Page 236 of Feralheart

Through it, Eradin’s shock met mine.

We’d been building toward this since I’d saved her life in the garden and helped her in the kitchen. Every moment we’d chosen each other over those who said we couldn’t be together, we’d been laying the basis for what we were doing now.

“Who’s attacking?” Lyndie cried out.

Reece scanned the remaining elite riders. “One of them.”

Most elite had been trained to hide their magical signature, and only three remained of the original eight.

Blair, who’d gone carefully blank-faced since the canyon floor.

Vella, who’d stopped looking up and started watching us instead.

And Cedric, who appeared much too focused on his climb.

“Let me help.” Eradin brought Selira closer. She laid her hand on his broken wing and red flushed across her palms. Her healing warmth sunk in and Aristus’s pain eased.

“I sealed the break,” she said when she’d pulled her hand back. “He’s still fragile, but he’s more comfortable.”

We began climbing again, the shield Eradin and I created shimmering around us.

The pillars’ hum built until it drilled into my skull. The collar heated Aristus’s scales, the runes glowing brighter as the columns pulled harder.

Grimstone convulsed, his body going rigid. His wings locked, and he started falling backward.

“Lyndie!” Aristus and I dove toward them.

She clung to her dragon’s neck, her face white with horror, but her hands moved on his scales. Soothing. Gentle.

“Come on. You can do it, love,” she cried.

His wings unlocked a short distance before they would’ve hit a jagged boulder embedded in the wall. The strain showed in how he moved to join us, sluggish, fighting for every step.

Reece’s dragon wasn’t doing much better. His wings stuttered on each upstroke, the damaged membrane tearing further.

The drain on Aristus intensified, a steady pull tearing away what little magic he had left. Our shield couldn’t block it.

Selira strode beside us, her distress bleeding through the bond she shared with him. Even though they couldn’t touch her, she could feel what the structures were doing.

More canyon stretched above us.

The three remaining elite riders were scattered across the rock face now. Blair in the front, still on his dragon, with Cedric and his dragon in the middle. On foot, Vella lagged behind.

Eradin frowned. The glow of her hands reflected off the nearest pillar as we passed, and her head turned to follow it as we climbed higher, studying the channels carved between the rune columns.

The light in the channels moved upward, each wave traveling from the base of the pillar toward its tip, then to the next pillar above it, climbing toward the summit in a chain. The higher we went, the brighter the pillars burned.

The upper ones appeared fuller. That was the only word I could use to describe it. Whatever flowed through them was accumulating as it rose.

Eradin held her hand toward the nearest pillar without touching it. The red lines on her skin flared, and she yanked her hand back.

“I can feel where it’s going,” she said, her voice stripped down to almost nothing. “My magic follows wounds. And whatever waits at the top of the canyon is hungry. It has been for a very long time.” She gazed up, frowning. “What if the pillars are draining the dragons to feed whatever’s above?”

If she was right and the Oracle lay at the top, it had been powered by centuries of dragon death.

“It can’t be,” I said, but I knew I was wrong the moment I said it.

Because it made sense.