Kyen and Adeya ran out of the house and stopped on the doorstep.
Shouts and screams had joined the clanging of bells. Up and down the street, orange blazes sprang to life, wet wood hissing and smoking, as the villagers lit the pyres. Families fled for the Firstwold ruin, away from the roof-capped wreckage of the watchtower that lay blocking the gateway.
A clamor of footsteps inside the house made Kyen and Adeya turn.
Theiho and his family crowded to the doorway. They wore their shifts, and Theiho had his nightshirt tucked into his breeches. Marhei looked the color of paper while she clutched Kelleth and Sareth to her sides.
“The Firstwold ruin,” said Theiho. “Quickly!”
Adeya scooped up Sareth and hurried with Marhei after the others. Theiho ran behind them, but Kyen stopped in the middle of the street. The fleeing villagers jostled past him, unnoticed, as his eyes searched the wreckage.
The fearful murmur of the families crowding around the dome filled the air. Theiho pushed through them to get to the stone slab that served as a door to the ruin. He threw his weight against it, sliding it open. Beyond, a pillar of crystal filled with light waited, illuminating the bare interior with a soft glow. Theiho stepped back to usher the women and children inside. Adeya handed Sareth off to Marhei, but didn’t join them as they entered. She stepped aside, looking back for Kyen.
He stood alone on the street, his eyes still on the wreckage of the watchtower. His brows drew together. Near the top, almost invisible in the dark, a man’s hand waved frantically from underneath the roof. Kyen dashed forward. Sprinting to the pile of broken beams and splintered slats, he began climbing. He reached the man’s hand, shoveled away broken bits of board from around it, and thrust aside a beam. Wood clattered down the pile as he ripped an opening in the rubble. He grabbed the man’s hand and, bracing a foot against the roof, pulled. The watchman slid free.
“Are you alright?” Kyen helped him stand.
He nodded even as he grimaced, favoring one foot. “My leg.”
The wreckage jolted beneath them. They both wobbled, the man grabbing Kyen to keep his balance. The warning bell gave a muffled clank as something deep in the pile shifted. They looked at each other in alarm.
“Down! Down!” Kyen shoved the man forward.
They both scrambled away as the pile of splintered beams shifted again. It swelled underneath them, cracking, rising, and shedding the rubble. They leapt, hitting the road on hands and knees.
“Go!” Kyen pulled the watchman to his feet and tried to run, but the man’s leg buckled and he fell sprawling. Dragging him back up, Kyen drew his arm over his shoulder, and they hobbled down the street together. Boards clattered to the ground behind them, and wood cracked as a dark mass the size of Theiho’s house pushed out from underneath the watchtower.
Theiho and Adeya ran out to meet them. Together, they grabbed the watchman from Kyen and carried him towards the dome, but Kyen turned back.
His eyes grew wide.
The tower’s peak lifted out of the debris. A huge head, jaws gripping the base of the roof, emerged. The timbers and beams fell away from a fiend shaped like a giant mountain cat. It jerked its head back once, twice. The tower sank into its throat as teeth like cave spikes closed over it with a crunch. The fiend swallowed, then turned its faceless grin towards Kyen.
He whirled around and fled.
The fiend leapt from the wreckage. In two bounds it caught up to him. Kyen dodged left and right as massive paws thundered around him, passed him. The fiend spun, blocking his path to the dome, its grin widening, its tail swishing through the air.
He backed away, a grim clench to his jaw.
The fiend lunged, swiping at him, and he jumped to one side only to meet giant jaws snapping down. He stumbled backwards. Teeth cracked a hand’s breadth from his chest. Kyen tried to run. Left, right, backwards, forward, claws slammed down and teeth breezed by, driving him like a mouse between a cat’s paws. One final stamp snagged him by the cloak. The cloth ripped. The jerk sent him off balance, stumbling and falling.
Adeya, after passing the watchman into the dome, looked back. Her eyes widened as she saw him hit the ground. He rolled, looked up as the fiend’s jaws opened wide. He started to scramble backward, but the giant mouth came down, closed in around him, and snapped shut.
“Kyen!” Adeya screamed. She started forward, but Theiho grabbed her arm.
Dirt dribbling from its jaws, the fiend lifted its head. It left a hole in the road where Kyen had been. The fiend slung back its head once. And swallowed.
Adeya paled.
The giant fiend turned its grin towards her. It took one thunderous step when a flash of light slit out of the fiend’s neck. Its grin fell. The fiend’s head slid from its shoulders, hitting the ground with a thud. Its body crumpled behind with another thud that trembled through the street. Its fallen form disintegrated into smoke, leaving Kyen facedown on the road.
Adeya slung off Theiho’s grip and ran to him. He was already struggling back to his feet when she reached him. He grabbed onto her as she helped him up.
“Are you alright?”
He lifted his face, his gray eyes steely, as he shouted, “Inside! Get them inside, Theiho!”
Beside them, the giant head moved.
Adeya gasped, and Kyen pushed her behind him as they both backed away.
With the corner of its mouth, the head gnawed at the dirt. Rock crunched as its teeth worked, the fiend eating itself into a hollow. From the base of its severed neck, a black nub began to swell out.
“Run!” Kyen grabbed her hand, and they turned to flee for the dome.
Theiho was ushering the villagers inside. Men tried to press after their families, crowding around the entrance, but the dome would hold no more.
“Go!” Kyen slung Adeya onward towards the entrance. He stopped and turned.
She reached the crowd of bodies and looked back.
Kyen faced the fiend as it rose again. A new body swelled out from its neck, and fresh limbs stretched to the ground. It stood, thin and knobby, but back to its full height. It rounded on Kyen.
With a chortle so deep that it vibrated the ground, the fiend stalked forward. The grinning teeth split its face in half. Every footfall shuddered up the buildings, trembled beneath their feet, and pushed Kyen backwards up the road. The villagers, whimpering and crying, cowered together while Adeya watched with bright eyes. Her hand crept towards her amulet.
The fiend lowered its head, wiggling it back and forth. It blew a hiss through its teeth that breezed through Kyen’s hair, grabbed at his cloak, and kicked up dust around his feet.
Within the space of a blink, Kyen’s eyes transformed in color, from gray to gold. His expression hardened.
The pillar inside the dome surged with light.
A hundred white ribbons exploded to life in the air around him. Shooting forward, they lashed around the fiend, wrapping its legs, its torso, its head. The fiend balked. It strained and pulled against them, but finding itself unable to break free, it plunged forward instead. With a roar, it lashed out.
Its massive claws swiped into Kyen. The impact knocked him off his feet and slung him across the street. He tumbled over the cobblestones and, hitting the front of Theiho’s house, he fell in a heap across the doorstep. The ribbons dissolved into a haze.
“Kyen!” Adeya dashed after him. Falling to her knees next to him, she put her hands on his shoulders. “Kyen!”
He writhed on the doorstep, clutching his side and coughing. His arm lay on the ground at an awkward angle. Broken.
“Are you alright?”
Bone cracked.
“Ah!” Kyen gasped and jolted as his arm snapped straight. He curled up on himself, hissing through his teeth.
“Kyen!”
Grimacing, he pulled the healed arm underneath him and looked up, his eyes still golden, his face still grim. Adeya followed his gaze.
The fiend stepped up to the dome. The villagers trapped outside shrieked and scrambled to flee, but the fiend ignored them. It sank its teeth into the dome’s roof with a crunch. Cries from the women and children inside rang out. Bracing a claw on either side, the fiend began to pull. Cracks splintered around the perimeter of the dome.
The cries grew into screams.
The roof of the dome gave way all at once, splitting away from the base, ripped free by the massive jaws. The fiend lifted the roof into the air. The women and children inside the dome covered their heads as rocks and dust rained down. In their midst the glass pillar glowed.
The giant fiend crushed the roof in its jaws with another crunch and a shower of debris. It gulped the whole mass with a toss of its head. Its limbs swelled larger. With stone still crumbing from its teeth, the fiend grinned down at the sobbing, huddling villagers.
Throwing off Adeya’s grip, Kyen jumped back to his feet. He sprinted hard for the dome as the villagers shrieked and cowered.
The fiend drew back on itself, opened its mouth, and plunged its head into the dome. Kyen leapt in front of it, throwing his hand upwards. Light burst from the pillar with a blaze like the Arc. A thousand ribbons exploded out around Kyen like a geyser of spears. They blasted into the fiend’s chest—its snapping jaws missed the pillar by a hand’s breadth, pushed back by the onslaught. The spears of aura shredded the fiend’s body, shearing through the pieces left behind, and disintegrating the darkness in a blaze that swallowed up Kyen and the dome. With a thud, the light went out, dispersing as a shock wave of white mist that curled across the road and faded.
In its wake stood Kyen, hands still upraised, chest heaving from breathlessness. Nothing remained of the fiend.
The pillar stood as it had before. Its soft, gentle glow touched the women and children as they raised their heads; on the faces of the villagers who peered out between the houses; on Adeya at Theiho’s doorstep; on Kyen. He stood before the dome’s threshold, his gold eyes so brilliant, it was as if they were lit from behind. He lowered his arms. In the space of a blink, the color flickered out, the sternness emptied out of his face, and his stormy gray eyes returned.