‘You should have surrendered when I gave you the chance.’
I spat out a mouthful of blood and teeth. ‘You’re an abomination. I’d sooner die.’
‘And die you shall,’ he said, squatting down next to me, his scent choking me with its strange ripeness. ‘But in case you had not noticed, death is not the end, not anymore.’
‘You’re playing with forces you cannot understand.’ The numbness was fading from my broken leg, giving way to a rising tide of pain that would soon drown me.
‘How sad that here at the end, you still don’t understand that power is all that matters.’
‘I will never serve you.’ If he would only stray a little closer, my claws could reach his throat. I had nothing else to offer. I tried to shift my weight but stopped when a bolt of white hot pain shot erupted from my leg, stealing the thoughts from my head and reducing my vision to shades of grey.
He was smiling as I sagged back. ‘You already serve me, and you will continue to do so.’
I looked at the grey leather wound around his staff and the milky veins that bound it.
‘Do you recognise it? You seemed so upset after I cut it from your wing.’
I felt something fall into place within my mind. I remembered the pain and confusion I’d felt, waking in the prison he’d built for me, my wings hacked by knives and saws and hanging in bloody tatters. That’s why he could resist my magic, and why it felt like his was weaving into mine; he was channelling it all through my own skin. Skin that his foul magic was keeping alive. Fighting him with magic was like fighting myself, only I was feeding him with it.
‘I see that you do.’
The veins swelled and I felt myself being rolled onto my back as if by a giant hand, one that didn’t care how my cracked bones shifted and made me scream in agony. He stood and loomed over me.
‘I don’t need your body, not all of it. Perhaps I’ll carve a staff from your bones and bind your soul to it. You shall serve me forever. Master and servant.’ His eyes began to glow as he gathered his power once more. ‘I shall rule this world forever.’
Blood red light arced from the staff and pierced me like the claws of a giant hand, lifting me into the air and pinning me against the wall, the impact lost amidst the sharp agony of my broken bones sawing into my flesh. I could feel those unearthly claws pressing inward, filling my own veins with ice.
I knew there was something I had to do, but my thoughts were slipping away from me as the coldness spread deeper into my pierced chest. A voice in my mind was whispering to me, promising me peace if I would only stop fighting, that it was all for nothing. All for nothing. I felt my body jerk as Navar sent another bolt of his bloody energy through it, pushing the claws deeper, but I hardly felt this new pain.
‘Die, damn you.’
Stratus Firesky.
I forced my eyes open and my head back to stare at Navar. He was saying something, but I couldn’t discern the words.
Stratus Firesky. My scream became a gasp as my name was whispered into my ear, the draconic syllables reverberating deep within me. The fog that had gathered at the edges of my vision thinned and I drew a breath as the world around me swam back into focus again. Navar was talking at me, his staff alive with coruscating power, but I wasn’t listening to him.
It was Anakhara. It was impossible, but there was no mistaking it. It was her voice. Was she waiting for me? I tried to call to her, but my mouth was full of my own blood and all I could do was cough it out. Navar raised his staff, his power flowing through my stolen flesh as he fed more power into the spell that was sucking the life from me and replacing it with something other. My flesh.
I spat more blood and forced myself to take a deeper breath. An idea took shape in my mind, as fragile as a butterfly caught in a tempest, and I threw everything I had left within me into nurturing it. Pain and ice pressed in from all sides as Navar sensed the shift within me, and I screamed as his magic burrowed deeper into my being, sapping my remaining strength, threatening to force the idea back into a darkness it would never again rise from.
It was a hopeless battle. He had a nearly unlimited supply of power at his disposal and I could feel the weight of it descending upon me. I sucked in a desperate breath so that I could say her name once more before I died, but before I could mouth it I felt the focus of his power shift, the unending stream of it faltering. Like a drowning creature seeing the surface, I thrashed against its grip, kicking and clawing with that last mote of life, surging upwards, desperate for one last breath.
The glare of his magic was almost blinding as I forced my eyes open. I was still pressed against the wall by a writhing mass of pale energy, but he had turned away for a moment, distracted by a smaller figure. I squinted against the glimmering light and saw light reflecting off steel as the figure darted forward. Lucien? Navar swatted him aside, sending him and his sword spinning away, end over end.
I reached within and grasped the idea in protective hands, breathing life into it as I would a dying ember. I felt a change within me as it grew and lit a new warmth inside me, blunting the frozen claws of Navar’s power. I drew a deeper breath as the cold within me eased, then another. I could feel my broken bones scraping against one another, the torn flesh around them shifting. Knitting.
Navar’s power flexed anew and I was thrown across the clearing to tumble across the frozen ground and smash into the wall. It hurt, but I had suffered worse. I gritted my teeth and, with a groan that became a growl as strength found me once more, I pulled myself to my feet. My newly knit legs shook like those of a newborn gazelle, but by the stars, they held.
‘Enough games!’ Navar shouted. ‘Die.’
He raised the staff and a dozen bolts materialised in the air around him, each as long as an arrow and gleaming with the unbridled power of his killing magic. He lowered the staff and they flashed forward as one, each burning as hot as the sun and as sharp as a fractured diamond.
They broke against my skin, hissing into nothingness like rain upon a fire.
‘Impossible!’ He screamed the word loud enough to shake a storm of condensation from the roof of the cavern. ‘I command you to die!’
Another dozen bolts rose and sped towards me, and once again they shattered against my skin. I extended my fighting spikes and bared the jagged mass of my teeth as I limped towards him.
He uttered a string of guttural words and loosed a pulsating beam of violet light at me. There was nothing I could do but close my eyes and trust the fragile construct that I held so carefully in my mind. His triumphant shout died as the light faded and I walked forward again, my hide blistered and smoking.
‘No!’
His hubris and pre-occupation with loosing such powerful magics was a fatal combination. I was unsteady on my legs, but I was still moving forward while he stood there, unmoving.
‘Anakhara!’ I bellowed her name at him as I leaped forward, both arms punching towards him for additional momentum. I felt my leg crack anew under the sudden pressure, but by then it was too late.
He staggered back, but my arms were long, even without the black talons that added another third to their overall length. The same black talons that now pierced his chest like twin spears.
My falling weight bore him to the ground, the impact driving my talons through the rest of him so that I felt the tips grind into the stone floor beneath us. I threw my head back and roared as loudly as this body would allow me to while he screamed and flailed beneath me. I bent forward and buried my teeth in his face, gouging grooves in his bones and bursting his right eye beneath before I ripped my head to the side, tearing most of his face away. He shrieked, the sound barely human.
He tried to swat at me with his staff, but it was a feeble effort, and I spat his own face back at him in reply. He lost control of his bowels when I leaned forward and gnashed my teeth together, and in that moment more than any other I knew that he was just a man. A man who had forgotten that I knew the sound of his magic, and who had bound his magic to my flesh.
I put my mouth next to his ear and whispered his mistake to him. I gave him a few heartbeats to understand, then ripped my talons out of his chest in a spray of ruby blood. He rolled into a foetal position, coughing blood and trying to clutch at his wounds with arms that quaked and shivered. I took my time preparing the fire I would end him with, savouring the spectacle of his agony.
Once I felt the pressure building at the back of my throat I pinned his shoulders to the floor and vomited my fire bile over the length of his body. I had been nurturing it for some time, constantly regurgitating the rocks I had taken from Fronsac’s alchemist, leaching every ounce of the minerals from them. It was still a weak and diluted mix, and so took far longer than I remembered to ignite, giving him some time to realise what was about to happen.
‘No!’ He clutched at me with claw like hands. ‘I’ll tell you where she is! Don’t!’
I stared at him, but whatever hope either of us felt in that moment was lost as the bile finally ignited, sheathing him in yellow flame. I hunkered over him as he screamed and thrashed, holding him down as the fire gained strength and burned downwards, the flames flaring up anew as the fats beneath his skin ignited. I drew in the scent of his death like the sweetest incense and laughed as his soul went to whatever Hel awaited it.
Navar was dead.