Chapter 108

The walls of the Jade Castle were cracking apart, its death groans rattling through the foundations of the mountain as huge lumps of it fell crashing from the ceilings and slamming into the floors.

This place had been built without consideration for a battle between Dragons taking place inside of it and the furious fight which we had found ourselves embroiled in had clearly damaged it beyond repair.

We had shifted back, my armour in place on my body and axe in hand once more. Tharix remained tight to my side when we'd scaled the last of the castle stairs and fought our way through the few remaining guards to the throne room, but now we stood in the abandoned space with no idea which way our father had run.

"The war has ended," Tharix stated, his eyes falling to the view beyond the huge window which looked out across the ruined landscape of the battlefield.

He was right. Corpses and detriment lay in every direction, fires still burning in the smouldering wreckage, but out there I could see what remained of our army celebrating, a group of ferocious looking Fae, led by my wife and her sister now closing in on the Jade Castle.

A shuddering groan broke from the walls around us, a huge chunk of the roof breaking free as the floor pitched beneath our feet.

I slammed into Tharix, knocking him aside as the boulder-sized lump of masonry came crashing down where he had just been standing.

The two of us tumbled across the floor and he looked at me in surprise a moment before the floor crumbled away beneath us.

Stone bellowed and the mountain cried out as the entire castle began to collapse, the room we were in and everything beneath it peeling away from its perch on the side of this baren cliff face and hurtling towards the ground.

A yell escaped me as I scrambled to move, Tharix grasping my arm while the Dragon in me roared with a demand to shift. But before I could, Tharix yanked me over him, my body rolling onto his back as we fell amid a landslide of jade and rock towards the ground a thousand feet below.

I threw a shield of ice over us as the roof came crashing down in full force, so close to crushing us that my heart leapt in alarm, and I caught a glimpse of The Veil waiting for us. But I hadn't survived this war just to die now.

Tharix shifted beneath me and I was tossed into the air, tumbling over the thorny spikes which lined his spine before managing to grab hold of one through pure force of will.

I threw my magic from me in a blast which boomed like an explosion, fire and ice ripping away from us in all directions, launching the debris from the collapsing castle out into the sky and opening a path to freedom.

Tharix raced for it and I shielded us again, grunting with the effort of maintaining it as rocks the size of cars rained down on us. Then the echoing boom of the castle crashing down the mountain chased us out into the sky.

A great cloud of dust billowed over us and I clung on tightly as Tharix flew through it at speed, racing towards that group of warriors who we had seen approaching across the battlefield.

Time seemed suspended within the cloud of dust and I moved myself to sit upright on my brother's back, amused to find myself riding a Dragon of all things at the end of this day of chaos.

The dust cloud cleared, sweeping up into a maelstrom of air and earth magic which stole the debris and hurled it away into the mountains. I blinked in surprise, finding the battle-worn figures of the people I loved most in this world ahead of me, my wife's hands raised, proving she had cast that magic.

We landed before them and I leapt from Tharix's back, smiling broadly as I strode their way.

"Is it done. Did you kill Lionel?" Darcy asked keenly, her eyes falling on my half-brother at my back. "And is Tharix…fighting with you now?"

"Lionel is currently trying to escape through a network of tunnels which lay hidden beneath the rubble of his castle," Gabriel answered for me, and a snarl rolled up the back of my throat.

Of course it couldn't be so simple as his ugly castle crushing the bastard.

"Then I'll go worm him out," I said, my gaze moving across my friends and my brother, taking count of them as the knot in my chest eased a little.

I turned to head back to the wreckage and found Tharix there, shifted once more and in his Fae form, that black shadow armour clinging to his frame.

"And yes to the second question," I added, nodding to him. "My other brother is one of us now too. The dead souls which were bound to him have been banished into death and he proved his loyalty in the battle."

Something in Tharix's expression shifted at those words, his lips parting slightly as his dark eyes met mine and I gave him a wry smile.

"He mentioned something about the True Queens owing him a favour – so maybe just pardoning all the shadow creep shit would cover it?"

"Oh it would, would it?" Roxy called after me.

"Yeah," I agreed but I jerked to a halt as a vine caught my arm and forced me back around to face them.

"And where do you think you're going?" my wife asked me, her bloody sword in hand as she strode closer, Darcy right behind her and the rest dogging their footsteps.

"I told you, I-"

"Thought you were the only one here interested in that hunt? Fuck you, asshole. You don't get to claim that bastard's head all for yourself – the rest of us plan on taking part in tracking him down too. We all have debts to pay back to your father."

I looked her up and down, this bloodstained, beautiful, terrifying wife of mine whose green eyes were simmering with violence.

"You are…everything, you know that?" I told her, reaching out to catch her waist as she got close enough to me, the adrenaline and intensity of battle making my pulse thrash and my need for her spike, but she just side-stepped me with a dark smile.

"Not yet we aren't," she replied, looking to Darcy who moved to stand beside her. "Not until we end this."

"Lionel has to die," Darcy agreed roughly as they gazed towards the heaped rubble which had been a castle minutes before, the jagged mountain which concealed the tunnels still standing at its back, beckoning them closer.

"You stay here," Roxy added, looking at Tharix who nodded his agreement like a good little subject, though I had to assume it bit at him to be ordered out of this fight at the last moment. "Guard the…rubble and we can talk about pardons when we hear the rest of your story."

Darcy nodded her agreement to that and the four sayer dragons fluttered over to inspect Tharix, clearly planning on remaining behind with him too. "The rest of you, follow us."

The queens strode away across the ruins of the battlefield and I fell in wordlessly behind them with Orion, Caleb, Seth, Max, Geraldine, Xavier and Gabriel. I pressed a hand to Tharix's shoulder as I passed him, exchanging a look with him which swore to end the man who had chained him, and free him just as the act would fully relinquish me.