Page 117 of Soul Forge

“Are you okay?” she asked, rushing forward while Cynthia struggled to her feet.

“I’ve had worse,” he muttered. “Stay back.”

The princess did as he asked, moving further back from the fighting but closer to that ominous archway. She reached for her Spirit, finding an answer almost immediately. Irileth brushed against her senses, reassuring her with a swell of the same freezing power she’d felt back in Riordan.

Cynthia was back on her feet, wiping a hand across her bloodied lips and flashing a red-stained grin. “My poison will make you slow,” she taunted. “Do you think you can still fight with it running through your veins? It’s been so long since you last felt it.”

“Feels like yesterday,” Sypher snapped.

“Just give me the princess, and it’ll be over,” she carried on, her tone conversational, like they were discussing the weather. “You don’t like the wielders anyway.” Her free hand settled on her hip, and she nodded in the direction of the others fighting the two wraiths. “I’ll even call off my darlings and let your friends live, too.”

He shook his head, wings flaring to shield Elda from Cynthia’s view. “You could have taken her from anywhere.”

“Of course I could. I had no trouble at all plucking the lovely Arden right out of Bratus. The wood elves barely even noticed.” She inspected her nails for a moment.

“What else is up here that you need?”

She laughed, cocking her head at him. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“So thereissomething.” His brow creased. “Elda’s not why you’re here.”

“No, but she makes an excellent consolation prize, don’t you think?” She clasped her hands together. “Lord Malakai willloveher.”

The mention of the demon lord was enough to make Elda flinch. The last thing she wanted was to be captured and carted away to Darkhold to become his plaything. A future with Horthan would have been far preferable to an eternity of torture.

“You’re not taking her anywhere.”

The witch shrugged, and Elda felt the atmosphere shift, the air seeming to darken around her. She began to worry that Cynthia was distracting him with talk so she could surprise him with an attack.

“Malakai will get his hands on her sooner or later,” she promised.

“Over my dead body,” he snarled.

Her smile was vicious. “That’s the plan, handsome.”

There was no time to dodge, no time to run. Everything happened so fast. Cynthia’s hand whipped out, and from it shot a ball of black as slick and oily as the feathers on her wraith’s back. It barrelled towards Elda, growing until it was bigger than her head, on course to splatter her across the cavern.

Instinctively, the princess raised her bow and fired. An arrow as bright as a star streaked towards the oncoming projectile before Sypher could dive in front of it. It shattered in a shower of frosty sparks, freezing Cynthia’s power until it splintered harmlessly across the worn tiles.

“What was that?” Elda asked, readying herself for another shot.

“Death magic,” he answered, raising his blade again. “She’s a necromancer. Had it hit you, it would have sapped your life and fed it into her.”A necromancer. Elda had believed them to bea myth, a story her mother told her when she was a child to frighten her into going to bed. To know they existed made her worldview shift. What other fables had her mother told her that weren’t fables at all?

Behind them, the sounds of the others battling the wraiths echoed through the cavern. There was a roar that belonged to Julian, followed by the unmistakable sizzle of Reiner’s power. Violet light reflected off the stone. Elda desperately wanted to turn around to make sure her friends were okay, but she didn’t dare to turn her back on Cynthia.

The witch let out a joyous laugh and spread her arms wide, another pulse of darkness rippling out from around her to fling Elda and Sypher off their feet. The Soul Forge landed on one of the remaining potted trees, shattering it beneath him. The princess hit the ground and rolled to a painful stop, her back and shoulders throbbing from the impact.

“How convenient for me,” the witch sighed, “that there’s so much death up here. Can you feel it?” She closed her eyes, breathing in deeply, and Elda saw a dark, cloying mist being drawn into her lungs from that shadowed archway. “So many lost souls for me to feed on.” Her hair rippled, lifted by the power flowing around and through her, and when her eyes opened, the green in them glowed.

“Shit,” Sypher muttered.

Elda watched his teeth sharpen, the red in his eyes engulfed by the abyss of his sclera. Dark veins reached outwards from his left eye, trailing across his nose and down his jaw. Vel stood. A pang of fear shook her at the sight of him – if the demon soul was willingly released, it meant they were in real danger.

“No shooting, no fighting, no getting involved,” he warned, shadows settling around him and trailing from the silken feathers of his wings. “Stay.There.” There was worry in the set of his shoulders and the tilt of his mouth, and that scared her morethan anything. His hands flexed, his brow knitting, but he raised his sword, and the shadows rose with him.

More of that dark, twisted power poured from the arch, drawn from whatever devastation lay beyond it, and Cynthia drank it in like a fine wine. A whip extended from her left hand, slick and shiny like the projectile she’d thrown towards Elda, and in her right hand her dagger ignited with sickly green flames.

How could her weapon be poisonous and control fire? Was she so powerful that there weretwoSpirits inside her vestige, or had Malakai altered her somehow? Would Vel be able to handle her at her strongest? A thousand questions fired through Elda’s thoughts, each one more panicked than the last.

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