Shit choices,Lan thought, squaring her shoulders. No matter what, she knew what she would always choose. Mama had told her that power was meant to be used to protect those without it.
Lan opened her senses, filling herself with qì, pushing it down, down to the soles of her feet.
She kicked off.
The sky was tinged a suffocating shade of yellow. The wind rose to a full scream, yin energies rolling forth like great tidal waves, threatening to pull Lan under. She landed and staggered before falling to her knees, one hand raised to shield her face as the yin pressed against her chest.
“Dilaya,” she gasped.“Dilaya—”
The wind ripped her voice from her. Sand choked her nose and her throat. The stench of demonic qì threatened to suffocate her.
A shadow at the corner of her eye. The faint chime of a bell.
Tai knelt by her. Qì bloomed from his fingertips into a Seal, shimmering a ghostly shade of purple. She recognized the arrangement of scripture within it that conjured the Shield Seal, a barrier against the energies battering them as well as the sand and debris flying around.
As her vision cleared, there was movement before them.
Beneath the storm, a figure danced and weaved: a duet of sash and steel. Bursts of qì sparked from the tip of Dilaya’s dao, trailing crimson in the air as they formed Seals. Over thecourse of their travels, Lan had learned that the one-handed girl had worked with her mother, the Master of Swords, to devise a way to channel her qì through her blade, since it was impossible for her to spar with a weapon in one hand while conjuring Seals with the other, as most practitioners did.
Falcon’s Claw slashed like an extension of Dilaya’s body, slicing through a whirl of sand.
For a half breath, a gap formed in the sand, exposing the core of the demon: a shimmering being, a river of starlight, sand turned snow.
Lan saw it for just a moment before the sand closed over again. Dilaya, too, must have caught sight of it. Her movements stuttered as she turned to look back at where the being had appeared.
A mound of sand slammed into her midriff, knocking her into the air.
Lan cried out. Tai’s face drained of color, his gaze confirming what she feared: they weren’t getting out of this alive.
Not without a miracle.
Lan’s hands shook as she grasped her ocarina. She had trained barely one moon at the School of the White Pines before the Elantians had invaded it, and much of the reason for her strong qì and innate practitioning abilities had been the Demon God her mother had Sealed within a scar in her wrist.
Without the Demon God bound to her, she was nothing. A barely trained disciple of practitioning. A street rat who’d survived by wits and luck in a colonized land.
Tai was gesturing, his qì stirring as he pulled it to his fingertips and began to form a Seal. It shimmered for a moment, sputtering against the gale of the sand demon before flickering out. As a Spirit Summoner, Tai was practiced in the art of seeking spiritual qì and hearing the voices of the dead. Seals and combat were not his strengths.
Lan looked at Dilaya’s crumpled figure a dozen or so steps ahead, then at the vortex of sand that had opened overhead, a tunnel of darkness and demonic qì that howled with the grief and wrath of all the souls the demon had consumed.
It is the duty of those with power to protect those without.
Lan leapt forward. She heard Tai calling her name as she broke through the barriers of his Shield Seal. The tempest had risen to a climax, lightning cleaving the darkness, demonic qì threatening to drown her.
She slammed into the ground by Dilaya’s side. The girl was unconscious, strands of hair loose from the two braided buns she wore in her signature hairstyle. Overhead loomed the sand demon’s misshapen gullet, filled with the wails of a thousand thousand souls.
Curse the skies if I die saving the life of Yeshin Noro Dilaya, of all people,Lan thought.She’ll never hear the end of it from me in the next world.
Just as Lan raised her ocarina to her lips, a hunk of hardened sand slammed into her stomach.
She barely registered the impact. All she knew was that one moment she knelt with her ocarina at her mouth; the next, she lay in the sand, winded and dizzy, a chasm of darkness and demonic energy closing in on her.
Death closed its teeth over her.
And something bit back.
The world turned a searing white as frost-colored flames ignited the swirling sand. The darkness drew back, and a pale light rose. Scales like snow, serpentine form glowing like the moon.
The Silver Dragon rose from Lan and towered over the sand demon. It gave one slow blink of its frigid blue eyes, almost lazily. Then it struck.
