Page 106 of Blood of Ancients

Arne launched icicles in his palm toward the elves staright ahead, running forward, not waiting for any call-to-arms.

I took one breathless glance at Corym’s beautiful face, silver-bright in the moonlight, and we nodded to each other.

Then we charged.

And chaos followed.

The hissing of the Dokkalfar language carried on the wind as they coordinated their defense. We had caught them flatfooted, but they were too skilled a warrior race to let themselves be surrounded or overpowered.

Plus, there were more of them than us.

Veryquickly, things took a bad turn—

Elves dashed out of the way of Grim and Sven’s charge, moving like shadows, almost as if they blipped in and out of existence. They sidestepped and swung their blades at Grim’shaunches, opening gashes of red. Sven scored a claw down the front of one elf’s armor, but only chiseled it with a nails-on-chalkboard sound that grated my ears.

Magical firebombs were tossed into the fray by Arne, switching from his ice that harmlessly shattered when it hit the first dark-elven breastplate.

The long-haired one at the front with the samurai bun noticed Corym before anyone else. The two faced off—Ljosalfar to Dokkalfar—a standoff for the ages.

While Corym was preoccupied to my immediate right, Arne to my left, I zoned in and got tunnel vision as I stared ahead at my closest foe. She was too fast for me to see, moving in the unnatural gait Corym had shown me during training.

Luckily, I was privy to Corym’s graceful movements and tactics, and this elf didn’t deviate too much from that stance.

I stabbed my spear high, keeping my distance. She ducked low, bobbing as I tipped the spearhead in a circle and lunged on my front foot. When I finished the jerky movements, I angled down to try and take her feet out from under her—

And the bitchjumped ontomy spear like a bedeviled ballerina, balancing there.

I gasped, eyes widening as her light weight sagged me forward, stumbling—

She roundhouse-kicked me in the side of the face, sending a firework of bright white ringing through my skull.

I stumbled to the side as she hopped down.

Still teetering, disoriented, I blinked and tried to right myself. Already in front of me, she bared white teeth in her midnight face, cocking her arm back to plunge a curved blade through my belly.

Smoke exploded in front of her face, which gave me the moment I needed to gain my footing and shake the daze out ofmy brain. Furrowing my brow, I attacked again, desperate and defensive.

The woman got out of the smoke cloud with a backstep, avoiding my attack.

Hands curled around her shoulders, black-gloved fingers like two spiders reaching down. She hissed and spun with a vicious elbow—

But no one was there.

Hersir Kelvar emerged from her shadowin front of me, now behind her, and he stabbed one of his daggers through the small of her back and up her spine.

The dark elf went rigid, spasming as her blade dropped to the mud and blood spewed from her mouth in a waterfall.

The dark elf having a sword-duel with Corym howled in rage, like he’d felt the woman’s death, and pressed his attack harder on my Ljosalfar mate.

I gasped at Kelvar’s martial dominance—his effectiveness on the field by using patches of darkness in the moonlight to shadowwalk. He gave me no encouragement—didn’t even look at me—as he darted off after saving my life, vanishing back into the mist.

When I saw him reappear next, it was to put a hand on one of the elves fighting Grim and Sven, placing his palm on the back of the Dokkalfar’s neck and causing him to scream in apparent, invisible agony.

The dark elf dropped his sword to put both hands to the sides of his head, Kelvar’s mindshaping stealing his memories and invoking true terror inside him.

By the time he was recovered, Sven latched dripping jaws onto his crotch, and the elf’s howl turned high-pitched. Grim finished him off with a great paw-swipe across the face, dragging gushing, bloody claw marks through his flesh.

Another dark elf approached me. To my right, Corym took a spinning blade across the calf, growling, and returned a slice in kind to his skilled opponent. Those two moved like ghostly storms, their blades blurring and clanging, brightening the sky with sparks. My elf’s silver steel glowed bright, while the dark elf’s blade shimmered with smoky blackness.

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