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Blue-green light poured from the hole in his gut.
“You,” he said with a sneer, “should have aimed higher.”
He chucked Ashrender aside with all the ceremony of tossing a broken quill in the bin. Then he took a single step into the shadows and emerged directly in front of Cedric.
Elyria’s scream was a brutal, furious sound.
She surged forward, her wild magic pulling more rocky fragments—marble and granite and obsidian, all—around her in a swirl.
But Malakar flicked his wrist, and his hollow power ensnared her once more. It pinned her and the shards in place, suspending them together in a twisted tableau, forcing her to watch in absolute horror as the dark sorcerer wrapped his fingers around Cedric’s throat.
“Enough of this,” Malakar said, his voice low but even. The croon of a lover. “Enough from you.”
He squeezed.
“No!” Elyria’s voice echoed in Cedric’s mind as his vision began blackening at the corners.
Not just from the loss of air, though.
Darkness was swirling around Elyria, shadows misting off her, frantic, frenzied. And whether she didn’t remember she was surrounded by shards of obsidian, or she simply didn’t care, it did not matter. Her shadows touched the power-hungry stone all the same, and her dark magic ignited.
The three of them—Elyria, Malakar, and Cedric all—were blasted back.
Cedric slammed into the wall behind him with a crunch. Warmth trickled down the back of his neck, and he blinked through blurring vision.
Elyria had gone tumbling backward too, but she managed to right herself before she slammed into the cavern on the opposite side. With a great flap of her wings and her staff pointed forward, she sped back toward Malakar.
Malakar, who—
Well, he’d stumbled.
Staggered.
Just a step. Maybe two.
There were gashes in his skin, more of that mana-filled light streaming from his wounds in place of blood.
But the blast of supreme, obsidian-amplified power had barely impacted him at all outside of that, and that was far more terrifying than anything Cedric had seen him do so far.
No, that wasn’t true.
The most terrifying possibility was still happening.
Because as Elyria rushed him, a whole new kind of darkness flashed over Malakar’s face. Any lingering composure, any remaining patience, the thought of continuing to toy with them, to draw out this final fight—it all evaporated.
The pained whimper Elyria released when Malakar’s power ensnared her once more drew fire from behind Cedric’s ribs. He tried to move, tried to rise, tried to draw his magic into his hands, then to lift those hands to his head and heal himself.
But his limbs were weak. His magic was sputtering. Like a clogged drain, only the smallest wisps were leaking through.
He looked down to see rivulets of red dripping from his palms, his wrists. And at the source of each bloody stream, a dark, shiny stone was embedded in his skin. Cedric had thrown his arms up in instinctual defense when Elyria’s power exploded through the cavern, and now shards of obsidian studded his flesh.
And so all he could do was watch with black-spotted vision as Malakar used his power to yank a paralyzed Elyria toward him. Her feet touched the ground, and the dark sorcerer ripped her staff from her grip, discarding it before snagging the back of her neck the way one might grab an animal’s scruff.
“This has gone on too long,” Malakar said, dragging her beside him as he took measured steps toward the Line. He hooked his night-sky fingers around her crown and plucked it from her head, looking at it with disdain before discarding it like it was little more than costume jewelry. “We offered you the world, regina. Power greater than that which the celestials wield. And over and over you spat in our face. You flaunted your bond; you wielded that sharp tongue to wound us.” He arched a dark eyebrow. “You stole our power, and then you kept it.”
“You’ve already pierced the Line,” Elyria gritted out. “You said you don’t need your power back.”
“Correct,” Malakar hissed. “We do not need it. But neither do we think you deserve to keep it any longer.” He shoved her to the ground, the slow mana tide rippling just inches from her periwinkle hair. “Not brilliant, you called us. No mastermind. Perhaps that is true. But still, we know things. True power does not lie in piercing the Line. It lies in using the Line to pierce.”
