Page 193 of The Reckoning of Starlight

The space between the trees filled with the vanguard—wraith and druids, then the magus who’d open the portals for the army waiting in the Aetherveil. Under the canopy, they packed shoulder to shoulder, so quiet the leaves whispered louder than they did.

Koln drew up to Jassyn’s side. “We’re ready.”

Jassyn inhaled an unsteady breath. “Stay alive.”

Koln turned for the tree line leading to the ridge. The wraith followed, cloaking as they went, until the night swallowed them one by one. Their final stand had begun, and it started without a sound.

Jassyn crossed back to the overlook with Lykor and the others, halting at the outcropping. Above the lake, stars scattered across a sky gone black and bottomless. Each glance toward the platform returned the same inventory—dragons, white-armored guards, bare crystal where Galaeryn would stand. Along the shore, cookfires guttered lower one by one as fifty thousand soldiers settled toward sleep.

Then light erupted from a tent.

Canvas caught fire in a rush, billowing upward in a column high enough to throw the nearest soldiers into lurching silhouettes.

A second flared near the supply wagons. A third farther along the perimeter. Four. Six. Ten.

The evening murmur fractured into the first alarms. Flames spread from tent to tent, smoke rolling above the camp as soldiers spilled into the lanes between them.

The wraith would never find every elf buried among fifty thousand humans. But they only needed enough officers dead, enough Essence-wielders silenced, enough commands severed that when their alliance took the sky, the army would have fewer ways to cut them down.

Galaeryn’s absence still held the entire plan hostage.

Behind Jassyn, the magus waited beneath the trees, ready to open the portals.

He reached back with a telepathic link and touched Kaedryn’s mind.

“Send the Starshard circles into position.”

The wielders shifted into wings and launched, each of the twenty circles accompanied by a wraith. Cloaking spread over the formations almost immediately, leaving only brief distortions against the stars before even those vanished.

Beside Jassyn, Vesryn’s eyes had gone unfocused, his telepathy passing from circle to circle as each adjusted their height and spacing around the Drowned Spires.

Below, the camp writhed. Soldiers scattered around burning tents while shouted commands rose over one another. Jassyn sensed the moment the king’s shamans turned their power toward the lake.

A tremor crossed the surface, slight enough to pass for wind, before the shallows began to withdraw. Water peeled away from the shore in long silver lashes, rearing above the encampment before crashing down hard enough to flatten whole lines of burning tents. Steam erupted in white plumes, sweeping over soldiers, horses, wagons, and flames until the shoreline disappeared behind a roiling wall.

The vapor was still rising when power gathered behind the trees.

Portals tore open around the lake, some splitting the ground along the perimeter, others suspended high above the shore. Wings poured through in a flood of scales and shadows, fliers dropping from the torn sky before leveling above the camp. Wraith emerged from the lower rifts and disappeared again, warping straight into the chaos.

The druids descended. Fire swept beneath their wings as they circled over the encampment, long arcs of flame racing across canvas and supply lines.

The eastern perimeter buckled first. Soldiers surged toward the new threat while elven officers bellowed commands into a camp already turning three ways at once—toward fire, shadow, and wings descending from the dark.

Human lines formed to meet the fliers, spearpoints rising while archers behind them wrenched their bows skyward. The wraith slipped between the gaps in formations before the soldiers could close them.

Arrows hissed into the smoke, glancing from scales and punching through wings. The misses rained back into the encampment, burying themselves in burning tent walls and the soldiers trapped between them.

The ground carried the violence back through Jassyn’s boots—ranks pounding mud, impacts shivering through trampled grass, bodies striking earth. The battlefield beat in broken rhythms, thousands of lives losing time at once.

All because Jassyn had given a single nod.

Beside him, Lykor watched in silence. Frost rimed the stone around his feet and crept outward through the grass.

Jassyn caught Zaeryn’s gaze across the gathered force. “Bring the rangers through.”

Zaeryn tore a portal open and vanished.

Saundyl reached the rift behind her but stopped before entering. He glanced over his shoulder, finding Serenna in the dark. They held each other’s eyes, but neither spoke.