Page 89 of A Flame of the Phoenix (An Heir Comes to Rise #6)

CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

Faythe

F aythe Ashfyre had come for the one enemy to end all. Her heart had turned black, decaying in the wake of Jakon’s death, and all she knew was that his sacrifice could be traced back to here.

Dakodas was the most cunning of them all. At least, the Spirit of Death believed she was, and she appeared so as the last one standing.

That is until Faythe arrived.

She didn’t have any words, only vengeance, as she clashed power with Dakodas the moment she landed on the battlefield, and the two of them became a devastating blur of darkness and light.

Faythe clutched the Ruin Dagger, using it to build her power to contend with Dakodas. She was still aware of the innocents, her people, fighting on this battlefield.

So when Faythe got close enough that all it took was one reach, touching Dakodas, to drag them through Shadowporting, but Dakodas fought her for control within the void they traveled through, Faythe lost the power struggle within the shadows that answered the Spirit of Death over her.

While Dakodas landed effortlessly, it was like Faythe had been spat out. Her body rolled against the harsh ground, but she caught herself, pushing to her feet in the same breath.

Faythe didn’t know how this battle would end, but after all she’d lost, if she had to go down in this fight, she was taking Dakodas with her.

“Your fight is futile, Faythe Ashfyre. There is no weapon that can kill me now—you made sure of that,” Dakodas taunted.

They circled each other, charging with tension.

“I’ll admit, it’s impressive how you’ve been the true driving force of this war. For centuries, you let Marvellas believe it was all her.”

“You killed my sister, didn’t you? I no longer feel her heavy, insufferable plague in this world.”

“You never cared for her at all.”

“I am a Goddess. I do not attach sentiments that serve no purpose to my duty.”

“How is this your duty? You are annihilating an entire species. Favoring another.”

“No—you are. You send all these fae and humans to their slaughter in resistance to my new order.”

“To keep humans as blood sources and fae as slaves.”

“That is your narrative, your viewpoint, not mine. The one with the will to make the harshest judgments for the most efficient and powerful order will always be viewed as the villain. I am at peace with that.”

There was no reasoning with an unfeeling monster. Faythe wasn’t trying to change her mind, only buying time to recharge her magick. Even with the Ruin Dagger, Dakodas was too powerful an opponent, and Faythe was struggling.

She just had to get close enough…tap into the source of Aurialis’s power that still lived deep within her, but for all her crimes, it was like it refused to open up to her.

A loud cry pierced the sky, and Faythe’s head whipped around, believing she had to have mistaken the Phoenix call.

She hadn’t.

Red Firebirds, perhaps a dozen of them, flew in a formation that painted a blazing horizon, heading their way.

Her heart beat full for the first time, in complete awe of the Phoenixes that flew over the battlefield, aiding their side.

Livia had made it across the sea…and it was true that the Firebirds lived on in Salenhaven. In all her grief and tiredness, it was truly a gift to watch history return in both the aid from their faraway western neighboring continent, and in the triumphant inferno of Phoenixfyre that lit up against the darkest hour.

In Faythe’s distraction, she was vulnerable.

The attack of darkness that hit Faythe stole the air from her lungs and removed her from gravity until she slammed into something hard and fell to the ground.

The shadows animated before she could roll off her back, and they began flooding into her body.

The shadows surged down her throat, slithering like snakes through her ears, and her nose too. Her body arched off the ground. She could hardly feel with the force that was burning, but not like any flame she knew, and all she could think of was Shadowfyre . Darkness that scorched icily, expanding within her. Faythe silently screamed at an agony so overwhelming it took her from that realm entirely, placing her in an endless void of torture that only begged for death.

Death.

Death.

It was all she craved with the tiny slices over every internal organ that spilled blood freely, over and over.

In her misery, it broke only by small notes that kept her wanting to fight it.

Sapphire. Silver. Him.

Her losses made her want to let go. Maybe she would get to be with Jakon and Marlowe again and leave this world behind, like a nightmare they’d all escaped together.

Sapphire. Silver. Him.

Reylan was a light bright enough for her to want to stay despite the desolation. That kept her fighting to stay in a world that kept hurting .

Faythe thought she felt him, but her consciousness was hanging on by a thread.

In the depth of the shadows that devoured her internally, a sun burst to life. Faythe threw all her fading energy toward it, reaching back for it to pull her to the surface as the only way to survive.

The last essence of Aurialis was her only hope.

She touched it, then gripped it, allowing it to cast away the darkness, replacing the shadows with pure blazing light through her veins.

“Stay with me.” Reylan’s beautiful voice cut through her drifting mind, offering a thread for her to reach for and stay grounded through the raging vessel of power she became.

Faythe blinked at the night sky before she pushed up, coughing violently through her throat, which felt filled with ash and smoke.

Faythe clung to the warmth and safety that wrapped around her body, but panic thrummed in her chest.

Dakodas was here. Reylan was in danger.

That thought forced her back to full awareness until she found his deep blue eyes searching hers.

“Always,” she whispered.

His brow flinched, and Faythe jerked at the sound of clashing power like wind and lightning.

Faythe stood slowly with Reylan’s aid, and she couldn’t believe what she saw.

Tauria and Zaiana were fighting Dakodas with an onslaught of wind and lightning. Nik rushed over to her, assessing her from head to toe.

“Sorry we took so long,” Nik said, breathless and with a crooked smile. His eyes kept darting back to Tauria.

Faythe reached toward him, touching his cheek.

She wasn’t alone. Never alone. Faythe still had friends in this world who looked out for her as much as she did for them, and she couldn’t stop fighting to win.

“Let’s end this,” she said, and Nik’s expression firmed to one of pure determination.

“Together,” he said.

Faythe leaned off Reylan, exchanging a pained, fearful look, but they didn’t need any words.

“I think I know what I need to do,” Faythe said.

Reylan nodded, fierce but terrified.

That was all the time they got before they were pulled apart by the demand of their enemy pushing back against their friends.

Nik attacked with a bow on Tauria’s right, while Reylan transformed into a large white lion on Zaiana’s left. The four of them kept Dakodas’s focus on defending herself.

Faythe held her palms out, giving herself over to the Ruin Dagger, which lay discarded. She didn’t need the blade itself, only the amplifier that turned the touch of sun within her into a blazing core. Her golden tattoos lit up brighter than ever before. Her mind drifted away, retreating to allow the last piece of the Goddess of the Sun to take over…and end her sister once and for all.

Aurialis flooded her mind, and Faythe had to trust the Spirit.

“You figured it out,” Aurialis said to her thoughts, which Faythe was only a bystander to now.

“Will you really sacrifice the last piece of yourself for this?” Faythe asked.

Aurialis had control of her body now. When she’d broken the Death Ruin and watched Aurialis turn to smoke in a vision, Faythe had thought she’d lost the Spirit of Life then too. But while Faythe still lived, Aurialis could never truly die when her power was used to bring Faythe back. Just for this moment.

Aurialis said, “Will you?”

Once they pushed Aurialis’s power into Dakodas, Faythe had long accepted that she would die without the Spirit’s essence sustaining her anymore.

“It was all borrowed time, wasn’t it?”

Faythe Ashfyre braced, ready to make her final stance.

Aurialis said, “I wish it didn’t have to be.”

Faythe looked at Reylan, but he wasn’t there anymore. Not attacking Dakodas’s front like Nik, Tauria, and Zaiana.

“Me too,” she whispered.

Faythe ran. Her Phoenix wings cast out, shooting her into the air as she flipped over her friends. As Faythe reached for Dakodas, the Spirit called on a plume of shadow that engulfed her. Faythe fell into the smoke and would have been under the shadow attack again, but Aurialis’s power formed a sphere around her. The light pushed out, and the shadows hissed, dissipating to reveal Dakodas in all her fury.

“Your band of saviors is nothing to me,” she hissed.

Reylan, in his lion form, growled menacingly beside her. Faythe braced, but more darkness caught her eye—more so at the sight of the flesh stepping through several walls of darkness across the mountain fringe. Dakodas had brought some of her army to fight with her. Some hissed––savage dark fae. Others came running with war cries toward her friends.

The masses kept flooding through. Faythe gritted her teeth as the numbers quickly overwhelmed Nik, Tauria, and Zaiana.

“I have to distract her focus so she can’t keep those shadow portals open,” Faythe said to Reylan. “They need your help.”

He roared, a sound of anguish and rage, but he lunged away from her even though it strained their bond to be separated.

Faythe honed her focus on solely Dakodas.

Her palm charged with light as Dakodas summoned shadow. When they raised their hands to each other, the force of magick that expelled from them both blast across the mountain. Faythe strained with the velocity of the attack until Aurialis took over. She shifted her stance, seeing nothing but golden light lashing in front of her, pushing against the darkness. Their collision of power shook the mountain and rattled the stars—a catastrophe that wailed with no victory, only destruction.

With everything she had, Faythe pushed hard enough to sever the dark, and her flare of light struck Dakodas. Using Shadowporting, Faythe appeared in front of Dakodas.

“Where’s your ally?” Faythe taunted. Wrath and vengeance rolled off her as she paced, watching Dakodas peel herself off the ground. Her voice trembled with so much grief as she yelled. “Mordecai has left you, hasn’t he? That’s the difference between you and me. My friends do not falter and fear in the face of our enemies. Their loyalty does not waver for selfish ambition. We are one. We will fight as one and fall as one if that is our fate.”

Dakodas used the wall as an aid to stand, and Faythe drove her blade through her stomach with a battle cry. She forced her arm to steady its hold on Lumarias. Dakodas’s hands wrapped around the blade in her gut. Her head slumped.

Hot tears rolled down Faythe’s face. She was so lost in her anger, in her mourning, that all she knew was violence. It kept growing even though she knew it would never bring back her two lost human friends.

The sound to reel her back in was chilling laughter. Dakodas was laughing .

“Did you really think you could beat me this easily?”

A chill broke over Faythe’s skin when Dakodas lifted her head and those onyx eyes gleamed.

“The difference between you and me…is that I don’t need anyone to fight my battles.”

Dakodas’s palm slapped the wall behind her, and a noise as powerful as thunder boomed. Faythe lost her balance when the rock beneath her feet shifted, releasing her hold on Lumarias. Her stomach flipped when her back didn’t slam to the ground—she kept falling.

Dakodas had torn through the mountain deep enough to carve a chasm Faythe plummeted down. The sound of splitting stone and crashing rocks consumed her, and she tried desperately to summon wings, but she was flailing and falling too chaotically.

The shrill cry of a bird cut through the thunder, and Faythe caught sight of embers—only…she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Not until the black Phoenix caught her, and Faythe twisted, gripping fistfuls of feathers and swinging her leg to mount it as the giant bird ascended to take them out of the chasm.

“You did it,” Faythe breathed, realizing it was Izaiah who’d saved her.

She couldn’t wrap her head around how he’d managed to take this form. All she could feel was gratitude for his help and relief he was alive.

They soared out of the scar in the mountain, and Faythe leaned over to survey the battlefield. The dire sight made her heart pound faster. Dakodas’s destruction continued to spread. The sides of the mountain fell away slab by slab, breaking off in an avalanche of rocks, crushing the people below. It didn’t matter that Dakodas’s forces were being slaughtered if her friends were among the blood-and-stone burial.

“We have to get them out of there!” Faythe cried to Izaiah. She scanned the devastation frantically but couldn’t see any of them.

She reached within herself for her bond to Reylan, seeking him out the easiest. Then she saw him, shifted back to fae. He was fighting an onslaught of Dakodas’s army alongside Nik and Tauria. To her horror, Faythe watched a large slab near the peak of the mountain to their right break off.

Izaiah circled around, and Faythe adjusted her position, summoning her Phoenixfyre wings.

“Rise the dead, Izaiah,” she said—then she leapt off him.

She cut through the air as a stroke of flame, gathering her magick in the only way she could think of to stop the falling lethal rock. Faythe conjured fire.

When she was close enough, she released a blue flame with the force of all she was. It surged out of her like a God’s breath as she suspended herself in the air. Her veins flooded with heat. Her golden tattoos flared so bright she became a piece of the sun. Her rays broke through the overcast gray sky her world had suffered, melting the snowfall before coming close.

She didn’t know if fire would be enough to forge the falling rock back into the mountain, but she had to try. Without anything to cool it, she might only create a worse descent of molten rock that would fall when she released her magick.

Faythe’s body trembled. Her skin was on fire. She had to let go, but she couldn’t see if her friends were safely out of the way.

Then a wash of coolness battered into her fire just as Faythe let go. She watched in amazement as a colossal wave of water surged up the mountainside, but Faythe didn’t have access to Waterwielding anymore.

She looked down to see Nerida, and Faythe’s chest burst with pride. Nerida wasn’t alone. Four others stood around her, their palms braced like hers, helping to command the flow that saved them all. Faythe recognized some of them from Lakelaria—they’d crossed the sea at the call of their queen.

Faythe descended, letting go of her Phoenixfyre and almost doubling over, but she pushed through the burning ache of her body to search the battlefield for Reylan.

Behind her, Izaiah’s distinctive cry rattled through the fringe. She winced, curling into herself, when a blast of Shadowfyre ripped through the air, curving around her to swallow the masses of enemy forces. Faythe’s eyes struck a fallen body, a dark fae, with thrumming anticipation. Was the legend about their breath true?

Its limbs twitched after the Shadowfyre dispersed, and Faythe watched with grim fascination as the dead lifted itself off the ground, animated in stiff, horrifying movements. It looked right at her, and Faythe’s magick became a dying wick, but she prepared herself to tap into it. With a second cry from Izaiah, the dead dark fae snapped its head in an unnatural way toward the opposing side. Then it took off in a frantic, terrifying run.

She spied many more racing in the same manner, and when she saw them launch into the enemy sides, she found Nik and Tauria relieved of their relentless fighting as Izaiah’s army of the dead plowed through the front lines.

A sharp tug within her silenced her world.

Faythe’s gaze instinctively swung toward the direction she’d felt it. Felt him .

Without missing a beat, Faythe sprinted, leaping over rocks, twisting through bodies. Occasionally, her magick cast out to eliminate anything in her way.

When Faythe rounded a giant rock, she skidded to a stop.

Dakodas was restraining Reylan on his knees, a hand gripped in his hair, pulling his head back, a blade already embedded dangerously in his throat. One second was all it would take for her to kill him. If Faythe so much as blinked, she might miss it. She noticed blood trickling down the sides of his mouth.

“He’s not a royal by blood, but he’s one of the chosen. Strength,” Dakodas said. Her black eyes drifted up, and Faythe looked too…at the full moon. “I think he’ll survive Transition just fine.”

“No!”

Faythe’s eyes flew wide, and she lunged as Dakodas’s hand moved to kill him. She raced time, knowing it laughed with every feeble step she took.

Though it wasn’t Faythe who screamed. It was Dakodas. The blade clattered to the ground, and Faythe beheld the manacle Reylan had managed to secure. Her other hand released his hair, and her face twisted with such frightening wrath that Faythe braced for her attack.

It never came.

“Now!” Zaiana yelled. Having dropped from the skies, the dark fae secured the second Aetherbond around Dakodas’s raised wrist.

Faythe’s adrenaline roared to life at the opportunity as the Aetherbonds fully nullified Dakodas’s magick. All at once, the power of a God flooded through her, and Faythe let it become her for what she had to do. To save the world. To save her friends, she had to do this.

Summoning the force of the sun inside her, Faythe’s palms thrust against Dakodas’s chest, and both of them detonated .

Waves of otherworldly power blasted through the mountains as Faythe drained every piece of Aurialis’s power into Dakodas. It incinerated the darkness, torching the very fibers of what made Dakodas.

The light cancels the dark.

Marvellas had given her this idea to eradicate Dakodas when she’d told them of her plans to place the Light Ruin into the Temple of Darkness. Then, before she died…Marvellas had made sure Faythe understood it was possible.

Gods were prideful creatures—Death had told her that. Despite all Marvellas’s wrongdoings and losing, she hadn’t wanted Dakodas to triumph either after her betrayal.

Through the light and gales of wind, she saw Reylan as if Dakodas no longer existed between them.

“In every realm,” she said to him.

Devastation stole his expression. Tears stood in his eyes.

“And every time,” he answered.

He reached for her and when their hands clasped, Faythe’s power climbed to a new pinnacle before she plummeted. The life drained out of her as Dakodas’s skin started to crack. Piercing rays of light broke through. With a cry to defy Gods, Faythe pushed all she had one last time and felt something in her snap.

She lost her connection to Dakodas, falling back and not knowing what came next. Faythe didn’t feel the ground nor any of the excruciating pain that had torn through her body at wielding that velocity of power.

Faythe was floating or flying—she couldn’t be sure. Her body was weightless and her mind content.

Hands touched hers, returning a sense of gravity with a pull. Faythe opened her eyes, which she didn’t even realize were closed, and at who she saw she broke out in a sob.

“Marlowe,” Faythe croaked.

She really was dead then. She had to be, but this was a gift with that miserable fact.

Marlowe smiled, floating with her in this void of white and misty silver. Her blonde hair weaved around her porcelain face, and those light blue eyes showered her with a love she didn’t deserve.

“I’ve missed you,” Faythe said, pushing to drift closer until she could pull her friend into an embrace.

“I’ve missed you too,” Marlowe said gently. Her hug was so soft. It was peace.

“I’m so glad my death brought me back to you.”

Marlowe smiled when they pulled away. Faythe didn’t feel when it happened, but she was distracted by a compulsion to look down, wiggling her toes through fresh grass now.

Surveying their new surroundings, she realized they were in the Eternal Woods. A bubble of humor grew inside her. She hadn’t escaped a fate tied to this place in the afterlife after all. It didn’t matter. If this was where Marlowe’s spirit now roamed, it was exactly where Faythe wanted to be too.

“Reylan knows what to do after your sacrifice. The window is very short, but he’ll make it.”

Faythe frowned, turning back to her friend. “Reylan?”

Marlowe walked to the wide lake by the waterfall. The yucolites chased each other, and Faythe missed the serene sight of them. With a skip in her chest, Faythe noticed only her own reflection cast in the water, but Marlowe was right beside her.

Tears welled in her eyes. “I have to say goodbye, don’t I?”

Marlowe’s arm looped around hers, and she leaned her head on Faythe’s shoulder. “You have to live your life, but I’ll always be here. We both will be.”

Faythe sobbed. “Jak?”

Marlowe didn’t answer.

“I failed you both. I miss you both so much. I don’t know how I’ll go on without you.”

“Then you haven’t failed us. We all paid prices in this war for the better world that is dawning now.”

“Your price isn’t fair.”

“Nothing in life or death is about fairness. It’s about choices. Actions and consequences. Safety and risks. The beauty and fear of the unknown.”

Faythe turned to her dear friend, reaching a hand to her delicate face. She felt so real Faythe couldn’t stop her tears from pouring, wanting so desperately to stay here but also return to the living.

“Do I have a choice?” Faythe asked.

“You’re making it right now.”

She could hardly blink away her tears fast enough to cling to the image of Marlowe for as long as possible.

“I’m so sorry,” she could barely choke out.

“It’s time for your reign, Faythe. The world has been waiting for it. It’s my privilege to have played a part in the history that will live on for millennia.”

“You won’t be forgotten. Never.”

Marlowe smiled. “Then I am never truly gone.”

Faythe felt the scene drifting away like a dream she held onto desperately.

Was it even real?

Faythe’s mind would never be certain, but her heart was.