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Alura called out a command, and then they all engaged as they had been practicing for the last year. Together, they weren’t the might of ten thousand soldiers, but it was the force they had to get through to be able to retreat to the safety of their dragons and get back into the fight.
Then with a shout, Aisling thrust under Alura’s guard and slashed across her ribs. Alura cried out in pain. Kerrigan could barely look as she fought her own acolyte. They were well trained. Better than them maybe even. But she couldn’t stop. Not even to help Alura.
Kerrigan had no concept of how the rest of the battle was going. Just this moment as she hit, blocked, parried. Her magic didn’t wane. It responded instinctively. Air, water, fire, earth. A marvel of combinations that pushed the acolytes farther and farther back, away from the burning docks and to the door into Lethbridge.
Alura was wounded. She struggled forward but retained her military prowess. Then with a performance Kerrigan had never witnessed, Alura whirled and drove her sword through Aisling’s heart. The great warrior fell backward, felled like a tree.
Wynter appeared then in the middle of the fight. Her scream of torment ached everywhere. Aisling was her lover, if not acknowledged. Her eyes were glowing orbs of death and destruction as she leveled her sword at Alura.
“You.”
Alura rose stiffly to her feet and beckoned Wynter forward. But Wynter had no intention of fighting fair. She threw a blast of straight black power into the center of Alura’s chest.
“No!” Fordham roared as he materialized before Wynter. He struck his sister across the face and center her stumbling backward, but it was too late.
Alura had taken the brunt of Wynter’s attack and was thrown backward. She tumbled a few feet before collapsing entirely. We all yelled as one, and Audria finished her fight long enough to dash to Alura’s side.
“She’s alive,” Audria said. “But I don’t know for how long.”
“Get her out of here,” Kerrigan cried.
Audria tried to get away with Alura, but suddenly the acolytes engaged them again. There was nothing to do but leave her there and hope for the best.
“She deserved it for what she did to my Aisling,” Wynter snarled.
“Then let us finish it,” Fordham said.
He was flagging. Wynter panted but looked as maniacal as ever. Perhaps more than normal.
She threw the shadows at Fordham, as if they could cut through him. He pushed them away, as if they meant nothing, and thrust his sword out toward her. Wynter made a sword of solid air and parried every thrust. She was a marvel. They were an even match in every way. Raised in the same way. Honed to be deadly.
Wynter knew every one of his tricks. Except one.
Kerrigan ignored the remaining acolytes. Fordham needed her help or Wynter would end him too. She rushed to his side. She had no sword. Only her powers to sustain her. But Fordham was not best on his own, as he had always been trained to be. He was best with his team. He was best with her.
“Get out of here,” he barked at her.
“I’m not leaving you.” She met Wynter’s gleeful strikes with her own magic. “I’ll never leave you.”
“I can’t protect us both.”
“Then, let me help,” she snapped.
He shot her a look of recognition. They had learned new ways to move, new ways to exist together in the last year. Wynter was one lonely girl who thought herself special. Wynter’s mania was pure ego. She thought she was blessed. She believed wholeheartedly that she had been chosen for this and that she was their savior, carrying them out of the isolated mountains, and that she would always rein triumphant.
Well, Kerrigan actually was special. She’d taken the wall down. She had visions of the future and ones that told her of the past. She was the one Wynter couldn’t understand, had only tried to use.
“Together,” Fordham said, and they launched forward.
But Wynter hadn’t prepared for what Fordham and Kerrigan could do together. And for a fraction of a second, that mania slipped into fear.
Wynter had control over the black shadows that Fordham used for short jumps. Kerrigan had seen him use them once to take down an assailant. Wynter seemed to have no gumption against using them, and she threw the shadows like knives.
Kerrigan smiled as she met Wynter’s black shadows with the four elements. Air to blast the dark power away from them. Water to douse them where they crawled. Earth to pull Wynter from her feet. And fire to distract her long enough for Fordham to close in.
“You were never good enough,” Wynter snarled at Fordham, coiling her shadows in like a whip and striking at him. “It should have been me!”
He dodged and then drew the edge of his Tendrille blade across her magic, disrupting the shadows. “Perhaps it would have been you, Wynter. Maybe it even should have been. You had more control,” Fordham spat. She wrapped the dark around his ankles and tried to pull him off his feet. Kerrigan stepped in, using her Dragon Ring fighting skills to slice the air down and sever the connection. “But you were always crazy.”
