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“Do not play games with me, Nuru,” she hisses. “I know everything about you, pawn to the goddesses. Everything that the mothers know, I know. Even the fact that you and that beast are forever conniving with each other.”
Her words no longer reach me.
I’ve passed to the other side of pain now, a place where everything is just instinct and sheer, desperate survival. Somehow, I manage to grasp one of my atikas, but when I stab up, Melanis is prepared, the clawed tips of her wings snapping together to protect her vulnerable belly. My sword clangs against them and she flaps them back open, sending it flying. More pain jolts through my arms. More wounds open, gold already welling there. I gurgle, trying to buck her off me, but she holds fast, claws digging in.
Until a massive blue body rams into her.
As she goes flying back, Ixa takes advantage of her momentary shock to roll himself in my blood, his wounds healing the moment it touches them. My blood heals Ixa’s wounds the same way his touch makes my pain go away. It’s part of how he and I are mystically intertwined, although I still don’t know the true reason for it. All the explanations the Gilded Ones gave me were lies.
Melanis comes flying back, and I can only watch, body shuddering as she picks Ixa up and hurls him away from her before rushing me again.
She snatches me by the throat once more, those white eyes blazing with fury. “This is not the same match it was three months ago, Nuru,” she roars as she launches into the air with me. The other hunters immediately join her, their bodies circling her like a malevolent cloud, their shrieks piercing into my ears.
Then a column of fire blasts through them. Keita is trying to clear the space around us, but it’s too late now—much too late…. Melanis has me in her grasp, and we’re so high up in the air, a blistering wind is rushing past my ears.
All the while, Melanis glares down at me, her eyes white with malice. “I’m stronger now,” she says. “Invincible. And you are weaker. Broken.” She pulls me up close, so close, we’re almost nose to nose. “You threw me into the abyss once,” she snarls. “Hurled me down but didn’t finish me. Now I will return the favor.”
“What about the mothers?” I manage to ask past the blood gurgling in my throat. “I thought you were bringing me to them.”
“The mothers can wait. After all, it will take much more than this to kill you.”
She unclasps her fingers.
I drop so abruptly, I can’t even scream. All I can do is tense my body. Rage against the unfairness of it. After everything I’ve done, all the battles and trials I’ve endured, this is how I’m defeated? By being thrown to the ground by the ancient horror who once called herself my sister? Fury is the endless scream in the back of my torn-out throat. It carries on and on until finally, I land.
Only, I’m not shattered. My bones aren’t broken by the ground. More to the point, I’m not even on it. I’m an inch above, floating on what appears to be a cushion of air.
Beneath me now are the remnants of a stone ruin similar to what we left behind in the abandoned city, except instead of pink, this stone is black, rainbow lights shimmering in its depths. As I weakly push off it, attempting to stand, a tingle races through me. A very familiar one. Divine energy.
Whatever caught me—prevented me from breaking…it was the work of the gods.
But it doesn’t feel like the Gilded Ones or the Idugu. There’s something strange about it, something…new.
And when I stagger up, still in a stupor, I’m startled to see more of that rainbow-tinted black stone is somehow rapidly growing, building itself around me, a temple rising from the ruins.
“Treachery!” Melanis shrieks as she descends, the temple taking shape around her as well. “There is treachery at work here!” She points down at me and my companions. “End them!” she commands her hunters.
They swoop down toward us, those white eyes gleaming malevolently in the dark.
But as they near, claws extended, another tingle races through me, this one almost immediately followed by a low whoosh. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the outline of a gigantic war hammer swinging; that’s all I glimpse before Melanis’s hunters are suddenly flying backward. I watch, awed, as their bodies crash into the trees and then past them to the forest beyond. Melanis herself is blasted so far into the darkness, I can’t even sense her anymore, only hear the impact as she hurtles across the forest.
Yet my friends and I are strangely unscathed. Untouched by whatever it was that attacked Melanis and her hunters.
We all look at each other in shock. Then a voice booms through the air.
“Bow your heads, mortals!” it commands, shattering the stunned silence. “Bala arrives.”
A massive person in a suit of armor made completely of that black rainbow stone plummets to the temple floor, their landing so powerful, the newly built temple floor shakes.
And yet, it does not give way.
Instead, the black stone reaches up to create a platform to hold them, the person contained in that strange suit of armor. The person who is a colossus. That’s the first word that comes to mind when I see our new rescuer, who is at least twice as tall as Lamin, the tallest person here, and so burly, even Britta’s muscles seem inferior by comparison. Even stranger, they almost seem like part of the temple that now encloses us. The rainbow-tinted black stone that makes up their armor is the same that adorns the sprawling, triangular structure that has somehow built itself around my entire group and the surrounding trees in the space of minutes.
I’m so stunned, I can only ask one question. “Who are you?”
That’s all I manage before pain explodes all over my body, all my injuries returning to the forefront now that I’m no longer in active danger.
Deka! Ixa gasps, running over as I fall to my knees, my entire body trembling.
