Ruxnoth flashed him a smug grin, then ignored us, and focused back on his fallen soldiers.
As he swept his magic over them, he looked out at my dad. “Regarding my comment about perceiving most of your kind and those under your charge as little more than mindless beasts,thesewill be precisely that.”
He suddenly thrust his free hand out at us.
In seconds, we were all choking as an awful, unsettling pulling sensation besieged us.
Zayn looked all around, freaked, and wrapped his arm around me.
It stopped after a moment or two, then we looked to see whatever Ruxnoth had done had taken the form of hovering multicolored sparks.
He thrust it toward his soldiers and those sparks rained down all over them, melding with the midnight-blue magic he was covering them with.
And then they started to rise.
To reform.
Into the shape of dragons.
Fuck,he’d drawn on the essence of our animal natures within, and melded it with his magic.
Dad let out a curse alongside Grandma.
“Fuck,” I heard Flame utter.
They kept rising and rising, reforming, until there stood a thousand of them again, shimmering blue constructs all in animal dragon form, faceless like before.
“You and your people won’t be leaving here,” Ruxnoth told my dad. “I will only call them off when you submit and hand over your people to my rule. I wonder, how many of your beloved own will you allow to perish until you give me what I desire?”
“You are a true madman,” Dad seethed.
“On the contrary, I am an innovator. I stand apart. Lessers cannot comprehend greatness of that magnitude, nor those who see beyond the conventional and arbitrary boundaries asserted by ill-equipped fools.”
Oh, shut the fuck up.What a load of manipulative distorted rhetoric.
“Now, while you contend with the instruments of my will, I will mark my territory in a way the animals you lead here will understand all too well.”
Mark his—
He fired a bolt of his power straight through our ranks, blowing dragons out of formation, into the air, tearing right through others, blood spurting everywhere as his straight-run of power tore through the ordered ranks, driving holes of his magic through the dragon hide of the first dragon it hit, the one behind, on and on.
The blast hit the four-pointed star at the centerpoint of Magnor City just behind us and drove down into the reinforced stone, shattering it.
A reverberating rumbling shook the ground beneath our feet.
I felt what had become familiar to me because of Winter—death magic.
The tremors intensified.
And then cobbles snapped all over the plaza, the foundations of so many buildings started fracturing, the ground cracked, fissures forming all over the place and spreading so fucking quickly.
We couldn’t react to any of it as the new forms of Ruxnoth’s constructs rushed toward us. I snatched Zayn up and spun, my back to the assault and covering Zayn, just as they hit, driving into us, all one thousand of them. The force of it and the fact that striking them caused us blunt force damage shoved the entire formation back. Roars and growls filled my ears as the hostiles shattered bone, battered us to pieces, and I grimaced at the sharp pain of my arm fracturing in several places at the impact like it didn’t even matter that I had dragon hide at all. No, it still did. The fact Zayn didn’t, if he’d been hit head-on like this, it would have shattered his body to pieces.
We were being crushed.
Zayn and I had to try to perform the Convergence again. But doing it so close to the last time… it was unlikely we’d be able to summon the same power, have the same impact. But anything would be a mercy right now.
I tried to search out my dad and Grandma, but it was absolute chaos.
