Helspira
THE BETRAYAL ON SIKRAS’Sface was seared into her brain. Helspira stuffed the scrolls into her satchel and squeezed her eyes shut. Unfortunately, that only gave the mental image of his devastation free rein to play over and over.
She couldn’t keep her eyes closed for long. Not with the enemy advancing.
Her blade met the stomach of a woman wielding a makeshift spear. When Helspira ripped it out, a brief flicker of realization and fear lit the woman’s face. Whatever mental manipulation spell she had been under must’ve faded shortly before she took her last breath.
No time to mourn. Helspira buried the mixed sentiment and charged forward.
How many? Roughly four dozen. For every body the sentinels felled, another seemed to rise from the snow. Banneret Rowan cut through the crowd, mangling corpses beyond recognition, tossing severed heads and arms as far from the torsos as he could. What seemed like savage brutality was the sad reality of their battle strategy. Corpses that couldn’t find their limbs or heads made impractical minions. If the sentinels robbed them of their usefulness, the odds of Vessik reanimating them diminished.
A dark green mist sank into the nostrils of a living attacker in front of her. He gasped, gagged, clawed at his throat as his eyes rolled into the back of his head. Dead by shadow blade. That could only mean one thing.
Helspira scanned the battlefield, shocked to see Sikras hadn’t fled. His movements were languid, he looked paler than ever, and an arrow still dangled from his arm, but he remained. Ben was all but glued to his side, slashing and slaying any who dared to get too close, but Sikras shouted to him over the fray, “Find the cleric and keep him safe. If you want any of these assholes to make it out alive, we need to make sure the healer doesn’t die.”
“You’re not a front linesman,” Ben retorted, severing the skull from an undead’s spine. “I need to make sureyoudon’t die.”
“This arrow isn’t just for decoration, Benjamin. I’ll need the cleric as much as anyone else when this is over.”
Even with her demonic hearing, she couldn’t decipher what either man said next. Probably due to the deafening explosion.
Helspira landed on her side, a short trail in the snow from where her body slid. The stench of charred flesh and ogre whiskey hit her senses first. The volatile alcohol made for a potent explosive when married with fire. Vision steadying, she spied thick plumes of smoke billowing upward, slow to dissipate and unveil the carnage.
The screams sounded like whispers in her buzzing ears. If Vessik had hoped the explosions would tip the scale in his favor, he was wrong. With many sentinels wielding massive shields to take the brunt of the blast, it seemed more of his own minions had suffered than the queen’s soldiers.
Her heart drummed like a thousand stampeding beasts as she willed her eye to see through the smoke. She found Rowan tearing through townsfolk like a madman. Ben—Ben?—yes, she recognized the scarf and cloak, pushed himself back to his feet. He scoured the battlefield in a frenzy, movements panicked, skull rotating, searching.
Sikras. He must’ve lost him in the chaos. At least Ben was still standing. By all accounts, Sikras must’ve survived too.
Helspira’s gaze darted from blood-red snow pile to blood-red snow pile until she found him in the distance, one hand clasping his scythe, the other dangling limply at his side. He made it to his knees, tried in vain to move his arm, but nothing, nothing happened. His lips moved; she still couldn’t hear, but she saw. They moved again. Same words, no results. It must’ve been a spell. Yes, he was trying to cast a spell.
Why wasn’t it working?
She tried to run to him, but a searing pain ran up her leg. Only then did she notice the shrapnel in her calf. No time to focus on that. Not when she saw the dawning fear in Sikras’s eyes as he tried to shout the spell over and over.
The ear-piercing screech in her damaged eardrums was constant. She dug her knuckle into her ear and squinted, suddenly making sense of Sikras’s alarm. A man trudged toward him, dragging a long halberd behind. It left deep imprints in the snow as he advanced closer, closer, repositioning the steel before him. It clicked then why his spell wasn’t working.
His arm was broken. Fingers twitched, barely, but not enough to fall into the unforgivingly specific positions required by casters to channel magic.“To ensure a spell is always intentional, it must be paired with a precise hand movement and matching verbal component,”Cecil had once told her. Sikras tried in vain again and again to manipulate his fingers into the artfully choreographed gesture he needed, but nothing.
He was dead in the water.
And even without a jagged shard of metal inches deep in her calf, she would never make it in time.
Unless ...
Helspira scrambled to dig out the scroll, tossing the fake into the snow. Quaking fingers trembled to rip off the thin, glittering string and unravel the delicate paper. Now was no time to trip over Siapharian pronunciations. Struck by the stench of old parchment, she steadied herself and spoke the words.
Seconds remained. It had to work. It needed to. But given how much fear infected her heart, it could’ve easily beat a hundred times by the time she reached him.
Sikras
NOTHING. USELESS, USELESSfingers. Honestly, the audacity of the human body, with its fragile ligaments and bones.
“Stay back.” With his functioning arm, he positioned the weightless scythe before him. “Or feel the wrath of my weapon that I definitely know how to wield.”
The threat fell on deaf ears, almost as if the advancing enemy knew a two-handed weapon was useless to a caster with no combat skills and one functioning arm.
His opponent edged closer. Closer. The pointed tip of the halberd locked into position. Several more seconds and it would be buried in his chest.
