Page 74

74

N YX CROUCHED WITH Daal in the cave, well away from its mouth. He had wrapped her hand using a scrap of his riding leather, a piece already ripped loose by a mankra claw, then tied it with a strip of bandage. Blood still seeped, and pain ached up her arm, even behind her squinted eyes.

“Should we worry about poison?” Daal asked, inspecting his work. “From the bite?”

“I… I don’t know, but as thickly as the wound bled and as quickly as my finger had been ripped off, if there was any venom, it likely washed out.”

At this moment, she almost wished for poison to swoon her away—from her pain, from her failure, from the doom that the torn finger represented.

She stared out into the glassy grotto.

No longer bolstered by her bridle-song, the fiery beacon thrashed wildly, ravaged by the powerful screams of the ravening horde. Her beacon had only lasted this long due to the fire she had fed into it from Daal, the last golden ember of Khagar.

But even that support would soon die.

Khagar’s golden glow barely showed any longer. The beauty was pillaged and tormented, consumed and polluted. It now raged with an emerald fire all its own, transformed into a beacon of madness.

Nyx despaired. All that the mankrae once had been—the brave guardians of these lands—had been torn apart, extinguishing their preserved memory for all time, never to be recovered.

Some trace of gold still shone in Daal, but it was a mere whisper, only enough to return some strength to him.

“More wraiths keep coming,” Daal whispered, trying to keep their presence hidden. “Hundreds by now. We can’t risk escaping with Bashaliia and Pyllar through that throng. We’ll have to wait for the ember to fade and for them to return to their nests.”

She sighed. “As long as the beacon burns, calling to their madness, they’ll keep coming.”

“Like moths to a torch.”

“Only these moths aren’t burning up. They’re growing stronger, feeding on the madness, then screaming to stoke that ember even hotter. This cycle keeps drawing in more and more of their kind.”

Through her bridle-sharp sight, she knew this to be true.

The golden heart of Khagar, tormented into an emerald madness, had only grown fiercer as it was corrupted. The poisonous taint spread like wildfire through the gathering mankrae, touching one heart, then leaping to another and another.

An emerald storm raged out there, whirling faster, drawing even more to the flame. The glass of the grotto’s walls reflected it all back, as if amplifying it.

She had to turn aside, unable to bear it any longer. But it was not just despair that forced her to look away—but desire. She could not deny a poisonous appeal, the raw seduction of what burned out in the grotto.

She remembered when last she had raged with emerald fire. Out in the Frozen Wastes, under icy stars, staring down a Hálendiian battle barge. But another remembered it, too. Deep down, something dark stirred within the ravenous pit inside her. It responded to the storm outside. It did not care where that fire came from, or what hue it took, only that it must be possessed.

She pushed her chin to her shoulder, refusing to stare into that poisonous maelstrom. She recognized another was at risk. She looked toward Bashaliia. Her brother shone with a gold warmth.

He pined softly at her, noting her attention and distress.

Still, she read the emerald flares at the edges of Bashaliia’s glow, a residual taint from the Spider’s corruption that had refused to burn fully away. His golden heart held that madness at bay most times. But with the storm at their door, that emerald fire had stoked into a corona around his golden core.

“We must not stay here,” she mumbled.

“We can’t leave,” Daal reminded her, shifting closer but not daring to touch her.

She fought against reaching to him, of pulling him to her, but she feared losing control. She risked a glance back to the grotto’s poisonous maelstrom.

Not even a glint of gold shone out there.

All of the bronze queen’s efforts, the millennia spent to preserve hope, the long sleep of a brave king…

All gone, fed into that maelstrom.

Nyx stiffened with an abrupt realization. It clenched her whole body. Even her wounded hand. Pain shot up her arm, flaring into her heart—as did certainty.

She suddenly recognized what raged out there.

“Wyldstrom,” she murmured.

Daal turned to her.

Nyx nodded to the raging inferno, to a strength amplified by madness. “That must be what the Dr?shra was trying to tell me. Wyldstrom. A storm born of madness, birthed from the golden core of Khagar.” Nyx turned to Daal. “This may not be failure. But hope.”

“How can you be sure? And how is this hope?”

Nyx was not certain, but her mind spun, as fast as the whirlwind in the grotto. “I think the Dr?shra feared this outcome but knew it was inevitable. Only she could not bring herself to do what needed to be done. Even if she had been able to wield a depth of bridle-song like me—to forge a beacon to draw the mankrae—she did not have the heart to lose Khagar, nor the will to allow his golden core to be corrupted. She could never make that sacrifice, not after so many millennia together.”

Nyx closed her eyes, trying to fathom that stretch of time, to see the desert slowly change beyond these caverns. The Dr?shra must have witnessed the eventual corruption of the mankrae, watching as grief turned to anger, loss into madness. A ravening that grew ever more powerful, enough to be a weapon against an old enemy.

Earlier, when Nyx and Daal were attacked, she had wondered herself if the madness had made them stronger.

Is that what the Dr?shra had witnessed over these countless millennia?

As Nyx spun across that span of time, she wondered what else might have changed as a result of those powerful screams. Had those anguished cries altered the land itself? She considered the crystalline chimes of the ?rgos, the debilitating blasts of the p?rde horns. Was the desert echoing back that millennia-old scream of loss and pain of its former guardians?

She could not know.

Daal asked the question that needed answering. “What do we do?”

Nyx whispered the answer, hearing again the words of the Dr?shra. “Be the wyldstrom. ”

Daal looked at her.

She kept her gaze on the grotto. “I must go out there.”

“Nyx, that’s certain madness.”

She nodded. “It is exactly that—and I must carry it out to the world.” She turned to the golden heart shining behind her. “But I’m not going alone. I’ll be bringing my own Khagar.”

Daal followed her gaze and flinched. “Bashaliia? They’ll ravage his spirit, corrupt him as surely as they did the golden ember.”

“I must risk it. I must be harder than bronze, to do what the Dr?shra could not. To use Khagar’s essence to corrupt his flock, then use their strength like a whip, to drive it to her will.”

“And you can?”

“Too much is at stake not to try.”

“Nyx… you’ll destroy the mankrae, possibly Bashaliia, too.”

Though she remained silent, she let him see how far she was willing to go.

His eyes widened. His face took on a wounded look, as if seeing her for the first time, recognizing how hard and callous she could be if necessary. Even their communing had not prepared him for this. The golden shine of her bridle-song had blinded him to the darker shadow hiding behind it.

Now he saw it.

Her buried self had been forged in grief and loss as surely as the mankrae. There was fury, some madness, all compounded by the weight of responsibility—whether by prophecy or circumstance, it did not matter.

She had to accept it.

And so did he.

She turned from his pained look and faced the maelstrom. The buried part of her understood the dark song being sung out there.

In the Frozen Wastes, she had fought the Spider, burned the taint from a poisoned colony to make them pure. She stared now into the wyldstrom outside and knew the extremes she must reach, the cruelties she must aspire to.

She knew what she had to do now.

I must become the Spider.