Page 100 of Elven Crown

The second her full weight came down onto both feet, a powerful force crashed into her from behind. The searing agony of Theodil’s next attack rippled through her back and seized all her muscles, bringing a strangled scream ripping from her throat.

Her back arched. She toppled forward endlessly, drowning in the unyielding torment of what felt like being ripped open from the inside out while all the flesh was filleted first off her back, then her shoulders, then down the length of both arms.

It was too much.

Rebecca collapsed out of her run, her scream not yet having died in her throat.

“Do notstop!” Theodil bellowed before his channeler crackled again and blistered the night sky with more of his magic.

This was it. She knew now. It was definitely going to kill her.

Somehow, she forced herself out of the way again, screaming against the pain through gritted teeth and moving, moving, always moving…forever.

“You stop, you die!”

Again and again, his merciless attacks crashed toward her. Rebecca avoided each of them in turn. Every time, she knew it would be the final lethal blow, until it wasn’t.

Scrambling across the embankment at an angle, she tried to turn toward Theodil, to see where he was and take aim at him with her own magic, but he was always faster.

Every time he forced her to abandon the offensive so she could avoid being obliterated by his terrible power, just to stay alive, he enslaved her to the endless task of avoiding his destruction and his wrath.

“Are you going to spend the rest of your life running?” he roared, his voice crashing off the stone centimeters to her left before she veered away from another incoming attack, shielding her face from the volley of fractured rock spraying up at the impact. “Make a choice!”

This time, his voice blasted at her from the right and slightly behind, alerting her to the direction of his next attack.

She’d given up ages ago trying to figure out how he moved like that. The only thing that mattered now was that she had to keep moving, no matter what.

No matter where she went, how many times she dodged more violent explosions of magic and great hurtling orbs—or a volley of conjured spear points, or new magic barreling through the earth beneath her feet—Theodil never let up. He corralled her across the abandoned site of the Lashir’i Clan’s forsaken temples.

She couldn’t get away from him, and she couldn’t buy herself enough time to summon her own magic before his next attack forced her into yet another retreat.

Time ceased to exist. The pain in her body ceased to exist. Every searingly raw breath served as the background to her entire existence until she truly wondered if this was it.

If the Bloodshadow Court’s enemies, or even a proclaimed ally, had finally gotten to the old warlord priest and turned him to their own cause.

If she was now being hunted by the elf who was supposed to turn her into the hunter.

The more time that thought simmered in her scattered mind, the more likely it seemed someone else had finally overpowered Theodil’s resistance, and this was no training session.

This was the night he would betray the Bloodshadow Court in its entirety. The night he would kill her for their enemies. And no one would ever know it had been him.

That thought was so terrifying, the possibility so infuriating, it gave Rebecca the determination she’d needed to finally stop running.

The second his next electrifying bolt of crisp, neon-orange light cracked against the earth inches from her boot, Rebecca skidded to a stop and whirled to face him, already summoning the darkest parts of her own power to face the darkest parts of his.

The parts she could only assume had finally revealed themselves.

An orb of dark, mercurial-silver light erupted into being in her open palm, but she was still too slow.

She hardly saw the ravenous swirl of consuming blackness barreling toward her until it was mere inches away.

Theodil’s final attack cracked into the center of her chest like an enormous fist. The blow lifted her off her feet and tossed her backward across the shale, residual sparks of dark unlight strobing all over her convulsing body even before she hit the ground on her back with bone-crunching force.

She must have hit the ground, because nothing moved around her.

All she could see were the sparks of black unlight whipping across her vision as Theodil’s newest spell seized her in its grip. She bucked and writhed across the ground, seeing nothing but those flashing sparks, hearing nothing but her own choking gasps and the crunch of stone beneath her.

These were her last moments. Her final seconds, in this world or any other. He was going to kill her…

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