Poppy’s panic made the moonwell pulse violently. Her palms lit with raw moonlight.
Lysandra’s corrupted half turned toward Poppy, cracks pulsing.
The entity whispered through her layered voice, “There you are.”
Mingxi went down hard. The bone-wolf bit into his flank. Revenants piled on, their necromantic sigils smothering his foxfire.
Poppy screamed, “Mingxi!”
Chapter 70
The valley answered Poppy’s plea.
The ground shivered. The air tightened. The moonwell tilted toward something unseen, and a thin stream at the valley’s edge began to swell, moonlight shimmering across it.
The revenants hesitated.
Lysandra’s corrupted eye narrowed.
Poppy felt it before she saw it, a massive presence moving beneath the water. The stream rose.
Higher.
Higher.
A wall of water erupted upward and hurled itself across the valley. It smashed into the revenants, crushing Mingxi, flinging them off him in a spray of bone and ash. The bone-wolf flew backward, sigils sizzling where the water touched it.
The wave curled back—darkened and condensed—and a massive black seal landed with a thundering splash. The seal dissolved like melting shadow, and the water peeled away from the shape inside, revealing him.
A man. Tall. Broad-shouldered.
Moonlit water dripping from armor etched with storm-runes, dark hair clinging to his jaw in wet strands, streaked with silver. Skin pale as seafoam. Presence ancient as tides.
But his eyes—storm-blue, silver-ringed—found Lysandra first.
Her left eye flinched. Her right eye gleamed black. The entity smiled through her cracked porcelain half.
He didn’t smile back.
His voice rolled like distant thunder, “You do not belong here.”
Lysandra’s layered voice answered without hesitation, “Neither do you, Seaborn.”
Revenants charged him. The man didn’t move at first, and the stream behind him surged like a living creature. He swept his arm outward. A tidalserpent of water erupted from the ground and slammed into the undead. Bodies shattered. Sigils extinguished. Ash exploded across the clearing.
Mingxi dragged himself back onto shaking paws, five tails low but burning. His gold eyes flicked between Poppy and the stranger—and tightened.
Poppy couldn’t look away.
The man finally turned fully toward her. The moonwell’s glow curved around him, drawn to the same tide-call that lived in his bones. He stepped forward, water dripping from his lashes, voice lowering into something deep and solemn.
“The tides heard you, moonborn,” he said. “And I answered.”
Poppy forgot how to breathe.
Mingxi’s ears flattened, and fire rippled down his back.
But the man wasn’t done. He lifted his trident—moonlit metal shaped from water—and pointed it toward Lysandra.
