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Not from here.

They both knew it, too. Okthana’s pale eyes peeked through the gloom to meet hers here and there. Lunara flashed her fangs, spitting taunts. Neither one of them was willing to be the first to give up their advantage. And all of it became a moot point when the first screams started in the distance—not those of battle, but pain. Distress.

Lunara ducked under the swiping talons of a Forgotten, blood and smoke spraying as Faldir’s axe came down and Amal speared it to the ground, and snapped her gaze to the north.

Shitting, fucking stars.

No. No, no, no.

Thodelebor was falling apart.

Rifts were opening across the fields, chunks of the land detaching and pitching sideways as the gap widened. They crashed against the Ghostwood’s cliff edge, slipping into the chasm Brand was trying to remake, caught there like monolithic wedges. Shadows erupted like geysers from the faults, whipping out in every direction to snatch up the creatures teetering on their edges and pull them down into the new depths that were forming.

Okthana had to wait.

“Help me!” she bellowed, pointing at the nearest pocket of destruction before she misted.

Lunara knew those who were suited would follow. She grabbed a pair of Sorcerit clinging to a drop-off as the land beside it fell, depositing them further inland where it was more stable, then dove back in to the worst of it. Again, this time with a small contingent of Demons. Over and over. Back and forth. Misting everyone she found, burning the darkness wherever she went, Illamiata flaring in her chest.

Fern flitted between the reaching, obsidian arms of shadow, shrieking obscenities as she rescued scrambling people and chucked them without ceremony, Lyriat doing his best to catch and ease them down. Vann shot his vines into the soil like sutures, teeth bared as he tried to hold everything together.

Araxis appeared beside her. “The Keep at Fanghold is falling!” He disappeared again, materializing with a group about a quarter mile off before returning. “Brand has to stop!”

“I don’t know if he can.” Lunara felt how lost Brand was to his power.

“He must!”

A violent crack preceded the tumble of a rockslide, and she spun. “There!”

They both leapt for the pack of Wolflords clambering up a newly formed incline, doing their best to escape the pending fall into oblivion. It took her and Araxis multiple trips, back and forth, two each at a time, and the shadows there in that deeper crack were…something else entirely.

They reek of Night.

Fuck.

“Lunara!”

She deposited her latest pair leapt back into the air again, frantically searching for Araxis in the mayhem. His voice was muffled, too far away, and the darkness was multiplying, starting to choke out what little light the dawn was giving. Throwing out her threads, she sent them after every heartbeat in the vicinity, trying to find his among them and⁠—

There. Side by side with another, smaller one.

She followed the tandem thumping and found him clawing at the buckling rock, dangling there with a tiny Wolflord in one arm.

Sweet, weeping⁠—

A child?!

The shadows were banded around Araxis’s middle, slicing through his leather armor like it wasn’t even there. Lunara called to the moons, so fucking low they were almost kissing the western horizon, and sent their light blazing into the dark mass before misting to him.

Lunara wrenched both him and the cub into the ether, no idea where they were when she landed—only that Araxis was choking on his own blood, and his lower body was half-cleaved away.

“Don’t you dare, Araxis. Hold on.” She summoned a flask from the ether. “Brand’s blood is my blood, so take this gift. Freely given,” she said, uncorking it and shoving it into his mouth as she flooded him with power.

Damned if he didn’t cling to that child the whole time, the creature’s ears flattening when Lunara’s screams rent the surrounding battlefield.

And brought a horde of monsters down on them.

One hand on Araxis, she used the other to seize the particles of dreadbeast and Forgotten alike, hurling them away from her as she was torn apart by his injury. Her spine snapped as his had. Her flesh sundered. Organs ruptured.