Page 208 of The Reckoning of Starlight

Above, Skylash turned on Veyrix with everything she had left.

Lightning carved across the Zephyrfang’s chest in a blinding fork. Veyrix spiraled, wings flaring wide as he plunged through smoke and drifting ash.

Jassyn sensed the earth shudder, a foreign pull lurching through the flooded ground. He followed it outward and found the same wrongness everywhere.

Lake spray arrested midair. Instead of falling, droplets gathered, froze, and sharpened into spears that launched toward the fliers overhead. A druid cast fire across the shore, but halfway to its mark, the flames veered off course and streaked toward a passing dracovae.

Skylash discharged another bolt. Violet light split the clouds, then sheared toward their ridge.

Lykor blurred at Jassyn’s side, clamping a hand around his arm.

The world ripped sideways.

Pressure crushed Jassyn’s ribs. Smoke, mud, lightning, and sky collapsed into nothing. Then the world slammed back around him, his boots striking the ground hard enough to jar his knees.

Jassyn staggered into Lykor behind a slab of broken earth. Fewer than a hundred paces away, Blossom stood in the shallows, shoulders bunched against the strain of wrestling Rimeclaw.

The stolen lightning struck the ridge they’d abandoned. Stone exploded in a violet flash, hurling splintered rocks along the slope.

“The shamans are close,” Jassyn breathed.

“I noticed,” Lykor muttered.

Fire swept toward them in a low volley. Lykor snapped one arm up. Frost raced over his talons and sheeted outward, rising into a jagged wall as the flames struck.

Heat and ice collided with a shriek, scalding steam bursting around them.

Jassyn traced the pull through the earth to the stretch of shore the humans had abandoned. Twenty shamans held the ground between them and Blossom, their attention divided between the sky and the fighting along the shore.

At their center stood Bhreena.

Lykor went wraith-still.

Jassyn snatched his wrist before that stillness turned into violence.

“She sold Blossom to the king,” Lykor growled. “For all we know, she slit Daeryn’s throat herself.”

Daeryn.

A son Jassyn had never claimed or dared to call his own because the breeding contracts had made sire into a sentence before it could become a gift.

His grip tightened around Lykor’s wrist. “I know what she did.”

Lykor’s voice went flat. “Then she dies.”

Jassyn hated how quickly his mind could justify it. The battlefield gave him every argument he needed. They’d avenge Daeryn, make Bhreena answer for what she’d done to Blossom, and leave the shamans without their leader.

Static needled across Jassyn’s skin.

He reached for the current too late. Lightning fell.

The charge erased the shore, lashing heat across his face.

Lykor’s arm locked around him and the world tore sideways, smoke and water vanishing.

The battlefield slammed back around Jassyn as they emerged from the warp. His boots struck flooded earth, pitching him behind the gutted remains of a supply wagon while Lykor planted himself between him and the shamans.

A scythe of ice arced over the splintered frame and shattered into needles aimed at their cover.