32 - REAL PAIN
The operative reappeared, a ghostly presence stalking through the battle, akin to a shark’s fin breaking the sea's surface. He moved too quickly for me to follow. He wore a pair of gauntlets, and from each gauntlet protruded two black talons, each a foot long, each sharpened to a razor’s edge.
“Justinia!” I cried out a warning.
But Justinia had already seen him, was pivoting in his direction, fearless, unstoppable. I glanced over my shoulder. The Thorns had taken the walls and groups of them were jogging toward us, eager to join in the battle. I saw Gavriel amongst them, broadsword resting against one shoulder so casually that I immediately knew he’d been a soldier in a former life. He flashed me a grin.
When I turned back around, Justinia and the operative were fighting.
They were matched when it came to speed, and almost immediately, it seemed to me that Justinia was better. Her strength and aggression were pushing the operative back, wrong-footing him. Triumph swelled within me. Once he was down, we could push hard and fast, get into the Tower itself, and escape.
Then he vanished.
And reappeared a second later behind Justinia, talons already slicing across her back.
Justinia cried out, stumbled. The operative once again blinked out of existence and this time, when he returned, he was in front of it, driving a gauntlet up toward her gut in an impaling strike.
Somehow, Justinia twisted out of the way just in time to avoid having her intestines skewered—but the talons still sunk into her flesh, scraping across her ribs. She gritted her teeth. Pain written across her expression.
I ran toward her.
Like the Sun Knights, the operative was protected from my power. Protected even more than they had been. His aura was a dense, miasmic cloud of crackling power, reminding me of the blinding light when the Autarch had briefly appeared during the blood games. I couldn’t get to him—not directly.
Instead, I shattered the arm of a nearby Guard, and then I forced his femur out of his body, peeling the bone, sharpening it almost instantly into a point.
I shot it toward the operative like an arrow.
He spun, talons flashing, and smashed it out of the air.
That was fine. A part of me had been expecting it.
And now I was close. Close enough to throw myself at him.
I was no fighter. I didn’t know how to throw a punch or take someone down. I’d gotten into a few fights with the other boys on the Withered Isles, but those were childish tussles, the flailing of the youth.
This was not a child. It was an operative of the Seeking Hand, one of the Autarch’s scalpels.
He saw me coming, and didn’t even bother protecting himself. In his eyes, I wasn’t a threat, wasn’t a priority—not when Justinia was still alive and clutching her axes, not when the two warriors were circling each other in a dance of death. Any mistake or distraction could be lethal.
I would be a distraction.
I tackled the operative.
I had a single moment to reflect upon the move. It was actually funny. I was a necromancer, not a brawler. I had no clue what I was doing and felt that to anyone watching, I must’ve looked comical. It even seemed as though the operative hesitated, perhaps so shocked by the foolishness of what I’d just done that he couldn’t quite believe it. But then he did react, and he reacted by whirling around abruptly and punching me in the stomach.
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His talons tore straight through me.
Ah. True pain.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. What had I been expecting?
The outcome seemed so obvious. I felt that I actually deserved this.
Sometimes, however, when one has a destiny, or at least feels as though one does, it is difficult to truly believe that death is a real possibility.
The operative shook his head as though mourning such a pointless death. He went to pull the talons out.
I wrapped myself around them, locking them in place. He snarled, tried again to rip them out, now with real urgency—
And Justinia’s ax cracked into the back of his skull, splitting it like a dry log.
Tiny fragments of skull and brain flew through the air. I watched them as though in slow motion.
I was on the ground. I didn’t remember falling. My guts cramped. A lethal blow? It felt like it, and the edges of my vision were darkening. Dead. I was dead.
The Void awaited, and not for the first time.
“Idiot,” Justinia hissed. “You absolute idiot. Why did you do that?”
“You were losing,” I croaked out. “I…didn’t want you to lose.”
“I would’ve found a way. And now you…” she stared, aghast, at my tunic, now so black with blood. “Can you…fix it? With your magic?”
I smiled sadly. “Necromancy is the magic of death, not life. I…cannot do anything about it.”
More Thorns were racing around us, cutting down the Guard. But there were shouts from far behind, near the eastern gate; Autarchy reinforcements had arrived. Quicker than we’d expected. But then, if the Autarchy was one thing, it was efficient and well-organized.
We had to move. If we didn’t move, we were done.
Well. The others were done. For me, I feared it made no difference at all.
And I hadn’t been lying when I’d told Felice that death didn’t scare me. It didn’t.
But something else did: the thought that now, no one could stop the Autarch.
That Marak would live forever, he and his immortals ruling over all of creation. Cruel. Tyrannical. Intent on turning themselves into gods.
So, it wasn’t death that scared me.
It was failure.
Justinia gritted her teeth. “Fucking fool. I’m your protector—not the other way around.” And then she bent down and scooped me off of the ground, holding me in her arms. As tall as I was, as heavy, she didn’t seem to struggle at all.
“Justinia,” I said, voice weak. “Just put me down, okay? Nothing you can do about this. Run. Get through that portal.”
“And then what?” She snapped. “Stupid fucking plan. Stupid fucking boy. We’re all dead now.”
She was probably right about that. Sorrow wrapped around my heart and squeezed it. I looked around in search of Felice and found her just as she smoothly reached into her cloak, pulled out a knife, and threw it. I followed the blade’s path with my eyes, watched as it slammed into the face of a Guard with pinpoint accuracy. Camillan had said that she was a devil with a knife. He hadn’t been wrong.
Forgotten gods, but I didn’t want her to die. She deserved better than that. She deserved peace.
I had brought ruin to all of them.
The corpses I’d reanimated had all collapsed when the operative had stabbed me, my lapse in concentration resulting in their return to the natural state of the dead. Camillan and several of the Thorns had reached the front doors of the Tower itself and were fighting a battle within the mouth of the compound. Felice was heading that way, and now Justinia was too, still holding me in her arms.
The air felt strangely heavy. Thick. Hard to move through, and hard to breathe.
Reality does not like magic. Hates it, in fact. Magic is not natural. It defies the universe, bends it, warps it into strange shapes. That is why, in the presence of magic, the world starts to behave strangely, as though allergic to sorcery.
My ears started to ring. My hair stood on end.
“I can walk,” I grunted out. “Justinia, put me down.”
Reluctantly, she did. Once I was standing, an arrow flying past me, corpses at my feet, blood everywhere, I looked back, toward the eastern gate.
A figure was descending from the sky.
Clad in blinding, golden armor, and falling like a meteorite.
The Autarch had arrived.