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She didn't hold back.

The violet-black wrapped her arms in coils thick as rope. The Eitr lashed out from her in a single concentrated strike. It met Vinea full at the chest. The daemon roared, the sound carrying across the plane and ringing back to her from somewhere distant.

Lance shrieked above her, fighting the storm.

She poured more in. Her blood took up its own song. The relic answered. Nothing in this place ever hesitated. Current and Eitr braided together along her ribs and ran out of her down her arms.

Lysander dropped to his knees and shielded his eyes from the light of it.

Even Nellith stepped back.

Vinea reeled.

His body cracked. Molten gold bled out of him. The surrounding air twisted, and the storm he was at the centre of folded inward and ate itself. His form blurred, came apart and was gone.

Idonea fell to her knees, the relic dropping from her hand to lie on the obsidian, faintly glowing.

Lance landed on her shoulder. He pressed his head against her cheek.

Lysander reached her side. He pressed his lips to her temple. "Did you—"

"I think so."

She did not, in truth, know. The relic on the ground gave one weak pulse, then went quiet. Her shoulders dropped without her permission. The black sky overhead held still. For a count of two, her body decided the worst was finished.

She turned her face into Lysander's neck. He smelled of pine and nutmeg and iron, even here.

Then, from somewhere her body should not have been, Nellith laughed.

Thunder rolled overhead. The black sky split and a colossal shape moved in the clouds.

A viper slithered up out of the obsidian beside the relic.

Vinea reformed in the air above them, twice the size he'd been. His mane was a crown of moving lightning now, the arcs jumping continuously between his horns. He came down. Both his paws struck the obsidian, and the plane shattered around them.

Idonea stared up at him, numb. Lance hissed low, flaring his wings.

A bolt of lightning shot from the daemon's jaw and split the plain in two. Idonea barely managed to roll, dragging Lysander with her. Lance went up.

Vinea prowled forward, laughing, every step its own earthquake.

"You cannot kill what is true. Not with borrowed power."

Lightning ripped across the sky. Wind screamed. The wind lifted shards of molten rock and threw them. Lance darted through it the way a swallow darts through summer rain, nimble, fast.

Vinea's voice rolled over the thunder.

"Storms don't die."

His claws came through the air. A second bolt of lightning came down.

Idonea got her hands up. She made a shield of Eitr, with not enough strength behind it. The bolt hit. The impact threw her back across the obsidian, and what went through her chest was the pain of something tearing.

Vinea came on. She had lost sight of Nellith.

"You will never rival what I am."

A second bolt formed above her. The cloud went bright with it.