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Even consumed with pain, Lunara fought. If Okthana was going to steal her, or worse, she was going to make it a nightmare for the bitch. There was no sense in misting away. Not when this might be their only opportunity to get hold of her.

Lunara’s stomach lurched when they changed direction, bile rising as her body seemed to free-fall through the air. Made worse when they came to a sudden, shocking stop and she was thrown, her mind twisting to the first night she’d seen the creature Okthana. To the moment when her spine had snapped and every limb was wrenched from their sockets.

Like morning fog beneath the sunstar’s searing rays, the shadows dissipated to nothing.

On her arse in the junction where three chasms met, a place Lunara had spent so many nights, Okthana stood gasping above her.

Lunara’s first real look of Brand’s abuser.

Jet black hair fell like a shroud around her, bones jutting from skin as white as the trees of the Ghostwood. For all it sat above a visage that some might find beautiful, the crown on her head was a hideous fucking insult to other rulers. It was Okthana’s scent, though, that jolted Lunara out of her stillness.

Roses thrown onto a bonfire, its cloying finish clinging to the back of her throat.

Lunara called out to Illamiata, what little power she had left rising to the surface amidst the nauseating throb of every nerve ending and the pounding in her skull.

“Please!” Okthana threw her arms out, hands pleading. “Please listen to me.”

Is she actually fucking serious?

Lunara didn’t give a starry shite.

She hissed between gritted teeth and yanked the dwindling moonlight down, but Okthana scattered before reforming a few yards away.

“You don’t understand!” The treacherous creature sent out lashing shadows to try and keep Lunara down, but they shied away before contact. “I need your help.”

“My help?” Lunara couldn’t decide between laughing and screaming. She settled for not vomiting as she struggled to stand. “Helping you…is the last thing I intend on doing. I’m going to rip your fucking head off for what you’ve done.”

“They’re dying.” She dodged the moonlit bars again, but she was flagging as much as Lunara was. “They’re all dying and I can’t stop it. But you can.”

Okthana was undoubtedly talking about her dreadbeasts, and the people hidden within them.

Lunara didn’t care.

“I need Brandir and you in order to save them.”

A red haze spilled across Lunara’s vision, rage like a wildfire in her veins. “Fortunately, I can rip your hideous fucking mouth off for daring to speak his name and save them. There’s no need for you at all.”

She called her whips from the ether, swallowing against the cold sweat and the trembling in her hands, and grew the tiniest bit—not enough to be her own Greater, but it was something. Besides, her fury could’ve torn the world apart all on its own.

Okthana’s face twisted into an ugly sneer, gaze locked on the shrunken talons Lunara fixed to her weapon of choice all those months ago, before the battle with the dreadwyrms. “You think you’re so clever, but you comprehend nothing about what’s going on around you. You think you know them, but⁠—”

Fern hit the chasm floor like a comet landing, Okthana barely escaping the shattering blow, and Lunara’s knees nearly buckled at seeing her friend. They were both hindered though, Fern’s storm magic gone without Vann or any other Fae nearby to pay the price of it, and Lunara was barely on her feet.

“Let’s fucking go, you cunting bag of pixie shit,” Fern growled at the obsidian cyclone swirling around them, backing up until she was right up against Lunara.

The shadows condensed again into Okthana on an animalistic snarl, her pale eyes burning with hatred. Until they landed on Fern and widened the barest fraction.

“You shouldn’t be here, warlord,” her low voice cracked. “This is between me and the Sorcerit.”

Fern jolted, blinking, then doubled down. “Get fucked, you drab bitch.”

She launched across the meager distance with a speed only the Fae could achieve, the boom of her mace cracking against the cliffside.

It would appear Okthana isn’t quite as weak as she first seemed.

Shite.

Okthana sidestepped the pummeling attacks and—between one blink and the next—was lifted from the ground by eight legs of inky bone that sprang from her back, jointed and clawed like a spider’s. On Fern’s next flurry, one snapped out and hurled her so fast and far down the chasm that Lunara couldn’t track it.