Page 138 of The Curse of Golden Blood
Solar spears, dozens of them, punched through the air where I'd been standing. I rolled aside but not fast enough. One caught my shoulder, spinning me around and sending me crashing into the balcony railing. Blood ran hot down my arm. The wound cauterized instantly from the heat, but the damage was done. My left arm hung useless.
Below, my vessels were dying.
The mortals fought with desperate courage, channeling storm magic through bodies never meant to hold it. ButSun Court warriors had centuries of experience. They carved through my forces with brutal efficiency.
We were losing. The mathematics were simple and merciless. For every Sun Court warrior that fell, I lost five vessels. Their mortal bodies couldn't sustain the magic needed for this level of combat.
Commander Theron himself descended through the chaos, wreathed in flames that turned the air around him to plasma. The Sun Court's executioner—the one who'd tried and failed to end me before—had come to finish what he'd started.
"Your pets fight well, storm lord," he called out, gesturing to the corpses littering the courtyard. "But they still die."
I pulled lightning from the clouds, shaped it into a spear of pure destruction. Threw it with everything I had.
He caught my lightning in his bare hands, fire magic transmuting electricity to harmless light.
"Did you think we came unprepared?" He landed twenty feet away, flames dancing around him like living serpents. "Ylvena knew your capabilities. Every strategy. Every strength. She prepared us for exactly this fight."
He moved faster than I thought. One moment he stood across from me, the next his fist connected with my ribs. Bones cracked, blood filled my mouth. The second strike took me in the jaw, snapping my head back. Stars exploded across my vision.
I tried to summon a tornado, to call down the storm's full fury. But his fire ate the oxygen I needed, turned the air itself hostile. My magic faltered, sputtered, failed to fully form.
His blade found my thigh, cutting deep enough to nick bone. I went down on one knee, the crown's weight suddenly unbearable. Blood pooled beneath me, too much too fast.
"The mighty Zydar," Theron sneered, raising his blade for the killing blow. "Reduced to this."
The palace walls exploded from within.
A figure emerged through the smoke and debris, and my fading vision couldn't process what I was seeing. Armor darker than night, unmarked by any court's insignia. He moved through Sun Court warriors like they were standing still, each strike precise and lethal.
Bodies fell in his wake.
He reached Theron just as the executioner's blade began its descent toward my throat. Their weapons met with a sound like breaking worlds. Fire and shadow collided, neither giving ground.
I knew that fighting style. I had learned from it, trained against it for decades.
The warrior's helmet turned slightly toward me, and through the visor I glimpsed familiar eyes. Storm-gray, like mine. Like my father's before me.
Gryven.
Theron laughed, flames dancing higher around his form. "The exiled dog returns to die with his master. How poetic."
Golden flames erupted from his skin in waves that turned the morning air into a furnace. The heat was physical weight, pressing down on everything within fifty feet. Stone began to glow red beneath his boots, melting into rivers of liquid rock that hissed and bubbled.
Gryven walked through it.
His armor drank the heat, swallowed it whole, giving nothing back. The metal was absence itself, a void shaped into plate and mail that remembered wars from before the courts existed.
Theron's first strike came wreathed in solar fire, the blade moving so fast it left afterimages burned into the air. Gryven caught it between two fingers, armored digits closing on superheated metal that should have melted through bone. Theblade shattered like winter ice, fragments spinning away to embed themselves in palace walls.
The Sun Court's executioner pulled back, conjuring twin whips of pure plasma. They wrapped around Gryven's throat, hot enough to vaporize steel, to turn flesh to ash before nerves could register pain.
Gryven grabbed both whips and pulled.
Theron flew forward, yanked off his feet by his own weapons. Gryven's knee met his face at the apex of the arc, driving through jaw and teeth with the wet crack of a butcher breaking bones for marrow. Golden blood exploded outward, painting patterns across stone that sizzled and smoked.
But Theron was three centuries old, trained by Ylvena herself. He twisted mid-fall, wings flaring to catch air, hands already weaving signs that pulled sunlight from the very atmosphere. The temperature spiked forty degrees in an instant, moisture evaporating from the air, from blood, from the surface of exposed eyes.
A miniature sun formed between his palms, compressed stellar fire that hurt to perceive even through my fading vision. He released it point-blank into Gryven's chest.
