Page 88 of The Shadowbound and the False God

Yalde hissed. For the first time, his confidence wavered. His grip faltered, then tightened again. The cold steel bit deeper into her throat.

Aisling kept still in his grasp and watched those flames leap towards them. She could feel every bit of Kael in the energy they emanated; every chaotic, riotous thing he carried inside him. Seren wasn’t just magic, itwasKael: raw and real and truer than the shadows that had ruled him for so long. In losing control, he was seizing it back. His power responded to Yalde’s darkness not only with defiance, but with utter devastation.

Aisling braced for pain as the blaze engulfed her, but none came. Though the light had swallowed her whole, it was tame and delicate against her skin. It was not so for Yalde. He fell away from her, his shrieks piercing and otherworldly. In a final, desperate bid for dominance, he sent his shadows in droves to push back against the flames. They swirled together, the light fighting the dark, both sides gaining and losing ground in equal measure. It was breathtaking to behold in the most nightmarish way, and it wasn’t until the obsidian ribbons began to wither under the touch of those heatless flames that Aisling was able to tear her eyes from the battle and find Kael once more.

She crawled towards him. The jagged stones that dug into her palms were nothing compared to the sharp sting of Yalde’s last remaining shadows as they lashed out, still attempting to reach their former vessel. Aisling kept her body between them, shielding Kael. They carved thin lines into her exposed skin and seemed to lick up the blood that spilled from each new wound.It hardly mattered; she was singularly focused. She had to get to him.

“Kael.” Aisling reached out both hands and took his face in them gently. His pale eyes—unfocused and wild and burning with something she’d never seen there before—locked onto hers. She swept her thumbs over his cheekbones, doing her very best to keep herself steady for him, to anchor him in the crossroads with her and ease him back from the precipice his rage had driven him to.

Yalde’s howling cries faded, almost indistinguishable now beneath the rush of magic around them. It was loud, a constant whooshing gale more akin to a hurricane than flames. Yalde’s shadows, too, had faded—only a few filaments still fought against the light, but they were vaporous now, their once-defined edges hazy.

“Enough, Kael,” she soothed. “That’s enough.”

A harsh shudder raced through him at the sound of her voice and the softness of her touch. The panic in his eyes waned, just slightly. Just enough that Aisling felt she could shut her own. She leaned closer and pressed her forehead to his.

Calm. Calm.

It was easier to tame, the Seren magic. More responsive than his shadows had ever been—like it craved her affinity’s quieting comfort, welcoming it rather than simply submitting to it. The flames igniting the crossroads continued to burn, but the raw power of them was tempered as Kael’s breathing slowed.

“Ash!” Rodney called out to her from somewhere to their right. He sounded relieved, if shaken, but uninjured. Aisling didn’t raise her head to look, still keeping that contact with Kael. She needed it just as much as he did.

“Aisling!” Raif this time: sharper, more commanding. An order. Aisling looked up and squinted to peer through the flames.

Elowas was coming undone.

The forest twisted in on itself, warping and wavering as reflections in a rippling pool. In some places, the realm simply ceased to be, unraveling and dissolving bit by bit until nothing remained but gaping darkness. Overhead, the stars slipped free of their celestial moorings and slid from the sky.Like sprinkles melting off an ice cream cone. She imagined a galaxy melting in her hand, rivulets of stardust dripping between her fingers. The idle thought came to Aisling unbidden, utterly absurd in the face of the destruction. It nearly made her smile.

Where the stars struck ground, great booming peals resonated that sounded at once both perilously close and infinitely distant. Craters erupted in their wake, and the force of their impact splintered the earth with sprawling fractures. Fissures yawned wider and wider; jagged chasms split open the landscape.

Without Yalde propping it up, the broken realm was collapsing in on itself.

Then, beneath the cacophony, another sound. Those thunderous crashes took on a different, more rhythmic cadence, pounding closer and closer and faster and faster. She realized then that it was not the falling of stars, nor the ground giving way, but hoofbeats.

At the edge of the distorting forest, Fenian waited with tiny Sudryl astride his hindquarters. She looked fierce—and fiercely annoyed.

A half-brained plan, indeed.

Gratitude swelled in Aisling’s chest, and with a gentle squeeze of his hand she lent the overflow to Kael. That Sudryl would abandon the safety of the Enclave to come for them was a kindness she’d never expected.

Rodney and Raif were at her side, lifting both her and Kael to stand. White flames still smoldered at their feet, curling around their ankles in flickering, harmless spirals. They banked arounda dark mass lying at the heart of the crossroads: a crumpled heap of heavy brocade, draped over a vaguely body-shaped silhouette. No more shadows crawled from Yalde, his vile, ruthless magic having been devoured entirely by Seren’s fire. Even as Rodney tugged on her arm, Aisling dared a long look at the god’s contorted body.

In death—or whatever it was that befell a deity in the end—he was hardly any more frightening than the fading echo of a nightmare upon waking.

“Move!” Fenian barked. His hooves stamped anxiously and he snapped a long whip back and forth. The ball at its end skittered across the ground.

“A bit of patience!” Raif shot back. Despite half-dragging the better part of Kael’s weight, the soldier still ran faster than Aisling and Rodney both. She could scarcely move two steps without twisting around to look over her shoulder, ensuring Yalde remained an unmoving heap on the ground. Rodney yanked on her hand and finally, Aisling turned her back on the false god for good.

Kael’s brilliant fire followed them as the group ran through the forest, dipping around deforming trees and dodging those dark, empty spaces that were expanding between. Shrill keening resonated all around them; had Rodney not kept a tight grip on her hand, Aisling would have covered her ears. Rodney’s own twitched and turned, at once both attempting to track the sound as they moved and flinching away from it.

Another shriek from overhead, and Aisling looked up in time to see one of those spindly, haunting gwyllion vanishing from its perch on a twisted branch. The aneiydh were being swallowed into the collapsing realm. She hoped they’d find peace once they were no longer trapped here. Having spent an entire afterlife being hunted down for sport and sustenance, the beings whose souls had been taken to Elowas might finally be free.

“This isn’t the way to the Enclave!” Rodney shouted. Gripping a low section of Fenian’s mane, Sudryl turned on his broad hindquarters to glare at them.

“I would not bring you back there; you have all been disruptive enough.” There was no real malice beneath the barb, though. A furtive smirk tugged at the alseid’s lips before she fully righted herself, and Aisling noticed the way she couldn’t keep herself from glancing down awe-struck at the flames keeping pace with Fenian’s galloping hooves.

They were fading, ebbing and shrinking slowly, slowly as Kael regained his composure and footing. By the time he was able to move without Raif’s support, however unsteady, the fire had died out entirely. Aisling missed its light when it was gone, and missed the way it felt in her chest and in her veins as her affinity had been so eagerly answered. Still, she continued to pour her calm and her strength into Kael, willing him to take it.

They were forced to slow once they reached the black sand plain. It swallowed their steps, dragging at their boots and stealing their momentum. Wind howled across the barren stretch and lifted swirls of the dark sand into the air. It moved strangely, not always in keeping with the air’s current, but with a purpose of its own: slithering, stalking, watching.

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