Page 203 of The Reckoning of Starlight

Lykor warped before the nearest finished raising her shield, Aesar still sharing control of their limbs. They reappeared at her side, and Lykor drove a spike of ice through her spine. Darkness swallowed them again as her body struck the crystal.

The second soldier wheeled toward the frost streaming in their wake.

Aesar struck first, knocking the soldier’s blade wide with one glaive. Lykor whipped shadows through the opening. Rending shredded the attacker’s ribs before his torso detonated, a scream blown apart with blood and teeth.

Aesar already had the glaive turning when Lykor warped again.

They materialized behind the third soldier in a rush of frost and steel. Lykor speared ice through his knees as Aesar’s glaive flashed in a silver arc. Steel sheared through the collarbone, chest, and heart.

The remaining two broke formation as blood struck the ground in a steaming sheet.

One lunged for their left side, rending writhing in both fists. Aesar spun inside the strike, letting the soldier’s own momentum drag his neck across the glaive. Steel bit to the spine. Blood fanned free. Lykor seized it midair, froze the spray into crimson needles, and launched them through the fifth soldier’s eyes.

Five bodies fell around them before the first had finished dying.

Jassyn stood exactly where Lykor had left him, face tilted toward Blossom, every muscle locked, the Heart blazing in his fist. At his boots, moss crept across the crystal, reaching toward the dragon.

A portal tore open behind him.

Too close to Jassyn.

Lykor warped.

They reappeared between Jassyn and the rift as Centarya’s wielders surged through, steel raised and rending coiled around their fists. Aesar trapped the first strike between crossed glaives. Lykor skewered the soldier’s throat with a shard of ice.

The next threw himself sideways.

Lykor’s shadows crashed outward, punching through his skull.

Aesar reversed a glaive and ripped it upward through another soldier, splitting him from hip to sternum, gore slapping the crystal beside Jassyn’s boots.

Lykor bared his fangs and hurled a tide of darkness into the portal’s mouth. Shadow crushed inward from every edge until the rift buckled, convulsed, and imploded.

A bolt of force struck the flat edge of a glaive, the impact jolting through their arms. Aesar yielded to the blow, twisting their body with it. The glaive whipped around and ripped across the nearest soldier’s gut.

“Another portal,” Aesar warned as a new rift opened across the platform.

Fifty paces. Jassyn remained at the edge of Lykor’s vision. Near enough to guard. Lykor cast a shield around Jassyn. Violet Essence locked into place, frost branching across its surface until the shield glinted like the crystal underfoot.

Spread across the platform, Centarya’s wielders focused on Jassyn. Force and rending struck the ward in scattered bursts, light flashing with every blow. Lykor kept Essence flowing into the shield, sealing each fracture before it could spread, every impact drawing from his Well.

It had to hold.

They warped to the portal, before another wave of soldiers could spill though. Anyone crossing it would have to survive them.

The first wielder appeared and Aesar took his head. Lykor froze the second’s lungs before her boots cleared the rift. The third managed half a scream before shadows knifed beneath his jaw and flung him backward into the soldiers crowding behind.

More poured through. Too many angles. Too many hands channeling Essence, every attack reaching past him for the still figure fifty paces away.

Crossing the rift to butcher them at the source would leave Jassyn undefended.

Fine.

Lykor cast a web of shadows in front of the opening, every writhing tendril waiting for whatever came through.

The next wielder crossed the threshold at a run and made it one stride before he struck the wall of darkness. Flesh and armor burst, his feet stumbling through one last step as the rest of him erupted.

The soldiers kept coming. One after another, they hit the waiting trap and died. Blood slicked the crystal while pieces of armor and flesh piled across the mouth of the rift, the dead beginning to dam the opening.