Page 175 of Elven Shadow

The snarled shout came from close by, on the other side of the utility vehicle in front of her.

Rebecca glanced down at the troll’s lifeless body and wrinkled her nose.

Tulio wouldn’t be answering anytime soon. Or ever.

And only partially restored for now, Rebecca was still a sitting duck.

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Ablaze of sickly green magical light erupted in the darkness to cast the approaching guard’s shadow long and misshapen across the ground, and that shadow marched ever closer to Rebecca’s hiding spot.

“Dammit, Tulio,” he grumbled, footsteps whispering across the dead grass. “I swear, if you’re back there sleeping again, I’m gonna—”

He stopped when he rounded the rear of the vehicle to find Tulio lying around on the job. But Tulio wasn’t sleeping this time. His eyes were wide open, the black hole of his missing eye gaping around scar tissue as the one working orb that had once glowed orange with the troll’s inner light had become a flat, dark gray.

A reflection of the nothingness that remained inside his empty shell of a corpse.

“What the—”

Rebecca pounced from around the other side of the utility truck, her speed and strength restored enough to offer much more of an advantage over this second guard than she’d had over Tulio.

One swift upward lunge with the tip of her Bloodshadow spear, and the cry of surprise and alarm that had built within the warlock’s lungs died with a gurgling choke.

The tip of her spear pierced right up through the soft underside of his chin, skewering him through the roof of his mouth and puncturing his brain.

His eyes fluttered side to side in a twitchy oscillation before Rebecca drew on the power of her Bloodshadow magic one more time to take this second Harkennr soldier for everything he was worth.

Literally.

Her glinting silver spear strobed and pulsed in her hands as she drew out the warlock’s spark.

His eyes rolled back in his head before that spark emerged from behind the center of his forehead, his body bucking and jerking while Rebecca leaned in, opened her mouth, and inhaled the magic of his life force.

The same force that fueled all living beings, with or without magic.

But the ones with magic had so much more to offer.

While the smoky tendrils of Rebecca’s power intertwined with the glowing filaments of the warlock’s spark drawn from the center of his forehead like silken threads drawn from a spool, the warlock remained on his feet—only because Rebecca’s spear thrust up through his head propped him upright.

When she was finished, the warlock’s body collapsed in the dirt and dead grass right beside the troll’s, his wide eyes now deprived of their irises’ color, the bright whites and the black pupils now nothing but gray.

Rebecca sucked in a shuddering, trembling breath as her entire existence lit up with energy, power, vitality, life. The warmth of her Elven spark and the power of her bloodline blazed through her like liquid fire, filling her veins, muscles, sinew, bone, every cell from the inside out, until she could have sworn she was glowing.

Until she could have wielded as much power as this world’s sun, if she’d wanted.

Every single particle of her wasalive. Her magic thrummed with renewed vigor, and tears of ecstasy shimmered in her eyes.

Holy fuck.

After such an incredibly long lifetime like hers without experiencing the dulling of her own life force or any failing of her own health, physical or magical—until only a few days ago—Rebecca simply hadn’t known the vast differences between her failing body and its perfect natural state.

Not until this very moment.

She was strong enough to fell entire armies on her own. To raze civilizations to the ground or lift them higher on her own back.

She was vicious enough and vital enough to consume entire worlds if she had a mind to, and nothing in existence on either Earth or Xahar’áhsh would ever feel as good, as right, as pristinely perfect as what she felt now in the full and complete returning to herself.

It was everything she could do not to scream in joy beneath the all-pervading power surging back into her, strumming each delicate thread of her life force with the glorious power inherent in a Bloodshadow Elf like her.

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