Page 206 of Bane of the Wild Hunt

“Very well, Spawn. If you care so little for this world, then we have no choice but to risk destroying it for you.”

And then everythingexploded. My magic was erupting out of me, and then it was scalded so hot that it seemed to hollow me out. The darkness all bled out of me, and it felt like my insides had been torn out. My ears were ringing, but my perception of sound gradually came back as blood began to roll down my upper lip.

“Rian!” The first thing I heard was Sage shouting.

Go, was all that I could think at him as I hit my knees.Keep running,I commanded all of them.

That cabin flashed into my mind. I saw the familiar kitchen, bright and filled with bundles of drying herbs, and the dark-haired woman stood at the stove with her back to me. The scent of cooking food permeated the air, and one of her fair-haired children stood next to her on a wooden stool to watch her mother.

I felt hands on my shoulders that jolted me out of the vision as Ciaran tried to drag me to safety before a cold air blasted, and I felt him thrown away from me.

I was choking on blood. I had not realized until it came pouring out of my mouth and dribbled over my chin.

An elf was standing right in front of me now with their shimmering robes flecked with my green blood.

They hissed at me in pure disgust.

“You were stronger than we thought you to be, Scrios. But you were not strong enough.”

And then they held their palm open to me as if to show me something. An orb of Light.

I did not understand until they grabbed my shoulder, burning me even through my armour, and drove that fist with the ball of starlight straight into my chest. I could vaguely hear people screaming, but all I could focus on was the sensation of my insides being flayed apart.

“Burn away now, Shadow,” the elf sneered at me as they stepped back from me.

Magic filled the air. I could feel all my riders trying to defend me, but none of it was a match for this power.

GO!I screamed at them. But they would not.

I turned my attention inward, trying in vain to find a scrap of shadow to shield myself from the blaze of a star burning me upfrom the inside. My hands tore at my own flesh in an attempt to claw it out of me so that I could find a way to protect them.

Then I heard Ornella screaming. Screaming like her world was cleaving, and I did not need to look to know that the elves had taken Sage.

I roared out the pain and rage, lifting my bleary eyes to see my cousin dragged behind one of them like he was nothing. Like he was less than nothing. Vines and tree roots erupted out of the ground, desperately grabbing onto him to try and stop them from taking him, but they all snapped. Sage’s own inferno of flames were smothered as if they were utterly insignificant.

The elf took him, walking straight into a light that flared briefly, and then dimmed.

Gone. He wasgone.

I realized one of the elves was still standing in front of me and watching me. Waiting, I supposed, for their Light to kill me, and keeping my brothers away until it did.

“You are just as tenacious as your ancestors.”

“You will die for taking him,” I managed to choke out, my blood spraying on their shimmering robes again.

“I cannot die. But I would not say the same for you.”

I became aware of Ornella utterly unravelling behind me with screams that sounded of such a breaking that it would rend the world faster than my shadows. Her magic raged wildly, the sky dark and wrathful as wind and hail battered griffins and fey alike. Thunder roared and bolts of lightning stabbed so rapidly and viciously at the earth that it set the forest on fire around us. Any trees that had escaped my magic were writhing around the clearing that I’d made like her anguish had become their own.

But powerful as the dryad princess was, all of it railed uselessly against the shield of Light that the elf had cast around me to prevent my being rescued.

And then, in her grief, while she was grabbing onto every ounce of magic inside her to throw at the Sylvan, she stumbled upon something unexpected.

“Impossible,” hissed the elf standing in front of me a second before a bright light burst out of the dryad. It was almost as bright as the one that eradicated my shadows, but this one was not directed at me.

I heard a shrill keening, like water whistling, and when I was able to look up, I saw that she had finally blasted through the shield around me. Obliterating it until it was nothing but a shimmer of Stardust floating in the air.

The elf was shocked, trembling in either rage or fear, before Ornella turned her whole attention on them with her mate’s Light igniting in the veins of her arms. And she screamed so loudly and furiously that it seemed to shake the earth as she imploded in Light again.

---