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Undeadspillfromtheportalsinariverofdecayedflesh.Theyshamblethroughthestreets,theirstifffingersoutstretchedlikeclawsastheybegintheirravenoussearchfortheliving.Ahordeofghouls,wights,andwraithsengulfsthecity.
This isn’t like the night Heston attacked. What Arluin brings to Nolderan is a massacre.
And this is the beginning of the end.
My father’s fingers tremble around his staff. Beneath his auburn beard, the veins in his neck pulse to a frantic rhythm. Upon seeing my father’s fear, terror shudders through me.
“What have you done?” My father’s roar cracks with horror and rage.
“I have done nothing,” Arluin replies with cool indifference. “What you have done, however, is to choose your daughter over your city. You are predictable, Telric. It is no secret that Reyna is your greatest weakness.”
I clench my fists. I want to shout that I’m not a weakness, nor a liability, but no words leave my tongue. Fear paralyzes me.
And even if I could speak, how could I deny Arluin’s words? Nolderan’s current state is because of me. I was too stupid to see through Arluin’s deceit. If only I hadn’t been blind to the signs: how he stared at me, how he kissed me, how he fixated on the locket last night. Now everything seems so painfully obvious. If only it were not too late.
“You will pay for this treachery, boy,” my father snarls. “When your father left, I treated you as family. And this is how you show your gratitude? By taking my daughter hostage and unleashing Death Gates across my city?”
“I saved her life,” Arluin hisses. “And the cost of saving her was to condemn my father, to my own future. Yet because I used necromancy to save her, you would have executed me. I was there when you murdered my father. I heard each and every one of his dying screams. You offered him no trial.”
“I offered him no trial because he deserved none! He sealed his fate when he murdered my wife.”
“But I didn’t murder your wife. I saved your daughter by betraying my own father. Do you then claim you would have offered me a fair trial, or would you have burned me where I stood?”
My father says nothing. His hand clenches his staff so tightly the wood creaks with the force. His temple throbs.
“That is what I thought. You would blindly kill us all for the magic we practice.”
“Your heinous magic threatens the living.”
Arluin shakes his head. “Do you know how much I despise you, Telric, and your pathetic self-righteousness?”
Before my father can reply, Arluin raises his obsidian dagger and drags it down his palm in a jagged line. “Tonight, I will avenge the injustice my father and I have suffered at your hands.”
A crimson bead wells from the wound. He gathers the shadows, and they merge with his blood.
“Kravut!”
Black blood spills across the Aether Tower like ink. The drops swell into an enormous worm thrice my father’s height. The worm lets out a ferocious hiss, revealing rows of knifelike teeth.
Adrenaline sears through my nerves, and the numbness dissolves. Lightning energizes me to such an extent I feel as though I’ve consumed an Elixir of Flurry.
I will not be weak. I will not allow my presence to burden my father. I will prove Arluin wrong.
Aether floods through my veins, bubbling and fizzling as it yearns for release. I force it under my control. I bend it to my will. When my father weaves aether into flames, I do too. Fire is the most effective magic we can wield against the undead and dark magic.
“Ignir’muriz!” we call together. Just before the bloodworm descends on us.
Flames erupt.
Maw first, the worm plunges into our blazing wall. Its shriek pierces my eardrums as our flames devour it.
My father and I work in tandem, as though our mind-link was not entirely severed. The aether rushing through our veins is one and the same.
“Ignir’quatir!”
The fiery shield explodes. Flames hurl at the bloodworm.
This screech is more horrifying than the last. Even when the worm falls silent, ringing continues in my ears.
