Khara waited until she sensed the two wizards sprinting beneath them.
Myraden gave off a unique sensation, with her angry, violent core and bloodhorn Essence. It was a mixture of toughness and speed—as balanced of a Path as they came—yet Myraden refused to accept the balanced nature of it.
At least, as much as Khara knew her. It had been a while since they had trained together.
As soon as Myraden and Pirin passed beneath her, she stomped her foot down and detonated the lines of manifested Essence she had drilled into the palace floor, one level above the cellars.
The boar Essence exploded, dropping a ten-foot long section of cobblestone and wood into a heap onto the floor. It shifted, blocking the side of the hallway that the Aremir family wizard stood on, but allowing her a gap to squeeze through onto Pirin and Myraden’s side. “My prey,” she sneered, looking back at the Aremir wizard—whether he could hear her or not.
Then, facing Myraden, she said, “Now, don’t you move!”
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Pirin pointed his sword at the new threat, but Myraden grabbed his arm and dragged him back. “Keep running!”
He lifted his foot, ready to obey. Khara wouldn’t be as fast as either of them; boars gave strength over speed. Still, she launched a bolt of red Essence—startlingly similar in shade to Myraden’s—at them. Pirin used a Winged Fist to disperse it, then spun around and sprinted down the hallway.
“You can’t run forever, Leursyn!” Khara yelled. “Both of you! You can’t escape the Red Hand’s retribution!”
But Pirin could run fast, and she couldn’t. As far as he cared, facing retribution was a problem for tomorrow—right now, he needed to escape the collapsing palace with his life and spirit intact, and to reap the rewards of it.
They sprinted to the end of the hallway, and only then did Pirin look over his shoulder. Khara hadn’t followed them, but she also wasn’t atop the pile of rocks.
When they reached another stairway, they climbed back up to the main floor of the palace. Along the way, they encountered a Spark-stage servant, who Pirin knocked out with a pair of blows.
When they reached the top of the stairs, a bolt of red boar Essence blasted at them, turning the doorway to dust in their wake. Khara had taken a different way up. She ran down another hallway, but she wouldn’t be fast enough to cut them off. For good measure, Pirin and Myraden both launched a technique back at her—a blast of crimson Essence from Myraden and a condensed bar of wind from Pirin.
Pirin didn’t know where he was running. He just needed to get out.
A wall collapsed beside them, and a beam fell from the ceiling in front of them. The lower Aremir wizards couldn’t stop all of the debris from the battle of Wildflames from crashing into their palace.
“Know a way to the exit?” Pirin yelled, jumping over a pile of debris. They rounded a corner and came face-to-face with a wall of fire. A candle had tipped and set a banner alight. Pirin tucked his head and jump through it. It singed his ankles but nothing more.
Myraden shouted back, “If we keep moving, we will reach one eventu—”
A boulder ripped through the wall in front of them. Kythen tackled Myraden to the ground, pulling her out of the way, and Gray pushed Pirin to the side with one of her wings. Wood shattered and stone burst apart. Pirin held his arm in front of his eyes to shield them from the blast, but a shard still slashed his cheek, and another chunk of wood scraped by his abdomen.
When the dust and debris settled, there was an open hole in the wall, leading straight to the outside.
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Alyus didn’t need to be a wizard to know that something was going wrong. Clouds of dust and mud rose up over the horizon—even from the Featherflight’s upper observation platform, he could see them. From his perspective, they reached up and touched the clouds.
As far as he knew, Pirin hadn’t gotten strong enough to make such a blast, but that didn’t mean someone wasn’t trying to kill him.
Brealtod stood on the platform beside him. The dragonfolk let out a fast chain of hisses, then clicked his tongue once.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m thinking about it,” Brealtod replied. “If Elfy makes it out, he’ll be heading right back here, and if we’re not here, he’ll be lost in Dominion territory all on his own.”
Brealtod hissed a single time. Pirin wasn’t getting out without help.
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“He has Nomad and Myraden with him.”
Again, a single hiss, but with a different timbre and a wavering pitch.
“No…I don’t entirely trust them. Least, not to save the boy. Though…out of all of them, I wonder if he’s really the one that needs saving.” Nomad shook his head. “He’s pushing himself too hard.” If he’d had the chance, he would never have let his daughter push herself as hard as Pirin was right now.
But Alyus wasn’t a father anymore.
Brealtod gave another few long hisses, and Alyus shut his eyes, considering.
The Dominion had taken everything from him, but what was new? It’d taken so much from so many people. He wasn’t any different just because they’d gotten his daughter killed.
But what if they could put an end to it?
What if he could stop Pirin from dying?
“Alright, y’big oaf.” Alyus clenched his fists and took a step back to the hatch. “Think we can get this leaky gasbag in the air with just the two of us? Like old times?”
Brealtod hissed excitedly.
“You unfurl the sails, and I’ll man the wheels! Hop to it!”
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The Red Hand swung his sword in a sideways arc toward Nomad, but Nomad caught the flat of the blade between his thumb and pointer finger. It stopped the blade in place, and he applied enough pressure to dispel the gathered Reign. The aura sloughed off the sword weakly, rendering it a bare blade again.
But the Hand wasn’t useless without Reign. He shifted his sword to the side, just slightly, then tilted it, freeing it from Nomad’s hold and slashing along the man’s palm. It drew blood, even if it was just a scratch, which was enough to send a surge of gratification through the Hand’s heart.
Then Nomad blessed him with a pulse of air, sending him sliding back a few feet along the now-muddy ground.
The Hand turned his sword over and jabbed it into the dirt to slow himself down, then flourished it and held it out to the side. He hadn’t enjoyed a fight with a wizard this much in years.
He might have fallen outside of standard advancement stages when it came to skill, but he had to admit that Nomad was stronger than any of his other opponents.
He wondered if he could kill Nomad. What would it feel like when he won?
But he also recognized sadistic glee when he felt it, and he pushed it down. He was not that sort of man. He had never been, no matter how else he had changed.
“Come back, Kovar,” Nomad said, holding his hands back. An orb of wind gathered in his hands. Claws of pale blue Essence manifested in it—claws like the raccoon-cat—doubling in size and brightness until they filled the entire orb. A circlet of Essence appeared above his head. Strands of pale blue light mixed and melded, turning into a broken halo.
The Prairie Lord’s Circlet.
The Hand raised his blade, ready to meet the technique. “As always. Preparing a finishing technique while telling someone you mean them no harm.”
Nomad scoffed. “I said nothing about ‘no harm’. If I ask you to rethink your choices while holding you at the tip of a sword, then so be it.”
“There is nothing to reconsider. My choices are the will of the Emperor.”
“And what happens when the Emperor no longer exists?” The Prairie Lord’s Circlet brightened, and wind swirled behind Nomad. The wind whistled at the right tone, chanting ancient sutras with its wavering gusts and preparing to destroy.
“You’d kill him?” The Hand tightened his grip on his sword and re-asserted his Reign over its curved blade. He was its master of everything down to its aura. He controlled how it interacted with the Eane, even if he couldn’t touch the Eane himself. “Or you’d have your disciples kill him?”
Nomad thrust his arm out, and the orb of blue light condensed into a beam. His broken halo dimmed, feeding power into the orb and maintaining a beam of energy.
The Hand held out his sword, breaking the flow like a wave crashing on a jut of rock. The blue light scoured the land on both sides of the Hand, but it never touched him. It washed away the layers of Reign over his sword, and the steel below began to glow red-hot from sheer friction. The Hand shouted, widening his stance. He would hold his ground if it was the last thing he did.
The halo faded, and the technique ended. The Hand was untouched.
“You would kill me?” the Hand demanded.
“If you believe I thought that would kill you...” Nomad tilted his head side-to-side. “I have always thought highly of you, Kovar, and you have improved even since you left.”
“Since I left?” the Hand exclaimed. “Since you threw me out and cast me aside!”
“You were too aggressive and headstrong. You needed time to mature. You needed to see the world as it is.”
“I see the world as it is, now.”
Nomad chuckled. “If you did, you would walk away from the Dominion and their so-called peaceful paradise.” He glanced over his shoulder and something, but a cloud of dust and debris obscured the land to the northeast. “Training you was one of my greatest mistakes. If you won’t give up and return to the light, then you will die—either by hand or my disciples.”
“You—”
The dust cloud parted, and the prow of an airship pierced through, its white sails billowing. The Hand recognized it immediately, but there was nothing he could do about it.
A rope dangled from the airship’s control gondola, and Nomad leapt up. He latched onto the rope with one hand, dangling as the airship passed over the estate. Nomad called, “One piece of advice! If you love your Emperor so much, beware of the Lady Neria!”
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Pirin crawled to the edge of the hole and leaned out into the night air. The moons had risen, now, and the stars beamed down on them.
From the guests’ camp to the palace, the land had been turned into a muddy wasteland reminiscent of No Man’s Land on the Elven Continent. No more grass, no more shrubs. Lowland marshes leaked out in channels, turning everything to muck.
In the distance, the two Wildflames still fought. Techniques still boomed and green flashes seared Pirin’s eyes. He blinked and rubbed them.
When he looked to the northeast, he first thought the patch of white was just an afterglow from a technique. But he blinked a few more times, refocusing his vision.
It was an airship. It was the Featherflight.