“So much heat,” the entity purred. “So much jealousy. The moonwell tastes it beautifully.”
Poppy threw her hands over her face. “Lysandra, please stop!”
Before anyone could say another word, more revenants burst from the tree line, dragging the battlefield back into motion.
Chapter 71
The revenants that burst from the trees in a new wave were snarling and clawing at the earth as they surged toward the moonwell. Their bodies jerked in unnatural rhythms, drawn not by hunger but by Lysandra’s command.
Or the command from the thing inside her.
The corrupted half of her face glowed faintly, the black cracks pulsing like a heartbeat.
“Go,” the entity hissed through her mouth. “Break them.”
The revenants obeyed instantly.
Mingxi didn’t hesitate. He lunged forward in fox form, five silver tails blazing behind him. His jaws clamped onto the skull of the nearest revenant; foxfire erupted through its body, and it collapsed into ash. Two more leaped onto his back. He spun, jaws snapping, fire bursting in a radiant arc.
Caelan moved like a storm with legs. With every step he took, water rose to meet him. He swept his trident through the air, and a crescent wave erupted outward, knocking an entire cluster of revenants off their feet and slamming them against the rocks. Bones shattered. Sigils blinked out.
Still, the revenants came faster. They were no longer the shuffling, staggering corpses from the forest. These were the ones the entity had touched directly—thin and long-limbed, joints bending too wide, their skulls half glowing with the same wrong light burning behind Lysandra’s eyes.
Caelan cut one cleanly through the ribs, and it kept crawling, dragging its severed lower body across the moss, fingers hooked like claws.
Mingxi tore through three with foxfire, but five more rose behind them—silent, synchronized, moving in a formation that made Poppy’s stomach twist.
“They’re adapting!” Caelan shouted, breathless. “They’re learning our rhythm!”
Poppy barely heard him.
Her glow pulsed in time with her heart, vibrating through her bones as she pushed more magic into the sigils. The moonwell thrummed underneath, matching her, amplifying her.
The circle brightened—
A revenant peeled away from the pack. A wrong one. A fast one. It darted sideways, ignoring Mingxi entirely, skittering on all fours like a spider across stone. Its head jerked unnaturally, tracking the glowing boundary line with a predator’s precision.
Poppy’s blood ran cold.
“Mingxi!” she screamed. “It’s going for the line! Stop it!”
Mingxi pivoted hard, but the revenant was already sprinting.
Caelan lunged. Too far. Too slow.
The revenant reached the glowing arc, and it didn’t stop. It didn’t hesitate. It slammed both hands onto the warding circle. The world tore open with sound.
The revenant shrieked—a wet, ragged, soul-ripping scream—as its flesh blistered and sloughed away under the moonlight, but it didn’t let go. It dug. Its fingers burned to bone. Then the bones began to burn. Then the bones cracked, but the thing kept clawing, pushing, forcing itself through the ward meant to annihilate anything corrupted.
Poppy screamed, “No! Stop!”
The glowing line sputtered. Flickered.
Mingxi’s eyes went wide with a kind of horror she had never seen from him.
“Poppy,” he whispered, “if it breaks the line, the entity can—”
CRACK.
