Page 25 of Ironhold, Trial Two

“Naia!” I call out and fling myself forward. I swing my net like the fishing implement it is trying to intercept the weapons before they can strike her.

I have done this when fighting Vex before to defend myself, but this is different. The weapons are not coming at me, but at her. I manage to catch them like sharp silvery fish, swinging my net around, throwing them to the sand of the arena.

“What are you doing?” Vex demands. “You spoiled my shot, traitor.”

“Leave her to me,” I shout back. “Focus on Koda!”

He turns back to the tribal warrior, but even as he does so, one of his knives comes perilously close to slashing my leg. It's obvious he has not forgiving me for stopping him killing Naia.

Naia and I leap back into battle against one another because it is the only way to keep one another safe. I have already cast my net, so I must use my trident as my main weapon, holding it two-handed and striking with both the butt and tip. Naia deflects the blows, swinging back with her axes again and again.

I deflect those blows in turn, and although none of them is aimed at my head or heart, they are swung with intent. Naia has talked about wounding me enough to take me out of the fight, then healing me afterwards. I'm not sure I can let her do that, though, not until we know which way the fight is going. If the drake is still up, it might devour me when I fall, and there's always a chance Koda will decide to finish me. Even Vex might take the opportunity to cut my throat when I'm down, hiding my death in the chaos of battle.

So I block each of Naia’s blows, and I press forward, trying to close the distance while battering her with the haft of my trident, trying to get close enough to speak.

“Not yet,” I say. “The rest need to be down before we finish the fight.”

I assume that she will nod and go on with the fight, continuing to make it look good to the crowd. Certainly they seem to be enjoying the action so far, screaming my name and hers, both loud enough to drown out any calls for Vex and Koda.

Instead, the strangest look comes over her face. For an instant, it goes completely blank, as if someone has just completely turned off her personality, leaving nothing else in its place.

“Do this, and you can have a seat among the best of us,” she says.

The words make no sense to me.

“Naia, what are you talking about?”

“Do what I ask, Naia. You know you want to. It’s for Lyra’s own good.”

The words come out without any inflection. They barely sound like her voice at all. Naia seems to come back to herself, but she looks as though she is remembering something int hat moment, something she ought to do.

She slashes at me, in a ferocious attack aimed at my head. I bring my trident up to block it, and I’m barely in time. But it seems that first blow was only the distraction, because Naia cuts across an instant later, the blow aimed at my arm.

“No!” I cry out, as I realize what she’s doing, but I’m too late, Her hand axe slices into the leather of the cuff on my wrist. Leather that I cannot remove, but which someone else can. The device designed to contain my powers is sliced open, and it falls from my wrist in a flutter of leather to the sands.

Almost instantly, I can feel creatures around me. Not just the drake and the shadow cat, but every creature in and around the arena. It's as if my power has been straining to get out, and the moment it is able to do so it reaches out with tendrils towards every creature nearby.

I can feel the birds, and I find myself looking through all of their eyes without even intending to do it. I see the fight from a hundred different angles now, and I'm able to dodge the swing of the frost drake’s claws with ease. But my power is not just limited to the birds.

I feel everything. I feel the insects hidden in every nook and cranny. I feel the dogs fed on scraps of meat, there to keep prisoners in check in the bowels of the place. I feel the creatures of the beast pens, all of their minds roaring into me at once, so that I sense the world in so many different ways that it's impossible to keep up with them all. I see colors that I should not see, view the world through eyes that see things more rapidly than I ever could, sense the trembling movements along a web. With so much input, it's impossible for me to make sense of any of it.

I can feel myself losing control, losing all sense of who I am. This much information is enough that it might drive me mad. I can't remember where I and the and the beasts begin. I can hear someone screaming and I think it's me, but am I really that strange, small thing out there in the middle of the sands?

I can feel waves of power coming up in response to my confusion and my pain. That power wants to flow into every beast, to set an army of them tearing at everything it can find. My mind is filled with bestial thoughts, wanting to find something to devour, destroy, to fill myself with blood. I think of Rowan, and those thoughts turn to the other needs of animals. I want to find him and give myself to him. No, I want to take him, to claim him as my own.

But Rowan is not the only one I think of. Instead, I think of Alaric. Beautiful, beautiful Alaric. My first thoughts are the same as with Rowan, but there is a flash of memory too. Of Alaric telling me that he did not fight back when his father hit him. Of Alaric showing me how he builds a version of himself to show to the world, how he stays in control of all the pain that he briefly let me see.

If Alaric can stay in control of all of that, can I somehow control this?

I force myself to focus on who I am. It means that I’m clipped by an attack from Koda, a blade cutting into my arm, but in some ways that's a good thing. The pain seems to ground me, reminding me of what is my flesh and what is outside it. I’m able to start to make that distinction, able to start to bring my consciousness back to myself, rather than splitting it between a thousand different creatures.

I try to come back to myself, and so many fragments of bestial nature try to come with me, try to become a part of me. There are vicious, deadly instincts. There are things that say that my body should take other forms, that I should have claws, or sharp teeth, or eyes that can see in the dark. A part of me knows that if I let it, my body will shift in response to those fragments, taking on hints of a more bestial nature.

I do not allow those fragments to take hold, though. I know who I am, and I know where I am. I can feel the limits of my body again, can come back into that body without any of the things that try to follow me back in.

I am myself, and it is just in time. I am able to throw myself back from Koda’s next attack and the one after that. I do not feel fear at those attacks, only a primal need to dodge and move. But I am the one in control of it. I am the one who can pick and choose what I need when it comes to the speed and strength of the animal world. I send a call to the shadow cat, and it leaps at Koda, distracting him again.

For a second, I am alone in the middle of the Colosseum. Around me, the crowd seems to be holding its breath, silent in the wake of the cuff being cut from my arm, as if afraid of what I might do next even as they long to see it.

The frost drake comes at me, rearing over me, and I can feel it building up to throw its icy breath my way. I can feel inside its mind now, too, feel the instincts that have been put into it, the images of those it has to hurt. It is intelligent enough to know what has been demanded of it, what it has been trained to do.

I thrust into its mind the way I might drive my trident home into flesh. I take the power I have been holding back, and I throw it at the drake, wrapping that power around it, driving it through it.

I see through its eyes. I see myself standing there, and I stop it from using its icy breath with a thought. I can feel all the agonies inflicted in training on it, all the things done to it to ensure that it would fight when it was told, and that it would not flee. I feel it, because I am one with it in that moment. I feel its heartbeat as my own, feel the strength of its muscles, feel the sharpness of its claws and its hunger.

I feel it, and in that moment, I control it.