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And from the cell right next to me, the same prisoner who’d advised me to get into the corner upon my arrival moved from his slumped position.

In the light of the waning mist, his form unraveled, and I reigned in a gasp.

As weak as his voice was, the prisoner’s body looked to be a hundred times stronger and more deadly. His arms bulged. His leg muscles may as well have been stuffed with rocks. And beyond his overall unnatural largeness, strange disfigurements spiked out from various parts of his body: antlers from his head, needles from his fingers, talons from his feet that scraped the floor.

“They forced Shape Shifting on me,” he said faintly, noticing my stare. “But once I changed, it’s like my Element Wielding set those changes into stone. Permanently disfigured me.”

My heart dropped like the clunk of his feet as he stumbled forward, the mist no longer keeping him contained in the corner. His fingers hardly even fit between the bars, but he managed to squeeze them through. Gripped.

And pulled.

With a grinding screech, the bars bent and snapped apart as easily as twigs. The prisoner did it to the next ones, and the next, until he’d opened a hole wide enough for him to slip through, out into the hallway beyond.

For a moment, my heart thumped to a stop. The shape of him standing beyond my cell cast flickers of memories from Hallow’s Perch into the space between each of my blinks. Memories of monsters who looked just like him.

Then the prisoner turned to me and said, “Name’s Pixton. Bren Pixton. I heard them say your name enough times to know yours.”

He extended a hand. One of the needles protruding from his fingers slipped into my lock, followed by a click and the creak of my cell door swinging open.

I rushed out, shuddering with relief as the weight of entrapment, of my own lingering screams, fell behind me. “Thank you, Bren,” I breathed, and a small fissure stitched up within me when he nodded back.

Not a monster. They hadn’t managed to turn him into that yet.

At that moment, a whirr of shelled wings cut across my face. I couldn’t understand Nuisance’s exact words within these strings of mist still suppressing our magic, but I knew what the beetle was trying to say anyway.

“Will you free my friend, too?” I asked Bren.

With another nod, he clunked his way to Gileon’s cell until his door had swung open too. The moment Gil stepped out, I threw my arms around him, and he squeezed me back with a shaking thank you to Bren.

Then the three of us stood in the hallway side by side. Free.

Another boom rattled the walls. Distantly, shouts and screams echoed from somewhere above us, muffled by layers and layers of iron and stone.

“What’s happening?” Gileon asked nervously.

A smile cut into my cheeks as that new sprout of darkness in my chest branched out and wove around my heart.

Because I knew exactly what was happening. And it didn’t matter that it also meant death and destruction and a sword against my neck.

“Coen is here.”

CHAPTER

57

COEN

My blade swished and slashed to the tune of all the screams around me.

I couldn’t grasp any of my powers yet, but the moment that cannonball had smashed into the prison, I’d been able to rush forward without disintegrating on the spot. Now, I cut through the mist of Dyonisia’s antipower, ducking and whirling and stabbing Old Veracious straight into elite after elite.

It was all too easy after Jagaros’s warriors decimated the Good Council’s magic, their arrows slicing through the antipower and sticking into every elite.

Into their left shoulders, to be exact. Mutilating that little red dot that granted them immunity. Making them just as powerless as us.

Like prey on a platter.

My Sorronian faeries came streaming in from behind me, using axes and cutlasses to hack into the fallen ones I left like a trail of crumbs in my wake, whooping out their delight, Barberro loudest of all.