Isek’s reinforcements.
But will they be enough?
Beneath me, the dayfolk youth swallows hard against a sob. His armor is unbroken, but he rapidly tests its seams and edges with gloved hands anyway, hardly believing he’s still alive. The dayfolk haven’t seen war against the nightfolk in generations, not since the Great Exile in the Cataclysm’s immediate aftermath. This boy is a soldier here by necessity alone, and he’s lived his entire life underground, sheltered from weather and his opposing nation alike. There was no possible way for him to be prepared for this. Forany of themto be prepared for this.
But thanks to Isek’s reinforcements, they won’t face the rest of this fight alone.
“Dayfolk! Stay behind me!” I shout, struggling to be heard over freezeshot and heatshot, the rapid beating of wings, the unceasing exchange of mighty blows. “Let us lead the fight against our own!”
Hearing my orders, the remaining armored fighters regather themselves, disengaging from their individual skirmishes, forming a tight pack of secondary defense. A spark of stubborn hope lights in my chest. With a nightfolk army to take point … Thaane’s can still be stopped. Kori’s people can still be saved.
Belowground, Chloe represents another equally imminent threat, but if I think too hard about that—if I let myself imagine Kori down there, without me, forced to fight her own mother to save her entire society from obliteration—I’ll collapse in on myself, as surely as the sobbing dayfolk boy I just protected.
So I set my focus securely aboveground. I fight with everything in me, with every ounce of strength the Diakópsei bestowed. Energy blasts from my hands, my feet, the sharp edges of my wings. It’s blue fire in my throat, my wild scream manifesting as power that blasts enemy fighters out of the sky. I’m lost to time. I’m lost to Pagomènos. Were I presentedwith a mirror, I would hardly recognize myself. In the name of the most human love I’ve ever felt, I surrender to my most animal instincts. I become a weapon of war, and nothing more.
Sand sticks to blood in patches along my arms, embeds itself underneath my claws. I ache like an exposed nerve, in body and in soul. I’m panting, every muscle screaming, my half-healed left wing aching more fiercely than ever, when I feel an unexpectedly gentle hand on my forearm.
I whirl to lock eyes with a face equally familiar and unexpected.
“My queen,” says Eridian, no longer cowering before torturous Thaane, nor bearing blood from my teeth along her throat. I haven’t seen her since I ordered her released from our custody, berating Thaane for tormenting her with fear of herself. Not so long ago, Thaane messaged my comms tablet that this very woman was rallying Azarii’s forces against me. But that doesn’t square at all with what my eyes are seeing.
I balk, words nearly failing me altogether. “When did you …?Whyare you here?”
“You showed me mercy once, where your brother-in-arms held only hatred.” The spikes along her spine, no longer deliberately hidden, shimmer in the sunlight. “I want no part of a planet he rules. None of us do.”
“Us?”
With an extended claw, Eridian points to the skyline, and hope floods my body like a wave of pure day.
Wings and claws and bared teeth. Freezeblades and rifles and blazing spheres of energy. More nightfolk soldiers.Reinforcements.And no longer cowering behind makeshift armor, nor trying to tear their gifted augments from their flesh.
My own reinforcements were not the last wave. I sputter, overcome. “Did you splinter off from Azarii’s forces?”
“WeareAzarii’s forces,” Eridian counters, even as my mind spins. “When General Isek warned of the betrayal—many of Azarii’s own rebels having been in Thaane’s ranks—myself and others approached Azarii with a plea.”
“Others?” I echo, even as I feel a telekinetic tug on my shoulder.
“My lord,” says Neo, somehow free of the cell where I left him to rot. Presumably, he escaped confinement when Kori did, during the serpent attack.
In rapid succession, someone says, “My queen.” Disbelieving, I behold his sister, Lail, whose single gray eye steadily holds my own.
“Azarii said his rebellion was in the name of peace,” Neo says, gaze alight with barely controlled fury, overgrown ginger hair blowing wildly into his face from the desert winds.
Eridian inclines her head in agreement. “You may be a monster queen, Adria,” she says, “but you are not the one who called for war on the innocent.”
Standing upon two of her arms, Lail crosses the other four defiantly across her chest, her tail coiled close to her body, ending in a tightly clenched seventh hand. “Once, Adria, I pocketed a memory of my greatest hope, rooted in resisting your rule. But now,” she says, voice rising above the ongoing tumult of battle around us, “it is your life, not your death, that gives us hope. That there may yet be peace. That Thaane can be stopped.”
I stare at the horizon without believing my eyes. Perhaps the heat has addled my brain; perhaps the whirling sands and haphazard freezeshot and heatshot have caused my vision to deceive me. But no, those really are a second wave of reinforcements, rapidly approaching to fight back Thaane’s assault. And at the head of the descending battalion, far older than my memories of him, face deeply lined by hundreds more sleep cycles: Azarii himself.
Despite our civil war, I haven’t seen him with my own eyes since my childhood, when my father condemned him to an Elysian cell.
If Azarii truly hates nightfolk evolution as much as the reports indicated, he has very much to hate about himself. Among the nightfolk, he is a singular creature, exceptionally built for battle, his mutations among some of the most overt our people have to offer. Two sets of arms. Two pairs of wings, smaller than my own, more akin to Thaane’s—spread ina more insectoid formation, built for speed above power. Four horns, one pair angled up and the other down, framing a devilish face. Strong square jaw. Amber eyes like hot coals.
This is the man who called me the ultimate monster, the usurper. My last living family, dedicating his entire existence to overthrowing my rule. Yet now he flies to my side, fresh soldiers assembled at his back—to take up arms not against me, but alongside me.
In the final hour, the enemy of my enemy becomes my friend. I showed a comparatively small mercy to Eridian, sparing her life in interrogation, but now she offers me far greater grace in return: a real shot at stalling the apocalypse.
Jaw set, Eridian pumps the barrel of her shotgun. “Lest Thaane destroy us all,” she says, resolved, “Azarii’s army stands with you.”
