Page 120 of Slaying the Shadow Prince
She spun on her heel, facing Talemir. ‘Where are the reapers?’ she shouted, her face flecked with black and red gore. ‘We need them if this is going to work!’
‘They’ll come,’ Talemir called back, slicing across more leathery flesh and leaving Wilder to hack out its heart.
‘We can’t keep this up much longer,’ Drue warned, felling another creature.
She was right. The Naarvian forces were weakening.
Talemir took a breath and gave in to that second instinct, the one that he had fought with for so long, now an inextricable part of him. He sent another beam of obsidian power up into the sky. It pulsed above them, a dark calling card.
Everything about the battlefield intensified: the screams, the bloodshed, the terror, and suddenly, Talemir saw why…
The firstrheguld reaperappeared in the near distance, morphing from one pocket of sky to the next, obscuring itself in a black fog. The ground vibrated as it landed in the clearing of the blooms, hissing viciously, its shadows lashing out, whipping the Naarvian forces and devouring their cries of agony.
Talemir and Wilder both lunged for it, brandishing their blades, ducking and dodging its savage attacks. It swiped at them with its talons, meeting their steel with a clash of violence and despair.
Talemir’s shadows battled those of the reaper, a furious lashing of power. With each strike, Talemir knew that this wasn’t the one who had sired him, wasn’t a king of dark kings. That monster hadn’t graced them with its presence yet.
Wilder shouted as he delivered a fierce blow to the creature’s torso, black blood spurting, the creature stumbling back with a wicked hiss. Talemir raised his sword in defence, but Wilder advanced, forcing the monster into the sea of blooms, smoke rising from its leathered skin as the golden petals seared it.
The thing shrieked in agony, and Talemir noticed the almost manic grin on Wilder’s face as he plunged his sword into the monster’s chest. He knew his protégé wasn’t simply fighting wraiths, but the wraiths who’d hurt his brother so badly.
As Wilder’s blade carved out the first reaper’s heart, an outbreak of blood-curdling shrieks sounded. Wilder cast the heart aside and a dozen wraiths dropped dead, their flesh flaking from their bones, drifting into the air.
‘It’s working!’ Wilder yelled. ‘Killing the reaper brought down its kin!’
A cheer from the Naarvians exploded, their resolve renewed in the face of such hope.
Similarly heartened, Talemir released another pulse of power outwards, onyx magic thrumming from his very being, demanding to be seen, to be heard, to be felt —
Suddenly, he smelt smoke.
And in seconds, the field of sun orchids was up in flames.
A group of wraiths had turned their own burning arrows against them.
Fire roared all around. Unimaginable heat singed them all, the blaze so hot, so furious that it rushed over the land in a great wave.
‘No!’ Drue shouted as the inferno raged, swallowing their advantage, devouring their hope of survival. ‘No!’
But fire knew no master, and it ravaged the crop, the sun orchids blackening and wilting, the earth scorched beneath them.
Something rippled in the world just beyond Talemir’s reach.
A chorus of terrified shouts sounded from the burning field around him.
Three reapers crested the horizon, almost blocking out the sun entirely.
‘Talemir!’ Drue called out, her face panic-stricken.
The reapers were upon them in mere seconds, coils of darkness whipping their forces, beating them back from where they had pinned and trapped wraiths. Amid the smouldering earth, they shrieked in recognition, struggled to free themselves and go to their masters.
Cruel magic lashed at the Naarvians from above, the reapers circling.
The one at the heart of the attack… Talemir recognised it. His sire. The monster who had inflicted the curse upon him, the reaper who had made him what he was today. And now, Talemir would show it just what it had created.
Fighting back the fear, choking down his inner protests, Talemir drew himself up and spread his wings. If he wanted to meet the reapers in a fight, he had to fly. He had to face them in the clouds.
A determined caw sounded by his ear, and Terrence swept in out of nowhere, beating his wings.
