Chapter 45

45

Arwen

"And I, you," I whispered, meaning it with everything that made me.

It was the very skill Kane had noted when we'd sparred that doomed him. Thinking I'd weakened, that I'd be forced to succumb—I'd thought so myself. So, so many times. Yet once again, a well of power simmered beneath my lowest point. When I thought I had nothing left, I rose even higher.

Kane's eyes flashed once with shock and horror before he flew backward with the force of my rippling, shimmering lighte. My sunfire lighting the night like dawn.

He did not stand.

And I didn't cast more than a passing glance toward Griffin or Mari—though it nearly cracked me in half not to, I couldn't waste a moment.

I grabbed the Blade of the Sun from the snow and surged for Lazarus, held within manacles of Griffin's emerald lighte. My blade poised—

With a blast of icy wind Lazarus blew the manacles off and took off into the forest. Through frosty branches and all that howling darkness—

Heart pounding brutally inside my chest, I hurtled after him, legs pumping pleasantly, braid a drumbeat on either side of my spine. This, I knew I could best him at.

If Griffin or Mari followed, we lost them quickly. Circling through mighty trees and rolling fog and icy snow. Around boulders and dry grass. Twigs and lightning bugs and glowing pairs of eyes.

I did not want to hurt Kane, and yet I did.

I ran so fast my feet slapped along the forest floor, my mouth dry and numb as breath shuddered from it.

I did not want to leave Leigh or Ryder, and yet I did.

Until he reached a bare clearing. Rocks and moss on one side, a river across the other. Nowhere left to run. Panting like a dog.

I unsheathed my blade from my back, and it sang to me in greeting.

I do not want to die.

And yet, I will.

"You don't have to," Lazarus called to me through the night, and I was sure fear had finally crept into his voice. "It's not too late to come with me and rebuild this useless world together."

I angled my blade. "I knew you'd be scared in the end," I snarled at him. "The greatest coward of them all."

He roared with fury as his icy arrowheads flew in my direction. So many that I could only cut the Blade of the Sun through half, the rest gouging at my skin beneath my leathers, scarring the trees behind me as they hit.

My limbs shrieked with the pain.

But my body healed before I could voice the agony. Instantaneously, gaping holes in my sides and gut fused themselves. Bone rebuilt. Skin stitched closed.

The blade's power—we were one. It could not be destroyed, and neither could I.

Even as Lazarus read my mind, anticipating my every strike—as he swept my leg from underneath me and sent me careening into the ground, the skin of my knees ripping under my leathers—I swiped my blade, flung my lighte, and darted past his blows.

Sweat dripped from my brow, stinging my eyes, my arms and legs wet with blood, the torn skin rippling as I moved, flesh weaving back together. Despite the tears that welled, I hurtled toward Lazarus and swung my blade with a heaving grunt. Each blow sent gentle rays of illumination wending through the glade. Like the reflection of a hot summer sun off a clean mirror—blinding and softly radiant.

A sword of pure ice materialized in his grasp—not a broadsword, but a heavy claymore—a punishing piece of weaponry. Stronger than any I'd ever encountered as it crashed against my own. We snapped together and sprang apart, primeval ice and sacred stone twisting and flashing in utter darkness.

The force of his blow knocked me down, my knees bending against my will, my blade arcing from my hand and skittering across the snow.

Ears ringing, pain cresting so acutely—

I could barely erect a shield around me once more as his next blow landed in a tree trunk, directly where my head would have been. Still, even under my shield, the impact made my jaw ache, and I fought to stand on trembling legs.

My blade glinted in pale light, only a foot—maybe two—from me.

But Lazarus was already there, scooping it up. He swung that blade, my blade , at me until I found myself dodging back and back and back, between trees and scrambling over rocks, until my spine slammed against the bark of an oak, bones screaming with the force—and I sagged beneath my own weight.

"Strike me," I pleaded. "Do it."

Lazarus narrowed his ruthless silver eyes. He, too, was winded. "You think it'll end me? That's not what the prophecy says."

But there was a chance the blade could work both ways. And that was all I had left.

My lighte was dwindling, and my lungs stung from exertion. I could taste the blood—

My limbs ached. And my skin, everywhere, raw and fresh and new.

And he was massive and so much stronger, and a very small, scared part of me was beginning to doubt I could physically best him.

With one last furious glare, fast as a viper, he drove my own blade toward my heart—

Stopped only by my trembling, outstretched hands, wrapping around the mighty Blade of the Sun, even as it sliced easily through my flesh, blood surging into my palms and onto the steel. Even as Lazarus bore down, pushing harder, wringing an agonized shout from my lips.

But my hands were healing—healing as they ripped —fueled by the power of my weapon, even held within his grasp. And with every step Lazarus took, forcing the sword closer to my chest, I lifted the blade higher, higher, higher still until Lazarus's own proximity—that gleaming, grinning hubris—condemned him. I wrenched the weapon clean from his hands.

The Fae king's pained groan might have been the most beautiful, victorious sound I'd ever heard.

A blink of horror in those insidious silver eyes, and then he retreated.

My heart hammered. And not from fear or all the pain or the adrenaline.

But from triumph. As I knew it in my bones—I had him.

"Almost," he admitted, before fishing through his own silver armor leathers and pulling out a small, glowing glass vial.

A vial that called to me. Sang to me.

"That's mine…" I breathed, before I could even articulate the meaning of the words.

Lazarus smirked, all his teeth lit by watery silver shadows. Then he downed my lighte like a shot glass full of spirits.

I squirmed against the sight. Like bearing witness as someone ate your flesh before you. The violation rent through my entire body.

Bolstered by my own traitorous lighte, the Fae king shifted in a whirlwind. Gray, veined wings crested open, his gaping reptilian jaw snapping as he bellowed so loudly the half-frozen river cracked behind him…and he lunged up, up, up into the night.

Dread oozed in me as I watched him fly away through blurred eyesight, carried on an icy, unforgiving wind. Away from me, and this blade. Away from the Shadow Woods, away from his fate—

And the future played out for me in vivid clarity: Lazarus retreating safely back to Lumera. Defeating Hart. Building up his armies once again. Replenishing his lighte reserves. History repeating—more violence, more death—because I couldn't kill him when I'd had the chance.

A sob racked through my throat at the thoughts—at all the unnecessary loss. I watched, enraged and so depleted as the wyvern sailed easily up into the sky.

I'd come so close—

It could not end like this.

And for the first time, that tingling at my shoulder blades, that prickling sensation I'd only felt when falling, wrenched up my spine and across my back.

Come on , I begged myself. No Stones. No Gods. Just me—

Come. On.

The split second it took to shift was one of utter, agonizing pain, and I was sure I'd screamed so loud I'd severed the forest itself in two.

But then the clearing was lit in incandescent golden light. And I was breathing, and nothing hurt—

And everything was lower, smaller, as I appraised it. Every critter and owl, staring up at me in awe. Every pebble, every blade of dry grass jutting through packed snow.

And my back was heavy. So heavy, and yet weightless. Buoyed by something that had sprouted from my shoulder blades.

Wings.

I had wings .

Glorious, massive, mighty wings of gold and red and yellow. Delicate, destructive—like burning fire, or autumn leaves, or the bright colors that painted the sky at first light.

Like a firebird of myth, my wings were those of a falcon, but my body was my own. The same as it always had been as I ran one hand across my cold lips and eyelids, the other still tightly grasping the blade, which now pulsed inside my grip in time with my heartbeat. The same, though dusted in a thin layer of insulating golden feathers, shining as I moved, casting pure light into the darkness—like I was the sun.

Without another thought I took off into the night sky.

It wasn't perfectly intuitive. My arms flailed as I flapped and wove, soaring and then plummeting a bit. But flying—how grateful I was that even if these were my last few moments in this world, I'd gotten to experience flying .

Though Lazarus's wingspan was twice the size of mine, I was faster, and my feathered wings were more suited for flight than his bat-like ones. Sweeping up, I barreled into him, sending us both twisting and turning through thick, moonlit clouds and down toward the clearing from whence we'd come.

Head tipped back, he ripped his vicious fangs into my wing and I clenched my fists harder around the pommel of my blade to stave off the agony. His throat was in my eyeline now. I didn't even deflect his next blow. That claw as it came barreling toward my face, tangling in my hair, and ripping —

I allowed it. Felt his talon carve through my skin as I plunged the Blade of the Sun deep into the Fae king's outstretched neck.

And that blade—it really was a weapon of pure sunbeams.

Of dawn and air and light.

A light that bloomed forth from Lazarus's strangled moan, consuming his throat, his bared teeth, in white-hot flame. That glorious, dazzling sunfire tore through his scales, across his outstretched wings, down his flailing, barbed tail.

And for a moment, I hoped—simply wondered—if maybe the prophecy had been wrong all along. If I might watch Lazarus—this wretched, writhing wyvern consumed by flame in the deep night sky—combust like a comet. If I might flap my brand-new feathered wings and soar down to the woods below. Feel the moss and earth beneath the snow once more. Run to my family. Run to Kane—

I allowed myself to want it. To pray and wish and beg the Stones themselves to allow me to live. To please, please give me one more chance at this life.

But then the blade itself lit with sunfire—and so did I.

My chest, my throat, my face.

My ears, shattering with the noise. It was my voice, that noise. My screaming. My long, feathered hair sizzling. My eyes squeezing shut before they could melt in their sockets. My wings , burning as I flapped them frantically.

And as the blazing fire devoured me, as I could no longer feel any pain—

That childhood game my mother had taught me—the one used for quelling panic—shoved itself to the front of my deteriorating mind.

Find and focus on three things you can name.

One: Evendell. Freed of Lazarus. Safe, for my friends. My family. For all.

Two: The man I loved. His dark, unruly hair, so like his spirit. The truth that he had loved me, too, for whatever little time we'd had together.

Three: