Page 99 of Elven Crown

A bitter growl echoed from below, following her along the path.

“How many times must I drill it into you?” Theodil seethed, his voice cracking against the ruins’ stone walls as if she were in a cavern and not outside beneath the open stars. “You willneversurvive this way! You’re not fast enough!”

A bolt of orange-brown light zipped through the air toward Rebecca’s head, and she weaved in her path along the top of the stone wall to avoid getting blasted in the side of the head.

But her next step came down off balance along a patch of glistening moss, made even slipperier by yesterday’s fresh rainfall. She went down, her arms flailing desperately to help her regain her balance, and tipped two inches too far in the wrong direction.

An especially powerful blast of electrifying blue energy crashed into the center of her chest at full force and sent her flying backward along the top of the wall.

Rebecca scrambled for purchase on the slippery stone lining this part of the ruins, but she just kept sliding. There was too much moss, too much water, too many attacks firing at her at once.

She fell from the highest ramparts of the old Lashir’i ruins, the world spinning around her as she toppled to the first level below her, then glanced off the edge of another building’s crumbling roof.

She rolled to catch herself, missed the ledge, and fell again by another twenty feet. Her hip hit the steep decline of rocky shale catching her fall with an agonizing lack of cushion.

Then she was sliding down the embankment, shards of crumbled rock digging through her clothes and leather armor, dust and bits of dry weeds spilling into her mouth and nostrils, the churning world around her blinding her to everything else.

When she finally slid to a stop at the base of a minor landslide, she couldn’t help but wonder if this was it. If this was the night Theodil finally killed her because she was too inefficient. Too weak. Too slow to withstand his tutelage the way she was meant to. The way everyone believed she could.

Everyone but Rebecca.

Pain flashed through her body in one constant, blinding scream of nerve endings and delayed shock response.

“You stop, you die!”

She tried to push herself up, but the loose shale beneath her gave way again, and she crashed back down on top of it.

She had to hurry. She had to keep moving. But she also had to pay attention.

She had to be smart about it. Keep the panic at bay. Ignore the pain. Acknowledge threats from all sides.

Her pulse pounded in her ears, each beat counting down the remaining seconds until the moment she was sure Theodil would finish her for good.

Finally, somehow, she gained her footing on the unsteady, tumbling slope just in time to see the strobing deep-purple light like an indigo sunset careening toward her through the darkness, crackling and sparking as it hissed its way ever closer.

Rebecca dove to the side, barely avoiding the crash of that magical attack that would have taken her head clean off her shoulders if she hadn’t moved.

But the movement sent her skidding down the rest of the embankment on all the loose stone. She lost her footing again and her balance.

The next thing she saw from where she lay on her back was the terrifying figure looming closer with each panicked heartbeat. Theodil, his eyes wide and glowing with furious light, wild and chaotic beneath the storm of his power.

His limbs hardly moved as he approached, more floating than walking, while the channeler’s staff in his hand burst with multicolored sparks of crippling magic he intended to use.

He was furious with her, and now she would pay the price.

“You stop, you die!”

The first burst of blinding silver light at point-blank range exploded from the end of Theodil’s channeler. The same second, Rebecca forced her pummeled body to roll aside.

The blast crunched into the loose shale on her right as she rolled to the left. Stone cracked and crunched beneath the assault, breaking and splintering to pepper her from head to toe with tiny spears of rock.

Still, she kept rolling.

Again and again, the attacks followed her in an endless onslaught, just missing their target by mere slivers every time. Until Rebecca knew she had to get up, to get back to her feet, or this would all be over.

She moved quickly out of her roll down the loose stones, finding purchase with her hands to push herself up even as she kept rolling to avoid the next blast.

But none of it was fast enough. She was never fast enough.

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