Page 38 of Three Dark Kings and the Gilded Serpent

As if he would reach for me⁠—

The image stutters and vanishes and I’m lying on Stellen’s frozen chest, the blade’s energy reaching into my mind, and too late, I remember the daggers strapped to my thighs. Wood handles that block my Oracle power.

The blade vision pulls me into its darkness and all I can manage is a garbled whisper. “Maxim…”

Chapter Thirteen

Maxim

Iassess the danger in the space of a breath.

While a pulse of energy sweeps like an icy-blue blade toward me, behind it, a snowstorm churns ice across the landscape as far north, east, and west as I can see.

Directly ahead of me, between the broken towers, the storm forms an intense whirlwind, the concentrated body of ice picking up chunks of stone and debris, turning into a fucking avalanche that’s rising like a wave.

If it crashes across my land, it will flow over one of the major inlets into the underground city, where my people are going about their daily lives, undoubtedly currently oblivious.

A snowstorm is threat enough, but if the main entrance or any of the city’s ventilation shafts were to flood with an avalanche of bone-shattering frost, the underground could become a near-instant tomb.

I have no fucking place for the rage that rises up to fill my heart as I stare down the death coming for me and my people.

First, the pulse of icy-blue energy tearing through anything solid in its path, then the snowstorm sweeping up the debris, and now the avalanche that will flow directly across the underground city.

All while that vengeful roar shudders through my hearing.

All of this, I assess within heartbeats, even as my body is already reacting, my instincts on fire, my feet pounding the dunes as I break into a run.

Straight ahead toward the danger.

I focus first on the destructive energy sweeping toward me, the deadly scythe seconds away from cutting through me.

I have to stop it.

I tell myself I can.

My feet fly, my arms pump, and my breath tears out of my chest as I race right toward the danger.

The edge of the icy-blue scythe becomes clearer, so sharp that it glints and gleams like a weapon.

A fucking winter blade.

In the split second before the scythe reaches me, I dig deep for my fire.

Controlling my power is the hard part. Releasing the heat is as simple as exhaling.

I welcome the fire. A fucking relief to unclamp the mental vise with which I attempt to constrain myself. A cage that fails more often than it succeeds.

Flames scream along my arms and burst from my chest just as the winter blade collides with my outstretched hands and cuts across my chest.

My world explodes in fire and pain.

Heat meets ice with a boom that shatters my consciousness and sends me flying backward.

I’m airborne, flung like debris, unable to process the contact, aware of every fine detail all at once, including the flare of unnatural golden energy amidst my flames, and Thyra…

Thyra?

I see her for the smallest impossible moment, as if she were right in front of me.