Elyria’s stomach lurched. “Don’t you dare talk about him.”
Malchior’s mouth curved in something that was far from a smile. “Evander truly was so easy to manipulate in the end. So desperate to save you. To get back to you. All I had to do was promise you would return for him, and he opened the Gate for me himself.”
Elyria’s hands trembled at her sides. Not with fear, but with a rage so deep it bordered on madness. “You killed him.”
“Ifreedhim,” Malchior countered. “He was bound to die one way or the other. At least this way, I gave him purpose before he did. Gave him a taste of real power.” His voice was silky, rich with mockery as he stepped onto the platform, dragging Cedric’s suspended body behind him. “You are not the only one who was touched by darkness, Elyria Lightbreaker.”
She wanted to scream. Wanted to yell. Wanted tofight. Her magic pulsed against her restraints, against the wards dimming her power. Shadow and wild mixed in her blood, thrashed in her veins, longing for an outlet, looking for any way out of this.
They wouldn’t find one. Couldn’t. There was nothing her shadows could do other than continue leaking across her skin, wrapping around her in a semblance of comfort.
She could do nothing but watch as Malchior drew Cedric onto the platform, laying him in the center like some sort of sick sacrifice.
“None of that matters now anyway,” Malchior said. “Let the celestials keep their shattered crown. I have everything I need.”
Elyria’s shadows pulled back, pulsing, waiting. As though they knew what was about to happen before she did.
“Malakar’s darkness was never destroyed,” he continued, voice low, speaking to himself. “Only scattered. Banished to the void by Daephinia’s cursed light. And with that light, I will bring it home.”
Varyth Malchior crouched over Cedric, a darksteel dagger materializing in thin air. “I am sorry it had to come to this,” he said, hesitating like he might have actually meant the words, before raising the bladeover Cedric’s neck.
The tug of the thread behind Elyria’s ribs was too sharp.
The three words that Cedric tried to send down it too painful.
Not again.
Never again.
A scream tore from her throat, and that tiny kernel of light inside her—hislight, theirbond—ignited. Blazing from her chest, it connected with her wild magic, weaving with the shadows waiting there.
It burst forth in a shimmer of dawn.
Malchior’s eyes shot up just in time to see Elyria’s bindings fall away, her magic burning through them like tinder set to flame. “Impossible,” he whispered, his grip on the dagger slackening—another hesitation, just long enough for Elyria to launch herself toward the platform with the flap of her wings, there in an instant.
Elyria had no weapon.
She was a weapon.
Her palm was like a steel bolt as she thrust it forward, hitting Malchior in the sternum, just above the wolven sigil stitched into his robe.
“No!” With a roar, he was hurtled back, hitting the far wall behind the manaforge with acrunch. The strike had been so swift that the dagger he’d held was still falling when Elyria crouched at Cedric’s side. Her heart stopped as the blade fell toward her knight, then restarted as it grazed the side of his neck, skittering to the edge of the platform.
“Just a scratch,”she reassured him—herself?—as she tore through the ribbon around his mouth. Just enough to draw a drop of blood, the smallest bit gleaming from the edge of the dagger... as it fell off the platform and into the mana basin.
The result was instantaneous.
The runes stretching across the floor, still red with blood, lit up.
The mana itself surged, twisting up and around Cedric and Elyria—a torrent of violet and scarlet flame, a geyser of power.
For a single heartbeat, they were suspended at the center of the storm—her wings flared wide, his chest rising beneath her hands, both of them illuminated by the glow of the mana.
Stone and steel flew as the roof above them burst open.
The platform heaved under Elyria—and then she was flying.
Not of her own accord. Not because she planned it. But because she had been blown from her feet, the blast hitting her like a battering ram, catapulting her out of the tower.
