Page 8 of Commanding Scythe and Sky

The sky filled with a choreographed descent of fire. Like shooting stars, the arrows consumed our vision until they met their marks and the boats ignited.

“Draw. Ignite. Aim. Loose!” August repeated, and the souls complied.

My gaze returned to the tallest pyres aboard Grayshell’s boat.

To the burning of legends.

“Draw. Ignite.”

The flames devoured the whipping flags as air elementals poured their magic into the sails, giving the ships a jagged shove away from the pier.

“Aim.” A crack of thunder. “Loose!”

Three rounds.

Three rounds of flaming arrows, and we watched the best of us burn.

Three days of grief and recovery since history had been irreparably written. Since Grayshell’s Old General lost his head. Since the longest-lived Commander in history bled out in the square while death consumed the world…

Since Magnolia erupted.

I looked down the length of the beach. Nearly every flag I’d ever read about flew there, each proudly displayed. Every element. Every race and religion. No soul was exempt from the war the Balaskas had decided to wage.

Where humanity was the price, all would stand united.

Or all would fall.

Moros may have won the siege of this realm, but he’d unknowingly provided the catalyst this world needed.

In robbing us of our brightest lights, he’d united us in the ensuing darkness.

One assault, and he’d given us all a common enemy.

A familiar, throaty tok cut through the thunder, and I raised my arm in time for Poe to settle lightly upon it. His talons dug in tighter than usual, as though he, too, knew we had another threat to contend with—one who had even more incentive to drive a blade through Freya’s heart.

Find him, I ordered.

Poe tapped his beak against my jaw, then launched skyward into the conspiracy.

With an aggrieved huff, I turned to survey the man at the center of it all. August Porter’s jaw was clenched tight, and I could see it there—that resolve to right this incomprehensible wrong.

He didn’t strike me as a man who wanted power. Didn’t seem to want leadership in the first place.

But it was to him that all souls now looked.

To him that—as one—we knelt.

TWO

THE ANOMALY

BLYTHE

Three days…

In my thirty years, I’d only ever seen two anomalies in the tapestry of the world.

The first was Magnolia, her beautiful soul woven and tangled in ropes of crimson, purple, black, and green.