Page 171 of The Reckoning of Starlight

Aesar went still as Skylash’s lightning ripped through them again.

Saundyl’s shamans struck behind her, untrained hands flinging their borrowed lightning across the narrow distance. Elven officers vanished inside the charge, shields half-formed, Essence still gathering as the storm lanced through them.

Soldiers packed the crossing shoulder to shoulder with nowhere to run. Thousands kept advancing, crushing the foremost against Lykor’s line until bodies spilled sideways into the water.

Lykor seized the river the instant soldiers toppled from the bridge. The current yanked them under, flooding open mouths before they could surface.

Those who fought their way onto shore found Lykor waiting. He turned the blood in their veins to ice, killing them before their blades finished rising.

One soldier broke through the front rank. Lykor punched him flat with a spear of frost, and those surging behind trampled him before he finished dying.

They held the shore for a handful of vicious minutes. Longer than Lykor had expected.

Lightning, ice, shadow, and force raised the dead into a barricade, yet still the living climbed over them.

Then another island came down beyond the edge of Lykor’s line.

Blossom’s roots wrenched the fallen isle into the bridge, extending it farther along the bank. Stone ground against shore and Galaeryn’s soldiers flooded into the opening. The forty-three fools who’d stayed spread thinner across a shore that kept widening as Essence and steel spilled past their exposed flank.

Prismatic light cleaved the sky.

Three figures dropped through it and struck the shore hard enough to fling mud across the line.

Lykor stared at them. Relief cracked through his ribs before he could crush it. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

Serenna’s wings vanished as she straightened. One look at Skylash sent her running, mending light already blazing in her palms. The Stormstrike bared her fangs, but Serenna didn’t slow.

Lykor drove a lance of ice through an officer’s chest. Vesryn’s shadows erupted the next. Fenn’s fire rolled over a knot of soldiers and left the air stinking of charred flesh.

Lykor had watched them fly toward Rimeclaw with a Heart of Stars. Now all three stood on his shore.

His attention cut skyward.

The Aetherveil chain drifted above him in shattered tiers, islands shrouded in mist, roots dangling from broken stone while waterfalls poured into open air. He searched for the sweep of Rimeclaw’s wings, yet every gap only revealed another stretch of empty sky.

His gaze dropped to Vesryn.

The prince shook his head. Fire burst from his wing claws and slammed into an officer halfway down the bridge, hurling him burning into the river.

“The king had another Heart. Used it on Veyrix and flew south with both dragons.”

Ice crackled over Lykor’s knuckles, the cold sinking inward until even hope felt frozen solid in his gut.

Rimeclaw still chained. Veyrix taken. Blossom building the army a road while Skylash bled in the mud.

They had nothing left to win with. Nothing left except time, each minute only delaying their inevitable defeat.

Another crush of soldiers rushed across the bridge.

Skylash hammered them back with lightning while Lykor sent ice screaming behind, his shadows lashing through the gaps to obliterate whatever was left standing.

“Where’s Jassyn?” he snapped between strikes.

Vesryn fell in beside him, shadows writhing from his fists. Fenn took the other side in a whirl of fire.

“Above,” Vesryn said. “He seized the razorwing swarm. Last we saw, he was catching people falling from the islands.”

As usual, he was still spending himself on everyone else, because apparently Jassyn had never learned when enough was enough.