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And then they are falling, tumbling together.

Down… down into the mouth.

CHAPTERFORTY-SEVEN

Death is a slow-flowing river, lulling his body safely downstream. Death is the soft wind, holding his wings aloft. It is the voice of Dawsyn, calling his name. It is sweet nothingness. It is easy. As easy as falling.

The falling wakes him.

Or rather, the falling wakesit. The magic. It rips and claws until he stirs, finally waking, finally seeing, finally feeling.

And he is plummeting.

Within a singular moment, many things happen at once. He hears Dawsyn’s screams, and it rouses the call of his wings. As the dark rises up to greet them and the walls of the Chasm rush past, he lets them unfurl, stretches them wide. He lets them break his free fall.

His arms reach, diving for Dawsyn, who continues to fall and fall.

Ryon roars in exertion, fighting the pull of wind on his wings. He tightens them to his body once more, and as the light of day subsides into the gloom, his arms wrap tightly around Dawsyn’s torso, then he lets loose his wings, the wind catching in their span.

He feels her ribs press painfully into his arms and prays they do not crack. He feels her heaving breath and groans in relief. He widens his wings to their fullest extent and lifts, allowing the wind to help guide them into an arc, away from the clutch of the Chasm’s belly.

He brings Dawsyn tightly into his chest, measuring her breaths against his. She is alive. By some mercy, they both are.

“You are safe, girl,” he murmurs into her ear. “I have you.” For tears have begun to soak his front and her racing breaths have turned to heaves. “It worked, malishka. I have you. I will not let you fall.”

He stays low in the Chasm, not daring to take them high enough to let the light reveal them.

“I thought you were gone,” Dawsyn says, her voice, for once, small.

Ryon’s chest clenches at the sound of her breaking, and he presses his lips into her hair. “Never. I know how you could never bear to be without me.”

She scoffs with watery laughter.

“That’s my girl,” he murmurs. He wants to stay there with her, hovering inside the mountain, their bodies whole and intertwined.

Instead, he sighs. “Are you ready?” he asks, wiping the moisture from her cheeks.

Their eyes meet, and whatever they wish to say to one another must wait. With a ferocious downward stroke, Ryon propels them higher.

From the Chasm, they soar, Ryon’s night-sky wings a beacon against the winter mountain. They rocket from the mouth, somehow more graceful than ever. He slices through the air around him and has the great pleasure of glimpsing the bewildered faces of the few Glacians who still remain along the Chasm’s edge. They cease moving at the sight of a soulless half-breed soaring over the palace, the soulless human girl in his arms. They watch him rise from his own death, gliding over the spires and turrets of the palace.

As Ryon’s voice echoes across the mountain face, the Glacians scatter. They hurtle across ice and snow to burrow back into their castle, but even from the tunnels, the bastard son of Mesrich can be heard, beckoning to the masses in the Colony, calling them to battle.

CHAPTERFORTY-EIGHT

Upon the divide between the pure village and the Colony, the Izgoi wait. A band of mutineers, a fraction of the mixed population but still an overwhelming number for the pure-bloods. Some flare their wings, others flex their talons, and the ones without either merely pace, violence heating their skin.

And then the call.

Beneath the filtered daylight, Ryon crests the Glacian palace, his wings outstretched. A shiver finds the Izgoi first, a collective knowing of what lies ahead, and then the sound of the mixed-bloods’ roar breaks the morning air apart, raising the hairs on their necks, and they lift their hoarded steel… finally.

Finally.

For centuries to come, the humans will trade accounts of how those on the Ledge could hear the almighty rumble of the Izgoi;their shared voice quaking the earth and filling the mountain with the promise of death.

As the pure-blooded Glacians funnel to the safety of the palace, sealing the portcullises behind them, the army of mixed-bloods charge over the divide for the first time, through the pure village and toward the bringer of their suffering and his entire court.

Ryon comes to land in an alley, where pure-bloods and mixed parry with swords and knives alike. His talons shred the leather of his boots away as he lands, letting Dawsyn spin out of his grasp. They run.