Page 41 of Ironhold, Trial Two

She slashes at me, in a ferocious attack aimed at my head. I bring my trident up to block it, and I’m barely in time. But it seems that first blow was only the distraction, because Naia cuts across an instant later, the blow aimed at my arm.

“No!” I cry out, as I realize what she’s doing, but I’m too late, Her hand axe slices into the leather of the cuff on my wrist. Leather that I cannot remove, but which someone else can. The device designed to contain my powers is sliced open, and it falls from my wrist in a flutter of leather to the sands.

Almost instantly, I can feel creatures around me. Not just the drake and the shadow cat, but every creature in and around the arena. It's as if my power has been straining to get out, and themoment it is able to do so it reaches out with tendrils towards every creature nearby.

I can feel the birds, and I find myself looking through all of their eyes without even intending to do it. I see the fight from a hundred different angles now, and I'm able to dodge the swing of the frost drake’s claws with ease. But my power is not just limited to the birds.

I feel everything. I feel the insects hidden in every nook and cranny. I feel the dogs fed on scraps of meat, there to keep prisoners in check in the bowels of the place. I feel the creatures of the beast pens, all of their minds roaring into me at once, so that I sense the world in so many different ways that it's impossible to keep up with them all. I see colors that I should not see, view the world through eyes that see things more rapidly than I ever could, sense the trembling movements along a web. With so much input, it's impossible for me to make sense of any of it.

I can feel myself losing control, losing all sense of who I am. This much information is enough that it might drive me mad. I can't remember where I and the and the beasts begin. I can hear someone screaming and I think it's me, but am I really that strange, small thing out there in the middle of the sands?

I can feel waves of power coming up in response to my confusion and my pain. That power wants to flow into every beast, to set an army of them tearing at everything it can find. My mind is filled with bestial thoughts, wanting to find something to devour, destroy, to fill myself with blood. I think of Rowan, and those thoughts turn to the other needs of animals. I want to find him and give myself to him. No, I want totakehim, to claim him as my own.

But Rowan is not the only one I think of. Instead, I think of Alaric. Beautiful, beautiful Alaric. My first thoughts are the same as with Rowan, but there is a flash of memory too. Of Alarictelling me that he did not fight back when his father hit him. Of Alaric showing me how he builds a version of himself to show to the world, how he stays in control of all the pain that he briefly let me see.

If Alaric can stay in control of all of that, can I somehow control this?

I force myself to focus on who I am. It means that I’m clipped by an attack from Koda, a blade cutting into my arm, but in some ways that's a good thing. The pain seems to ground me, reminding me of what is my flesh and what is outside it. I’m able to start to make that distinction, able to start to bring my consciousness back to myself, rather than splitting it between a thousand different creatures.

I try to come back to myself, and so many fragments of bestial nature try to come with me, try to become a part of me. There are vicious, deadly instincts. There are things that say that my body should take other forms, that I should have claws, or sharp teeth, or eyes that can see in the dark. A part of me knows that if I let it, my bodywillshift in response to those fragments, taking on hints of a more bestial nature.

I do not allow those fragments to take hold, though. I know who I am, and I knowwhereI am. I can feel the limits of my body again, can come back into that body without any of the things that try to follow me back in.

I am myself, and it is just in time. I am able to throw myself back from Koda’s next attack and the one after that. I do not feel fear at those attacks, only a primal need to dodge and move. But I am the one in control of it. I am the one who can pick and choose what I need when it comes to the speed and strength of the animal world. I send a call to the shadow cat, and it leaps at Koda, distracting him again.

For a second, I am alone in the middle of the Colosseum. Around me, the crowd seems to be holding its breath, silent inthe wake of the cuff being cut from my arm, as if afraid of what I might do next even as they long to see it.

The frost drake comes at me, rearing over me, and I can feel it building up to throw its icy breath my way. I can feel inside its mind now, too, feel the instincts that have been put into it, the images of those it has to hurt. It is intelligent enough to know what has been demanded of it, what it has been trained to do.

I thrust into its mind the way I might drive my trident home into flesh. I take the power I have been holding back, and I throw it at the drake, wrapping that power around it, driving it through it.

I see through its eyes. I see myself standing there, and I stop it from using its icy breath with a thought. I can feel all the agonies inflicted in training on it, all the things done to it to ensure that it would fight when it was told, and that it would not flee. I feel it, because I am one with it in that moment. I feel its heartbeat as my own, feel the strength of its muscles, feel the sharpness of its claws and its hunger.

I feel it, and in that moment, I control it.

Chapter Twenty Five

I do not care now that this is the dark side of my power, the goddess as huntress rather than protector. All that matters is that the drake and I are one.

I can feel the power of it, the anger, the fear. This huge and dangerous creature is scared of me, of my presence in its head. It knows what I am, and it knows that I am something it cannot stand against. A part of it wants to try to destroy me in order to save itself, but I do not let it.

I see through its eyes. I see Koda closing in on the shadow cat, his blade raised for an attack that I am sure will kill it. The shadow cat is already bleeding, and it doesn’t seem to be melting away into the shadows. I realize the truth, that Koda is keeping far enough away that the shadow cat can’t get to his shadow, and so can’t disappear.Koda is planning to add its fur to the others he wears, his bladed staff already poised to swipe down and finish the cat in front of him.

The need to protect the shadow cat runs through me. Some bonds run both ways. I cannot see it hurt. I will not. For a moment I am the frost drake as I open my scaly maw and I breathe a blast of ice that is colder than any winter, colder than the ice on a mountain, colder than the grasp of death.

It is cold enough to burn, cold enough to make Koda scream as it hits him. He freezes in place, quite literally, layers of ice forming over him until he might as well be a statue of a gladiator, sculpted in the act of fighting. Even under the sun of the arena, the ice hardens, layer after layer of it forming to encase him.

The drake swipes at him with its tail, and I do not command that part but must still watch it through the creature’s eyes. I must still watch as Koda topples to the ground, shattering into fragments, frozen so solid that he is brittle and vulnerable.

The horror of that makes me pull back from the frost drake, but not so much that I lose control over it completely. Instead, I'm able to give it a simple command, knowing it will obey.

“Go!”

It spreads its wings, taking to the air. Arrows flash past it, and magic, but it is not staying around to fight, or to hurt the spectators the way the wraith did. Instead my command is still ringing inside it.

Its wings beat powerfully, carrying it further and further from the Colosseum. It retreats into the sky with ice falling from it, it's breath forming freezing clouds, so that snow drops onto the arena, improbable in the heat of Aetheria. I stand there watching it go, wanting to make sure that it is not coming back as I release my control over it.

I stare at Koda and what I've just done. Pieces of him litter the sand, each frozen so that even now they are paler than marble. The shadow cat runs to my side, reminding me of why I did it as it rubs against my legs the way a normal cat might.

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