I am not that powerless child anymore.
Pulling my fur up around my shoulders, I resist the urge to raise my hand into the wind again, to let the air play around it.
Blacksmith magic… Creation and darkness…
With that thought, I can’t help but focus on Thaden.
When Asha, Gallium, and I die, our people will be extinct. Or so I always thought.
It isn’t lost on me that Milena Ironmeld is out there somewhere, and now Malak’s own son lies sleeping only a few paces away from me.
It takes both a Blacksmith father and mother for a child to be born with Blacksmith power.
If Thaden were someone else…
In another life…
But our people should never rise to power again. After what that power has done to the fae and even to the humans, it’s for the best that we will be the last of them.
For hours, I sit, my thoughts whirling around in my mind like the dust storms out in the darkness.
Until the air changes.
It happens imperceptibly at first, a small shift in the heaviness, a subtle change in the acidic scent…
And then, suddenly, my chest burns, and I can’t breathe.
A gust of wind billows across the barren range, bringing with it the heaviness of blood and death, snatching the air from my chest.
I grab hold of my fur to keep it from being ripped from my shoulders, my focus flashing to my left—the direction from which the wind is gusting.
Clang!
I jump as the sound of a hammer hitting metal rings in my ears, whirling around and around me, a disorienting hum of noise.
I don’t know where the sound’s coming from. I don’t know what’s making it. It sounds muffled and eerie and…wrong.
Clang!
I jump to my feet just as a dark tornado of wind and debris and crimson ash appears at the edge of the ridge, only fifty paces away.
A dust storm!
My heart thuds, and fear shoots through me.
It will stop.I tell myself it can’t pass the edge. There’s nothing here for it to feed on. Nothing dead. Only the echo of my dead mother’s commands and the beat of long-ago hammers.
Then, to my shock, the dust storm pushes forward another foot, edging toward me, as if it’s found something to feed on, something to let it approach me.
At the same time, it thins and begins rising up and up, an elongating tornado of ash and darkness before its uppermost half begins to curve down, arcing toward me across the distance.
It doesn’t need to move its base if it can reach me this way.
“Thaden!” My screams tear from my throat. “Gallium!”
Gallium leaps up first. He was already facing me, and he’s instantly awake.
I catch the desperation on his face as he launches himself up from his lying position, his muscles pumping as he throws himself toward me.
