Chapter Three
Helspira
CHAOTIC ENERGY EXPLODED. Helspira stumbled, arms out for balance. At first she thought the sentinels stampeding for the door caused the floor to quake, but no. Fleshless, ocher bones, still caked in dirt, pounded their way through the castle’s thick tiles, and prehistoric corpses crawled from the holes, like a horde of undead imps.
In the pandemonium, a streak of light caught her gaze. The glow that once lit the thread around Ben’s stone flew across the room and into Catseye’s chest. Jaw agape, Helspira watched the necromancer’s silver-white hair darken to a deep, saturated black. Vigor resumed to his enfeebled form, gone was his sallow complexion and the dark circles beneath his pale, green eyes.
Those eyes ...
Once tired, charismatic, and harmless, they sent a ripple of fear through her now.
“Sentinel!”
Helspira snapped toward Queen Saelihn’s cry as it rose above the bedlam. The screams. The clanks of armor. The undead. The growing cyclone of ghostly daggers that took shape and swirled within the room.
“The stone, the thread!” the queen commanded, a desperate finger guiding Helspira’s focus toward the rock that had fallen from Ben’s ribs. “Get them to Sikras before he—”
The deafening sound of a crumbling wall swallowed the queen’s remaining words. Sconces and chunks of debris fell to the floor when the dragon’s corpse ripped itself from its anchors and landed on all fours with athud.
Its eyeless glare settled on Rowan. It parted its jaws, as if to unleash a war cry, but, with nothing to create sound, only an eerie silence followed the gesture.
Fueled by adrenaline and the queen’s orders, Helspira tore her focus from Rowan and pinpointed the rock, the thread. She stumbled over upturned tile and the grasping arms of the monstrosities that crawled from the broken castle floor. Gods, there must have been two dozen, three dozen; it was hard to tell in the turmoil of shrieking soldiers and undead minions.
This was fine. She was fine. She’d take this chaos over that of Chthonia any day of the week.
Of course, Helspira regretted that surge of confidence when the pressure of fingers clenched her ankle.
Stomach sinking, she ripped her leg free from the minion’s skeletal hand and slid to a stop near Ben’s unmoving bones to scoop up the rock and thread. Fear tainted the room like a thick cloud, and a stab of sadness bloomed in her chest at seeing the lifeless remnants of the only soul who’d propositioned her with friendship, but she kept her heart steady. This was nothing,nothingcompared to her homeland. Time to put all that childhood trauma to good use and soldier through.
Squinting to locate Catseye through the storm of swirling shadow blades, Helspira’s heart quickened when she spotted him. She tightened her fingers around the stone and whispered, “Nyllmas needs a hero; Nyllmas needs a hero,” then bolted headlong into the fray, deft feet weaving between one undead beast and the next.
The dragon pinned Rowan beneath its massive claws, its face inches from his. The restrained banneret threatened it with a dagger no bigger than one of the beast’s teeth, but it yielded no results. The creature’s jaws snapped, a threatening display of promises to come.
“Sikras,please!”
If Catseye heard Queen Saelihn’s desperate plea, his face did not show it. He loomed on a mound of broken tiles, black hair whipping around him from the winds of his spectral cyclone. “You wanted the power of the Cat’s Eye, Rowan?” Catseye snarled at the banneret, voice raw, unforgiving. “Here it is.”
Helspira jumped over an undead beast and regretted her tuck-and-roll when a jagged piece of tile found her shoulder. She grunted through the pain, her stomach slithering across the uneven floor, elbow after elbow, beneath the ghostly churn of flying shadow blades. When Catseye’s leather boots came into view, she knew she had reached the other side. Whispering a silent plea that she would be spared from the sting of a spectral weapon, she stood, forced into uncomfortable proximity with the necromancer.
He seemed to look right through her.
“I—I brought—” Her words hitched when she locked onto his eyes.B’yehnz. It wasn’t just malice in that heated stare.
Fear lived in his eyes. Raw, genuine terror.
He was angry, yes. But more than that, he was afraid.
Gut him.
Wrestling her inner demon into submission, Helspira grabbed Catseye’s wrist and shoved stone and thread into his palm. “Here.”
