Page 138 of The Reckoning of Starlight

Lykor had never gone to Fenn.

Jassyn had known, perhaps since before the sun reached its zenith, though he’d refused to acknowledge it. All afternoon, he’d folded maps over it and written formations across it, because naming it meant admitting Lykor had lied and entered the mines alone.

Jassyn stared at the crater blazing at the illusion’s heart, flight paths drawn around it, wraith scouts staggered along the rim, forces committed in measured stages so every life had a path back out.

Lykor had stepped beyond them all and left his own off the count. Like Jassyn’s careful planning meant nothing.

He should’ve known from Lykor’s face that morning, from the way his jaw had ground hard enough to crack teeth. He’d tracked the illusion like a captive predator pacing the bars while Kaedryn debated formations and the rangers argued flight corridors, every added precaution tightening the cage around him.

Lykor hadn’t seen strategy. He’d seen delay.

The luminous map hovered, faithful to a plan that no longer mattered.

Lykor would’ve torn open a portal as close to the crater as he could, then flown the remaining distance. Without telling Jassyn. Without a single soul at his back.

Jassyn crossed the isle. Conversation dwindled behind him as Kaedryn broke from her guildmasters and moved to intercept him.

“Continue without me.” His voice held steady while the rest of him shook. “Koln has the updated formations. Send the wraith scouts as planned.”

His guards moved to follow. Jassyn stopped them with a lifted palm, the symmetry turning his stomach as he mirrored Lykor’s recklessness with his own.

At the island’s edge, stone surrendered to empty sky.

He hauled on the portaling talent borrowed for the war and tore a rift open. Kaedryn shouted his name, but Jassyn shifted into wings and plunged through.

The portal cast him high above the Everglow Rainforest, well north of the Drowned Spires. Opening a rift any closer would’ve announced his presence.

His stomach pitched as a gust tore through his wings, the canopy leagues below. Beastblood flooded his limbs, snatched the anger already burning, and honed the world to wind and pursuit.

Jassyn caught a current and angled south until the trees blurred.

He flew until the rainforest gave way to scrubland, his rage burning down to coals. Fear rose through the time already lost. Every hour Jassyn had spent planning was another hour Lykor had vanished deeper underground.

He drove his wings harder.

A white shimmer kindled against the setting sun. Jassyn flared his dragonsight, drawing the distance into detail.

Ships crowded the lake around the Drowned Spires, their masts bristling against the horizon. Supply barges rode low among them, hulls heavy with the makings of the king’s next campaign.

It would have to wait.

Jassyn veered east. The ground resolved into a scarred plateau, the crater carved through its center. Essence raced along switchback scaffolds as scores of soldiers streamed between platforms. Patrols fanned across the rim while others hauled bodies from the upper works and dragged supply carts aside to clear the descent.

Jassyn’s heart plunged faster than his altitude.

Whatever Lykor had found below, the king’s forces were now closing in.

Jassyn banked toward the northern rim and slipped over its crest, letting the ridge rise between him and the crater’s glow. Dusk swallowed him as he dropped along the outer slope. He struck the shale hard, loose stone skidding beneath his boots, and dispelled his wings as his palms met the earth.

He hauled on Blossom’s gift, and her power poured through his hands, sinking past soil until it snagged in the bedrock. Green tendrils drove downward from his fingertips, prying fractures through the stone as his awareness raced along their branching paths.

Jassyn pulled the earth apart around his body and drove himself into the opening. Soil and shale streamed past his shoulders like dark water around a prow, roots bracing the narrow hollow as he descended. Once he passed, they drew stone and earth closed behind him so no one could follow.

He steered the tunnel deeper, igniting illumination as darkness pressed closer with every span.

Crystal threaded the stone in veins lit from within by Essence. Dead roots lay petrified into dark arteries, fused to glasslike panels joined at angles too precise for the earth to have formed.

Jassyn sent his awareness ahead through the roots, dividing telepathy among dozens of searching tips that slipped through the narrowest fractures in the rock.