them out.
And for the first time, I saw her binding on me not as a curse or something to be feared or removed, but a blessing. Not once had she ever made me do anything I hadn’twanted to. And now she was somehow boosting my own mental defenses, her binding more powerful than the sylphim’s mind powers.
In the half-a-heartbeat before I was swamped again, I took in the field around me. The other guys were fighting hard. Had they always been freed? Had the sylphim not affected them? No… there were wounds on them.
