Toren Daen
After escaping from Mardeth along the Redwater, I’d asked my bond why she’d put her foot down regarding the Second Phase of my Phoenix Will. My core was more refined than Arthur’s was when he had first trained with Realmheart, and though I certainly drew more direct insight from the depths of my will than Arthur did, Lady Dawn was there to ease the burden. My control of my Acquire Phase was impeccable; honed over the course of many months. What stopped me from delving deeper?
Aurora had explained to me that I was not the problem. It was her.
My mind grew closer with my bond’s when I used my First Phase, and while comfortingly intimate and beyond useful for calming my mind during a fast-paced battle, we were still distinct. I knew who I was, and my bond knew herself in turn.
Yet as the Integrate Phase of my Phoenix Will washed out from my core, it became difficult to distinguish where Lady Dawn started and Toren ended. My bond’s experiences outnumbered my own by a factor of a thousand thousands. She’d forgotten more than I would ever learn, and as that vastness encroached on my sense of self, I found myself being overwhelmed.
Even as I stared Mardeth down, the iron grip I kept on my own psyche was a greater strain than any other. Aurora’s sentiments and emotions still bled over somewhat, accounting for the sense of arrogant disdain I felt for the vicar flying in the air. I realized that it was not my body that would give first under the effect of my Will.
It would be my mind.
I knelt to look Benny in the eye, whose trembling gradually ceased as he realized he was not drowning in a tide of Vritra acid. He looked up at me, his eyes impossibly wide as they took in my appearance.
The only things not darkened to my sight were the lingering spells that still burned through mana, alongside the churning heartfires all around. With my further enhanced sense of lifeforce, I could trace the path of Benny’s veins through his body, a simmering stream of aetheric energy coursing along his blood.
“Are you an angel?” he asked, my burning eyes reflected in his own. They seared just like Aurora’s phantom. In place of flesh, twin stars pulsed rhythmically.
“No,” I said softly, allowing myself to smile at the boy’s question. “Go to your mother, Benny,” I said, brushing off a few chips of debris from his shoulder. “And have the rest of the refugees run while they can.”
The boy opened his mouth, seeming just about ready to burst with a flurry of questions, but I stood, facing Mardeth’s uncertain form. The entire world was blanketed in a misty haze from my perspective, the same darkening of my sight taking place as when I saw Lady Dawn’s phantom form.
Benny scurried back to his mother. I could feel the sense of awe–and no little terror–coursing through the crowd behind me, but once the young boy reached them, it seemed to light a match. Legs remembered to move as bodies surged to run, a tide of people moving in the opposite direction.
As they ran muttering prayers to the High Sovereign, Mardeth's anger returned in full force.
“You think I’ll let them go?” Mardeth sneered, pushing past his uncertainty. “You are naive as ever, little mage,” he said, conjuring a dozen concentrated spheres of sickly green sludge. The spells hurtled toward the retreating civilians with a hiss. As they got close, each one popped open like a pimple, spraying even more of that caustic acid in a rain toward the retreating men and women.
Oath hovered by my ear as I pressed outward with my mana, summoning a wall of solid white fire behind me. I was backlit by the burning inferno, my stance cool and impassive.
And then Mardeth’s spell slammed into my wall of white fire. A dozen petty raindrops pelted my stalwart protections, but they found no purchase. Holy fire gave the putrid lessuran filth no quarter. Only merciful cleansing.
When it was done, there was nothing left of Mardeth’s spell. The tongues of white fire sizzled behind me as they waited at their master’s call.
Mardeth's expression shifted to one of shock.
I clenched my fist, and the wall of fire concentrated into a single point. A singularity of compressed mana that wished to rage with the force of a nascent star.
A supernova must expand, I thought evenly. It cannot bear being caged. It will not allow itself to be leashed by petty gravity.
Then I let the singularity of fire burst forward, a nimbus of white flame searing toward the vicar. He lurched to the side haphazardly, barely avoiding the arc of power. It blazed through the forest behind him, outlining the boughs of trees momentarily before they were utterly burned, not even ash left in the flickering wake.
I gradually rose into the air, a dozen psychokinetic pushes on the ground serving to make me float. I rose higher and higher, feeling a deep dissatisfaction with the state of my body. I could not fly. That may have been the greatest indignity I’d yet faced in this new world. That the lessuran of basilisk blood could fly, and yet I–with the blood of Asclepius flowing through my veins–could not.
“The sky is not your domain, lessuran,” I said, my face a cool, impassive mask. I waved my hand, lashing out with my telekinetic emblem. “It is ours.”
A bead of white flared around Mardeth’s leg as my spell engaged. His automatic putrid defenses tried to wither the telekinesis away, yet with another force of will, I coated it in white fire. The spell resisted long enough for me to pull my hand down, the vicar barely seeming aware of what was happening due to the sheer speed.
Mardeth shot toward the ground like a green comet, yelling in rage as he was forcefully dragged from the sky. The trespasser in our domain bounced off the ground hard, a sickening crack echoing out as his body cratered the street.
“This is better,” I breathed, floating over. “The petty basilisk mocks what it takes to truly soar. Your kind writhes and twists on the ground, sprouting false wings to sully the sky above with your rot. Your bitter envy taints the freedom of the air.” I cocked my head. “Too long have you ignored this truth, Vicar of Plague. You will stay there, entrenched in the dirt. It is where you belong.”
Mardeth yelled in anger, surging upward as his bones reknit themselves and his skin sealed over. He dared to sully the sky once more with his putrid blood.
He would learn.
I raised a hand, coalescing a handful of plasmashot along my palms. The white beads–each burning with the heat of a star–elongated into the shape of feathers. Then they shot forward, passing through the vicar’s plague-like defenses without resistance. A dozen burning holes opened along Mardeth’s twisted body, but the man didn’t stop, blurring toward me with abandon.
His tenacity is admirable, I thought. Or was it Aurora who was thinking this? For one so outmatched. He does not falter in the face of pain. It is a shame that such a virtue is tethered to one so full of vice. But we will not suffer prey to claim the mantle of predator.
Under a bare tense of my power, chunks of rock blurred in from the side, cracking into Mardeth. They stayed there, one after the other, as I gradually pulled on the rubble in the destroyed street. The vicar’s body was gradually encased in rock, even as he continued to approach. His mace flashed as he tried to smash the pressing rocks around him, but a well-aimed feather of plasma swatted it to the side. He thrust his hand out as he finally neared me in the air, nearly entirely entombed in a sphere of stone.
A living corpse, finally knowing the kiss of the grave.
I saw his hateful eyes as a final bit of stone finally settled over his face. I could feel his mana trying to rip apart the earth around him as he hovered, but the strength with which I held my telekinesis was undeniable. My mana would not be decayed by such weak basilisk arts.
His fingers stopped an inch from my face, the nails obscenely long and poised to spear my eyes.
I held a palm impassively against the rock sphere, seeing the disjointed rhythm of Mardeth’s heartfire within. Black veins spread across a body trapped by tons of telekinetically leveraged stone. For the first time, I felt the vicar’s heartfire pulse in an accelerated rhythm.
One of fear.
“You wanted an Indrath to your Vritra, vicar,” I said in a monotone that was somehow melodic. “But the doom you have brought upon yourself is not that of the dragons. Kezess cares not for the people of his kingdom. But we are not Kezess Indrath. We are not of the dragon.”
Burning energy built along my palm, white-hot plasma compressing itself over and over as we banished the night; as we ripped apart the veil of shadows that encroached upon our home. The rock began to melt as I stared deep into Mardeth’s blackened heartfire. My eyes brightened.
“We are the envy of the low as they see what they were denied,” I said calmly, my voice echoing. “We are the joy of community around a fire. We are the sorrow of every brother as their siblings succumb to the cruelties of the world. We are the hate of the powerless as plague subsumes their souls. We are the love of a mother for her children. We are every quiet cry of the people of this land, their tongues cut from their throats and their bodies broken from your cruelty. We are the emotions of all those who can never feel. We sing to the sky because their gods will not let them.”
With every word uttered, the fire in my palm burned hotter. The runes on my hands glowed brighter. My words echoed louder and louder as my calm voice became crashing thunder, and the thrum of my magic condensed further. I felt Mardeth thrash, his intent bleeding with wretched terror.
“We are the sun, vicar, and you will never stop those beneath us from feeling the light and warmth of a new day.”
I let loose. A beam of searing starfire passed through the rock without resistance, through the vicar inside, and out into the trees beyond. A hole burned through several trees beyond before my mana finally dissipated into the night. Trees cracked and fell with the sound of splintering wood.
I could see a path straight through the earth, every wound I’d inflicted immediately cauterized. No blood dripped from Mardeth’s wound, the wretched flesh instantly cauterized.
I snorted with disdain, then concentrated on the telekinetic emblem across my back. I allowed the power to build–just for a time. Mardeth's lifeforce was weakening, but he still trespassed in the sky. I would not sully the air with his life’s blood. He would not bear the honor of dying in our domain.
A flare of white built overtop the compressed mass of stone and flesh. Mana churned angrily as I kept it leashed by power of will, a hurricane roaring to be unleashed. Demanding that I give it freedom.
I obliged.
A focused stream of telekinetic force slammed into the ball of stone that bore my prey. The sphere shattered into a million pieces as it was pounded by undue force, a hurricane-gale wind sending the rubble and the wretch within down toward the ground.
To an outside observer, it must have appeared as if the very sky itself swatted the vicar from the air with a hammer blow. The weight of a city’s worth of sins compressed in and through Mardeth’s coffin as he was cast to the earth.
The sound of shattering stone echoed out as a ton of rubble hit the ground in a resounding crash that made the very earth shudder. A crater the size of a house opened in the streets as it was struck by a cannonball. Dust and debris darted among shattered homes and broken canals, searching for any escape from the coming carnage.
I slowly lowered myself down toward where Mardeth’s lifeforce still weakly pulsed. He wasn’t moving, too much mana expended in his assault on me and those I was bound to protect.
I exhaled a bit of fiery steam as I stepped forward, slowly walking down the slope of the crater. My hands were clasped behind my back with regal poise as the sound of my shoes on broken earth echoed out.
And finally, I reached the pile of rubble.
I pulled on the mana in my core–already draining at an extremely fast rate–and coalesced energy around my hand. My left forearm was encased in vibrating sound, a humming too low to be audible to mortal ears buzzing into the atmosphere. I straightened my hand into the shape of a knife, feathered orange runes glowing along my fingers. Then I thrust them down into the rubble, the vibrating barrier allowing my strengthened limb to shear through everything it touched.
My hand pierced flesh. I allowed the shroud along my hand to dissipate as I curled my fingers upward, feeling the squelch of putrid muscle as my fingers wrapped around bone. I pulled up, wrenching Mardeth’s body from the stones.
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I held the man by his clavicle, my hand embedded into his chest. His body–already decrepit and disgusting, even by the standards of a lessuran–looked like it had been thrown into a wildfire, then dropped into the rolling fields of the Cerulean Savannah in the ancestral home of the Thyestes Clan. The holes that riddled Mardeth’s form could just have easily been caused by the sentient blue-green blades of the asura-slaying grass of Epheotus. The only clue that they had not were the blackened edges and lack of blood, each wound burned beyond recognition.
His horn, though–Brahmos’ horn–still glowed under the light of the mana that transferred to him from the far-distant basilisk blood crystal. His wounds were already beginning to heal ever-so-slowly. His eyes were glazed over, and his face was locked in a rictus grin even as his aura trembled.
Oath returned to my hand, the entire weapon degraded and damaged from the furious combat I’d put it through. The once-perfect edge was now dulled and littered with cracks, but the swept-hilt saber only needed to fulfill one more mission. To finish its namesake.
“Their hearts beat in defiance of you,” I said, my voice pulsing in tune with my heartfire. “All at once, vicar. They deny you. Deny you through us.”
I raised Oath up to my left ear, funneling an absurd amount of mana along the blade. The red edge erupted into burning white plasma, but I could feel the structure breaking down under the effect of my spell. My sights locked on that onyx horn that the vicar had grafted onto his forehead.
“This is what I was waiting for,” Mardeth muttered through bloody lips. “This fire in your veins… The pain you cause…”
I ignored the pathetic vicar’s dying words. They were worth no more than the sand under my boot. “May your soul be scattered to the wind,” I muttered, slashing at Mardeth’s neck with the humming white blade.
Then my instincts screamed at me. I barely registered as Brahmos’ horn erupted with a torrent of mana, a beam of brilliant green shooting from it and toward my head. The amount of energy condensed into it was absurd; compressed in a way only possible through a basilisk’s horn.
I was forced to divert my plasma-laden cut, instead pulling the saber in front of my face and bracing the back of the blade with my other hand as I ripped my fingers free of Mardeth’s collar. The green beam of pure mana was split in two as it impacted Oath, the twin halves shearing through the buildings nearby. Everywhere it touched seemed to melt, the structures drooping and buildings collapsing. I inhaled a bit of greenish mist from the atmosphere as I skidded back, my feet digging furrows into the cobbles as I was pressed from the crater.
My heartfire began working feverishly to heal me as it battled against the caustic mana in my lungs, but the pain was surprisingly potent. I snarled as I was forced to the back of the alley, the energy finally relenting.
As the white plasma finally simmered away from my blade, I looked down in disappointment. The red metal drooped, sloughing to the ground as it finally gave way. Not from the caustic acidic attack I’d just deflected, but the searing heat of my own plasma. I was left with Oath’s empty handle and a feeling of loss.
That sense of loss was from Toren. It helped ground me more; helped separate where Toren started and Aurora ended.
I looked up, feeling a spark of anger as I looked at Mardeth as he gradually rose back into the sky. As he trespassed once more. That anger was shared by both Toren and Aurora–both of them hated him.
Except the green beam of energy hadn’t dissipated. No, it had simply changed direction. Instead of being aimed at me, Mardeth seemed to be absorbing the energy from the horn in waves, his body changing and growing larger as he did so. His skin darkened from mute gray to a sickly green as his body filled out, growing in size twice over. The horn on his head glowed brighter as the monstrous transformation took place, Mardeth’s robes suddenly tight on his body. His eyes bulged as he screamed in pain, tendrils of caustic mana lashing out at everything nearby. I was forced to dodge and weave around each strike, the force behind them absurd.
But what made my eyes widen in alarm was how his heartfire changed. It became more and more indistinct, the disjointed tone seeming to shift in a fluid-like way. I could see the veins where his blood used to be simmering away and vanishing. It was as if underneath his twisted exterior, all semblance of humanity evaporated as that sickly mana spread throughout his body.
Mardeth’s screams of pain intermingled with laughs as his body writhed in odd places, something squirming underneath the surface. Parts of his robes were shredded under the strain, revealing a torso littered with deep, ugly marks. All over his body, different grafts of skin revealed themselves, stitching scars like wretched mouths covering every bit of his thin, wiry form. His skin bulged intermittently as if something was trying to rip its way out. The twisted vicar grunted in pain with each throbbing expansion.
Mardeth twisted in the air, turning to look at me as the transformation completed. Dark power surged out of him in waves, kicking up dust and making the night seem even blacker.
“Little mage,” he said, his voice now an octave lower but just as greasy. “I am going to fill your corpse with all the blithe in the world. You have given me so much pain. It is only just that I return it with pleasure.”
I held out a hand as I locked eyes with Mardeth, listening to the thrum of my own heartfire. Slowly, my personal aether–tinted the color of a waxing dawn–pushed through the handle of Oath in my hand. The threads–no, veins–of heartfire elongated into a long wire.
I’d worked for a long time to understand what the threads of heartfire were that coursed between Aurora’s relic and her soul. Further inspection of Sevren’s melding with the Relictombs over the past weeks had granted me even deeper insights into the intricacies of lifeforce.
But it was only as I witnessed the veins of soultethered aether thrumming through the arteries of every single person not sixty seconds ago–unadorned and not–that I’d finally gained enough insight to try this. The way the aether flowed in rolling pulses; how it arced back toward the heart when it was done. How it carried notes of a person’s intent in the way it flickered and shined.
Over my summoned vein of heartfire grew a crystalline coating of interlocking mana, my telekinetic shroud extending over the highway of energy. I could only summon my telekinetic shroud over my body, but heartfire was the deepest expression of the flesh. Orange and purple light shimmered as it was refracted by the flashing weaves of pure mana that made up the shroud, a familiar single-edged shape coalescing. Mardeth watched with glee, a rictus smile on his demented face.
And finally, white plasma threaded overtop, forming the third and final layer of my summoned sword blade. It hummed deeply as I flourished it, carving a divot into the ground without resistance. Unlike Oath’s old blade, my telekinetic shroud would stand the heat of my plasma.
Outwardly, I kept my face a stoic mask of indifference. My hair, altered to a brilliant, fiery red under the effect of my Will–blew in a breeze no others could feel. “You continue to prattle about pain and all it brings you,” I said with a sneer, “But for all you claim to feel pain, I see none in your actions.“
Mardeth chuckled, a sound like ooze spreading along stone. His body appeared to be healed, the holes I’d opened in his wretched form sealed over. But there was something deeply wrong with his lifeforce that made me uneasy. “Did you not engage in that form of yours to escape the pain, little mage?” he mocked.
I blurred forward in a burst of white fire and telekinesis. Mardeth's mace whipped toward me, trying to wrap around my arm as he surged forward in turn. My white plasma blade flashed three times, severing the flail-like contraption before I swiped at the vicar’s torso.
My blade of pure plasma hummed as it neatly bisected the vicar, shearing through… Through liquid. Bits of green steam trailed in the wake of my cut instead of blood.
The inside of Mardeth’s body roiled with green mana as his two halves snapped back into place after my blade passed through. His fist lashed out, the appendage bulging unnaturally as it approached my face. Instinctively, I raised my arm to block the attack, but that’s when his strike changed.
The fist hit my forearm squarely, but instead of an impact, his entire arm expanded to the size of a tree as it became liquid, seeking to encase me in the filth. The bare moonlight was eclipsed as Mardeth’s limb enlarged around me in a ghastly curtain, attempting to ensorcell me entirely in caustic acid. I might have panicked were I Toren alone, but Aurora’s presence in my mind forced an almost clinical calm over my thoughts. I pressed outward with an unfocused nimbus of white fire, burning away tendrils of green sludge as I backpedaled away from the acid.
Everywhere I burned, the acid turned to a sickly mist that clung to me. It ate away at my telekinetic shroud relentlessly, scouring away my clothes and flesh. I grunted as my heartfire fought to heal me, erasing the touch of Mardeth’s taint.
“You would have gladly run from me forever had I not threatened those so close to you,” a voice whispered into the air. Mardeth was nowhere to be seen as I emerged back into the street, a misty green haze blanketing everything around.
I formed a full-body shroud of white fire, the absurd heat protecting me from the seeping green mist. I watched as the paint on the nearby buildings withered away under the effects of the fog. My sight was obscured by layers of green as Mardeth’s heartfire somehow echoed all around me, a distorted cacophony of drumbeats that served to heighten my own.
I flexed my mana, feeling a deep ache in my core as I pushed outward with an unfocused nimbus of white fire and oscillating sound. The two elements swirled around me in a mix of refracting light, an expanding vortex of heat and vibrations ripping the hazy mist apart at the seams.
I ground my teeth as the haze evaporated, leaving Mardeth’s heartfire focused and clear. He was flying away from me, laughing all the while.
I bent my knees, feeling a distant panic as I realized what he was aiming for. Toren’s panic. I blurred into the sky after the vicar, appearing in front of him in a flash of heat. A fist coated in fire seared straight through his chest, but all that I found inside was more ooze. It attacked the spell around my hand, breaking it down and eating into my flesh. It seemed Mardeth’s entire body was made of just acid.
“I wonder what will happen,” Mardeth said, leaning close to my face as we hovered in the sky, “If I put you through even greater pain?”
A torrent of green acid erupted from Mardeth’s chest, pushing me back diagonally toward the ground. I grunted in pain as I smashed through three buildings, finally managing to thrust a hand forward and concentrate a pushing telekinetic force in front of me. The beam of putrid power veered off to the side, searing a hole through another home and leaving my sight.
Toren’s panic surged again as Mardeth blurred toward a pocket of retreating refugees, the vicar’s tendrils of mana lashing out.
I rushed to intercept, but I was too slow. I snarled as he reached them first, his casual attack melting down their bones in instants. I felt as if this should remind me of something. Of a forest, and skittering limbs. Of failing to protect someone, but the sensation vanished as I focused on my foe.
Mardeth cackled above as he began to shoot up into the sky, his mana inexhaustible. Massive tendrils of acid erupted from his back, each large enough to blot out the starlight above. They swirled in complex patterns, whipping this way and that as the vicar surged into the sky.
I jumped upward, my feet landing solidly on top of a liquid tentacle as thick as a tractor-trailer. I ran along the tendril, slowly making my way closer to the vicar. The massive tentacles thrashed and flailed around with a life of their own, making it nearly impossible to continue my forward trek. Caustic fumes laced the air as I skated on soles of white fire and pulling telekinetic force. I was turned upside down, whipped to the side, and jerked every which way as the appendage writhed in the air, but I didn’t let that deter me.
I climbed higher and higher into the sky as Mardeth himself ascended, Fiachra growing smaller beneath us as the night sky welcomed us into its embrace. I zipped and weaved as I followed a twisting path of caustic mana like a staircase. The fires that were burning all over the city seemed incomprehensibly small from this far up, each a flickering dot of red amidst rolling canals. I could see large specks of green and red, the blithe spread having blanketed nearly a quarter of Fiachra as a whole.
The sky was ours. It was the domain of the Asclepius, and it welcomed its master with open arms. The delicate dance of hunting my prey was more than natural as I gradually sought my enemy’s throat.
I jumped from one tendril to another as they swelled around me, narrowly avoiding the surface of a tendril exploding like a cyst. The wind kissed my face in a familiar sensation as I twisted midair, landing feetfirst onto the next appendage and resuming my blurring path of white fire. Even as I fought for my life, I felt a sort of unleashed exhilaration as I darted from tendril to tendril, running and skating in an ever-ascending pathway. I was so, so close to flight. So close to true freedom. No more was I stuck in a deep, dark cell, lashed to a cage wall and doomed to never escape.
I snapped out with my white plasma saber as balls of sludge approached me, cutting through them in a flurry. Mardeth saw me getting closer, Brahmos’ horn on his forehead glinting. Some of the flesh on his arm separated, then shot toward me in a gyrating spiral. The fleshy green spells bulged, expanding in odd places as they filled up like a clenched balloon.
I concentrated on the elements I could call to me, ignoring the ache in my core. It was weak by my standards, my usual strength of ages past long gone. But I would have to make do.
Feathers of solid sound coalesced between the ochre feather stem glyphs of my fingers, a spark of white fire erupting in the center of each plume. I threw them like knives, allowing them to twirl and hone individually as they sought Mardeth’s flesh spells like comets.
All at once, my vibrating feathers punctured the soft exterior of Mardeth’s spells. Before his attack could explode on its own, the condensed fire inside of my spell detonated, ripping them apart in a conflagration of heat.
I surged through the glittering aftereffects of our clashing spells, green specks spinning around embers of white. The moonlight flashed through my saber as it flared, Oath’s handle glinting as I funneled heartfire and mana through it in an even pulse.
Mardeth welcomed me with open arms as I neared, seeming to trust in his invincibility and my inability to physically harm him.
“This is what they are to us,” Mardeth said, gesturing to the city far above as I edged closer. “Below us in every way! Yet you continue to fight for their sorry existences!”
“Your kind talk and talk, test and test, always seeking scientific enlightenment. Yet you always forget to feel,” I retorted, pirouetting around a lashing swipe of acid. “And that is why you shall never feel satisfied, Vicar of Plague. That is why you will die unfulfilled”
I didn’t need to cut through Mardeth’s body. By absorbing the energy condensed in Brahmos’ horn, he’d managed to turn his entire body into decay-based acid. His appearance as a lessuran was only a twisted facade. No part of him was truly solid.
None except for the horn.
Yet as Mardeth met my burning eyes, he must have sensed something was wrong. I swung my saber, the humming blade shearing toward the vicar’s head.
He tried to fly back desperately, finally seeing where I aimed by edge, but a telekinetic pull on his back only served to yank him into the cut. He yelled in anger, while I maintained my stoic features in the face of the end of this confrontation.
Then Mardeth did something that baffled even me. One of his tendrils cracked against his spine, a shattering sound rippling out as his body bent unnaturally far back. My saber sheared just past the base of Brahmos’ horn; my target barely missed.
Mardeth's back lurched back into place with another sickening crack, his face a mask of fury. His fist crashed against my face. My vision flashed as indescribable force rocked my body, my telekinetic shroud melting away from the acid coating his knuckles. I rocketed off to the side, my body shooting off into the night. My consciousness blanked for the barest moment as the bones in my jaw struggled to heal under the effect of my heartfire.
I lurched to a halt with a grunt as something latched onto my leg. I blinked, blood leaking from the edge of my lips as I looked at where one of Mardeth’s tentacles wrapped around my ankle. Instinctively, I tried to cut through it with my saber, but then the vicar cocked his hand back. I saw the bitter hatred on his transformed face as he twisted his arm in a full rotation, the tendril following suit.
I can’t let myself be flung from him, I thought with a note of consternation. I can’t fly. I can’t fly!
I was spun around, only kept in place by my leg. I barely had time to take in my situation before the tendril reached the bottom of its rotation, flinging me down with a crack. I felt my leg wrench out of its socket as the tendril hurled me toward Fiachra far below, the ground rushing to meet me.
Like a bird cast from the nest, I fell with broken wings.