Although Talasyn and the Amirante attempted it many times, they were never able to replicate the barrier of light and darkness that had been woven in Nenavar. They couldn’t reestablish contact with the Dominion, either, because the fighting came hard and fast, from all sides.
In the end, a month was all it took.
A month to bring a decade-long war to its conclusion. A month to tear down what was left of what had once spanned an entire continent. A month to destroy the idea of a nation and its states.
This isn’t happening.
Moments pulsed like heartbeats, glinting in the arterial red light that flooded the world as a Sardovian stormship fell from the sky in a deluge of metalglass shards that cratered the streets of Lasthaven, the Allfold’s vast capital and its final bastion in the Heartland. The Kesathese stormship that had dealt the final blow arced up, victorious, and drew parallel with the city skyline, unleashing a fresh barrage of ammunition over it. The enormous cannons embedded in its underbelly spat out lightning strike after lightning strike, etching swathes of rooftops in white heat before setting them ablaze. The sky of early evening rained cinders and smoke, obscuring the pale silhouettes of all moons except the Seventh, which was in eclipse, burning red-gold over the war-torn land.
On the other end of Lasthaven, it was actually raining. A second stormship, its midnight-black hull proudly bearing the silver chimera of House Ossinast, unleashed magic from the Rainspring and the Squallfast in the form of downpours as thick as sleet and gales so strong that they uprooted trees and houses, whisking them every which way while Sardovian soldiers and cityfolk scrambled to safety amidst storm and darkness.
This isn’t happening.
The stray thought flitted across the surface of Talasyn’s mind every now and then, as if the hundredth time would be the charm and she’d wake up to a reality where it hadn’t taken Kesath only a fortnight to overwhelm the Coast and then another fortnight to sweep through the Heartland, effectively surrounding Lasthaven.
No one had expected Gaheris to use all of his stormships and his entire army in such a devastating assault. Kesath had grown in wealth and power precisely because of its strategy of accumulating resources from conquered Sardovian states, but the Night Emperor had apparently decided that wiping out all form of resistance was a greater priority. Most of the Heartland had been completely flattened, with countless dead. The Sardovians’ base in the Wildermarch was gone and the last stand that they were mounting here in the capital was in the process of being utterly crushed.
The husks of lightning-razed mills and workshops proliferating Lasthaven’s industrial district sheltered Talasyn and her two companions from the worst of the wind as they made their way through the ruins. The rains hadn’t reached this part of the city sprawl yet, which was the only stroke of luck in what had been a truly rotten day.
“How’s she holding up?” Talasyn asked, glancing over to where Vela was being supported by a cadet. The air was thick with dust, stained crimson from the myriad fires, but Talasyn was close enough to see that the Amirante was having difficulty breathing, her complexion deathly gray. Blood soaked through the cloak that had been wrapped around her torso as a makeshift bandage, seeping out in copious amounts from the wound inflicted by a shadow-smithed greatsword.
After her frigate crashed, Vela had been attacked by the same giant Shadowforged whom Talasyn had encountered and taken by surprise on the frozen lake, a month and a half ago. It had to be him: she would have recognized his stature and the style of his armor anywhere.
Talasyn had killed him with a light-woven blade of her own. If only she had done so back on the outskirts of Frostplum that night. The Amirante was in bad shape.
“She’s fading fast,” said the cadet. He was still a boy, several years younger than Talasyn and shaking in his too-large boots but trying valiantly to put on a brave face. “We have to get her to a healer as soon as possible.”
Talasyn squinted through the gloom. “There’s a rendezvous point just up the street.” Or what was left of the street, anyway. The one saving grace was that this district had already been obliterated and, thus, the Night Empire had focused its attentions elsewhere. The area was deserted, heaps of debris walling it off from the ground skirmishes scattered throughout the rest of the city.
From the moment she had saved Vela and the cadet from the giant legionnaire, Talasyn had been operating on the hope that the rendezvous system was still in place. The spots had been marked before the battle; there should be healers there, as well as teams to ferry people to the carracks for evacuation.
Not that there would be anywhere left to evacuate to when this was over, but she tried not to dwell on that.
A tower had collapsed onto their intended path; there was an opening between the mounds of twisted metal wide enough for their party to squeeze through one at a time. Talasyn motioned for the cadet to go first. She then gently nudged Vela forward, murmuring words of encouragement to the injured, disoriented woman, whose bones felt impossibly brittle beneath Talasyn’s fingertips. No sooner had Vela disappeared through the gap when Talasyn heard the shriek of the Shadowgate, crackling with sharp malevolence.
Fuck.
“Go,” she told the cadet through the gap. “I’ll hold them off.” He started to protest but she interrupted him brusquely. “You need to get the Amirante to the rendezvous point, and someone has to buy time. Go. I’ll catch up.”
Once Vela and the cadet were safely away, Talasyn whirled around to confront the three helmeted figures emerging from the battle’s mists. She slipped into . . . not an opening stance, not exactly. Instead, she stood stock-still in an almost meditative posture, assessing the situation as the Shadowforged fanned out, the better to launch a simultaneous offensive from different directions.
The figure directly in front of her was quite possibly the legionnaire who had carved out Vela’s eye with a shadow-smithed knife the year before. Talasyn couldn’t be entirely sure because their mirror image was to her right, identical in build and armor from head to toe, but it had definitely been one of them. The distinctive style of their helms showed their brown eyes, which regarded her with twisted delight. She’d encountered them the previous sennight as well, in a vicious battle onboard a Kesathese ironclad that Sardovian forces had tried and failed to commandeer. In her head she called them the Thing and the Other Thing.
“Hello, little Lightweaver,” purred the Thing. “Lasthaven has fallen. The remains of your fleet are scattered. It’s not too late to beg. Perhaps then we’ll make this quick.”
“I understand that this might come as a shock, but I don’t exist to make your life more convenient,” Talasyn said evenly.
The figure to her left let out a chuckle. He had a lithe build and a relaxed pose that belied the dark, crackling, double-bladed staff that he was casually resting on his shoulders. “I wouldn’t banter too much if I were you,” he hummed. “You might be in for a world of pain. The twins are already pissed off because you killed that big lug, Brann. They were sweet on him, you know—”
“Shut up, Sevraim,” growled the Thing.
It dawned on Talasyn that Brann had been the giant legionnaire’s name. She shrugged, trying for flippancy. “May his shade find shelter in the willows from Zannah’s all-knowing eye, but, honestly, I doubt it.”
The Other Thing, the Shadowforged to Talasyn’s right, spoke up then, her black cloak rustling as a barbed mace materialized in her gauntleted fists, already slanted into an attack position. “You’re finished, Lightweaver. The Sardovian Allfold is no more.”
Talasyn spun two curved swords, one shorter than the other. They were like molten radiance in her hands, filling the air with golden heat. “In that case, there’s nothing left to do but take all of you down with me.”
The three legionnaires charged and she sprang into action, her blades of light clashing against staff and knife and mace. Talasyn made liberal use of crumbled pillars and toppled ledges, springing off them and spinning and slashing at her foes as she counted the minutes in her head, trying to determine when would be the best time to retreat. It had to be once Vela and the cadet were close to the rendezvous point, but already Talasyn was at a clear disadvantage, staggeringly outnumbered. Still, she had a chance if she could move faster, if she could strike harder—
There was a new flare of shadow magic from somewhere else. From someone else. Chains of darkness wrapped around a sizeable chunk of fallen stone and hurled it into the back of Sevraim’s hand a split-second before his staff could find its mark on Talasyn’s skull.
Sevraim swore under his breath, his weapon winking out of existence. He rotated his wrist experimentally, as though checking for broken bones. “What did I do wrong now, pray tell?” he complained as Alaric Ossinast placed himself between his legionnaires and Talasyn. She could only stare, dumbfounded, at the crown prince’s broad back. The spikes on his pauldrons glinted, grotesquely skeletal, in the glow of nearby fires.
“Find your own plaything,” Alaric instructed in his deep rasp. “I have a score to settle with this one.”
Talasyn bristled. As soon as the other Shadowforged had reluctantly melted back into the smoke and rubble, she brought her two swords together and melded them into a single sharp javelin, which she hurled at him with a fierce cry. Alaric brought up one gauntleted arm, folding it in front of his chest; the javelin crashed into a shield of shadow, and both fizzled out of existence. His left flank was unguarded and she didn’t give him any opportunity to correct his stance. She was upon him in an instant, back to curved swords again, one blazing in each hand.
Alaric quickly conjured a whip from the Shadowgate, wrapping it around Talasyn’s ankle. He gave a sharp tug and she fell, flat on her back on the ground, the wind knocked out of her by the impact. He transmuted the whip into a falchion and brought it down over her prone form just as she sprang up, crossing her swords in front of her, timing it just right, timing it so that the blades intersected over his, trapping it between them. And, just like that, she was looking up at the Kesathese prince’s half-shrouded face for the first time since Nenavar.
They strained into each other. For Talasyn, the rest of the world faded, eclipsed by Alaric in all his danger, hawklike gray eyes burning down at her above the obsidian half-mask.
“Nice to see you again.” His sarcasm cut through the air as precisely as any knife, the lethal edge of the shadow-falchion almost grazing her neck.
“Why, did you miss me?” she retorted, trying her very best to angle one of her blades in such a way as to stab him in the throat.
Alaric scoffed; then he pushed her away from him. She staggered back, regained her footing to fly at her opponent once more. They fell into a frenetic sequence of blows and parries and counterattacks, their footwork carrying them all over the ruins of the industrial district. Lightning rolled on beneath the Seventh moon’s blood-red eclipse.
Talasyn was eventually forced to concede that she needed a new strategy. Alaric kept her on her toes while simultaneously being a brick wall who refused to budge, and she couldn’t duel him forever. Not when Sardovian troops badly needed her help to retreat elsewhere. She banished the shorter of her two swords and transmuted the other one into a bear spear, its enormous blade shaped like a bay leaf and the length of its handle quite suitable for fending off a bear of a man while waiting for the opportune moment to escape.
Alaric regarded her quietly. His gray eyes were inscrutable, but he had to know as well as she did that the war was over. Talasyn’s fate along with that of her comrades was written in each peal of thunder, in each collapsing building, in each wasp cornered overhead, in each crossbow bolt piercing through an Allfold emblem. After this battle, there would be nothing left of Sardovia.
“Perhaps you should just yield,” Alaric said. His deep voice was hoarse at the edges.
Long day of shouting commands to kill people, Talasyn thought with a scoff. She brandished her spear, poised to attack.
He came at her with shadow-smithed sword and shield, and the next time his weapon clashed against hers it was devoid of the usual brute strength. Almost as if his heart wasn’t in it, which was ridiculous—wasn’t it? He dove beneath her swing and then they were putting each other through their paces, light and darkness and aether illuminating their gloomy surroundings as the sky continued to fall.
She lured him away from the direction of the Allfold’s rendezvous point. Their lethal dance of spinning, slashing magic carried them from one demolished street to the next, until they stumbled into a ground skirmish between Sardovian and Kesathese infantrymen. The space sang with crossbow bolts and ceramic shells as soldiers from both sides scrambled to get out of the way of the two aethermancers cutting a path through the field of combat. Light and darkness sparked and shrieked along with the metal zipping through the air, the bodies all around them slumping to the ground. The hulking shadows of the stormships drew ever nearer with each jumbled, blood-soaked moment that passed.
It was when Talasyn had to skirt around a splinter of a newly crashed wasp coracle that Alaric leapt at her in an overhead strike. Her spine nearly bent in half as she blocked with the handle of her spear, the intersected beams shrieking at her throat.
“It’s over, Talasyn.” His gaze was blank but he sounded—odd. Too quiet, somehow, too lacking in the triumph that such a declaration should have warranted.
She almost fell backward in shock. It was the first time he had ever said her name. He held it carefully on his tongue, as though testing the weight of it, his tone at odds with the mask that he wore, with its carven grimace of wolf’s teeth, with the way that their weapons crackled violently mere inches from each other’s skin.
“It’s over,” he repeated. As though he was attempting to calm her down, or to come to terms with something himself.
“And?” she bit out sharply. “Let me guess—if I surrender, you’ll let me live?”
Alaric’s pale brow creased. “I can’t do that.”
“Of course not,” she mocked. There was a well of bitterness building up inside her. “You’ll kill me quickly, then? A merciful death? The Shadowforged Legion loves promising me that.”
He just stared at her. She had the distinct and unsettling impression that he didn’t know what to say. She split her spear into two daggers and kicked his legs out from under him and, as he fell, she lunged . . .
Only to freeze as a stray ceramic shell rolled over the ground nearby and burst, the incendiary mixture within it hitting its critical point. A mighty stone column in front of her was blasted off its plinth, falling forward with a horrible, crumbling lurch.
Talasyn hated herself for what happened next. She hated how instinctive it was, how she didn’t think twice. She glanced over at Alaric and some—understanding—passed between them, swift and white-hot like a lightning bolt. She hurled one of her daggers at the falling column and he followed suit with a shadowy knife of his own. The two weapons dissolved into each other and there it was again, that black-gold sphere, that radiant night, unfolding in rippled currents with a sound like silver glass. The column disintegrated upon contact with the barrier, splintering into thousands of tiny shards. The sounds of battle became muffled, as though Talasyn were hearing them through water.
Alaric got to his feet, his every move slow and measured as his predatory gaze stayed fixed on her. She clenched her fists at her sides as nets of magic glimmered around their forms, casting a charged veil through which the Seventh in its blood-red eclipse still managed to burn bright.
He was far enough away from her that the column wouldn’t have so much as grazed him. He had helped her. The epiphany brought with it such confusion that Talasyn’s mind all but blanked. She once again remembered that first chase over the ice, how he’d parted each ribbon of Shadowgate so that she could pass through unscathed.
What was his game plan? She was Sardovia’s Lightweaver. If he killed her, he would avenge his family and make Kesath’s inevitable victory all the sweeter.
Maybe he was just savoring the moment.
A deep furrow carved its way between Alaric’s sweeping dark brows. It occurred to Talasyn, distantly, that he might look conflicted behind the mask.
“You could come with me.” His words tumbled out too quickly to have been thought through. “This phenomenon—this merging of our abilities—we can study it. Together.”
Talasyn’s jaw dropped. The man was two sails short of a full rig. And she was, too.
Because it was her turn to speak without thinking.
Because, instead of telling Alaric that she would rather eat dirt than go anywhere with him, what she said was . . .
“Your father would never allow that.”
His gaze flickered. He almost, very nearly, seemed to flinch.
What a strange person, she mused, with no small amount of awe at his gall. It wasn’t that she wasn’t curious about these barriers that she could apparently only create with him, but—
“Do you honestly expect me to believe that the Night Emperor will welcome a Lightweaver into his ranks with open arms?” Talasyn demanded. It suddenly hit her that this was what said Night Emperor’s son had to be up to, and she narrowed her eyes. “Did you really think that I would fall for such an obvious trap? That I’d be so grateful for the chance to save my own skin that I’d throw away all common sense?”
The more she took Alaric to task, the more color leached into his skin. She had presumed him incapable of anything as common as flushing, but his thick dark hair had been so disheveled by stormship winds and ground battles that the tips of his ears peeked out, and they were as red as the eclipse. The anger that she nursed for him and all his ilk didn’t recede, exactly, but it was somewhat dulled by confusion.
What was wrong with him?
“Never mind,” Alaric gritted out, abruptly vicious. “Forget I said anything.”
The clanging of gongs resounded through the air, dulled as it permeated the black-gold sphere but insistent, nonetheless. It was the signal for all Sardovian forces to retreat, leaving behind the dust and the rubble and the dead. Talasyn tugged at the threads of her magic and Alaric did the same, unraveling the tapestry that they had woven together. The barrier dissipated in the next instant, revealing the chaos that beset the street. The Sardovian soldiers who weren’t currently fleeing were covering their comrades’ escape with rattling streams of crossbow bolts and more ceramic shells, and Talasyn braced herself for Alaric’s next attack.
It never came.
“Until we meet again, Lightweaver.” His gray eyes were back to being hard and impassive. “In the meantime, do try not to let more falling rocks get the best of you when I’m not around to help.”
Talasyn shook with bewilderment and blinding rage. She couldn’t muster any sort of comeback, phantom snatches of words weighing heavy on her tongue and refusing to budge. She couldn’t re-engage him, either. She needed to help fend off the Kesathese troops while Sardovia pulled out.
Alaric was clearly well aware of it, too. The corners of his eyes lifted, as though he were sneering behind his fanged mask. And yet, something gnawed at her. There was something . . . off about the situation, some jarring thing that lurked beneath the veneer of this moment. Beneath his coldly regal tone and the unreadable flint of his gaze.
She didn’t realize what it was until he had turned around, clearly prepared to leave her standing there.
“You’re letting me go?” Talasyn blurted out.
Just like that?
Alaric froze. He didn’t look back at her, but one gauntleted fist clenched at his side.
“There is no use killing someone who has already lost.” His response was soft, but it sliced through her world like thunder. “It’s a waste of energy on my part, as you will probably die in the retreat soon enough.”
With that, he walked away, leaving her seething, leaving her to wonder why he did the things that he did. Even as Sardovia fell to pieces all around her.
