I didn’t know if she knew what the word meant—if the khrysaor and pegasus truly understood us—but Dynaxtaropened her mouth, and those flames poured forth, blue hearted and silver around the edges. They eclipsed Thorn’s winged body, falling around him and bouncing off the stone pathway. A solid wall of swirling gray light shot up, the fire and storms ricocheting off either side.
It wasn’t enough to kill him, to kill any Angel, or Valyrie would be dead before me already, but the khrysaor’s fire was more powerful than regular flame. It was born of myth, ripped from the stars with her constellation, a reason I thought we were a chosen pair. Fatecatcher and a beast born of the stars.
The flames forced Thorn back, the warriors he’d been after taking the opportunity to flee, and the Angel slowly turned his attention toward the rooftop. His eyes flicked over Dynaxtar with an unhinged curiosity.
And they landed on me.
And with all the wrath burning through me, I grinned viciously down at the Mindshaper.
Dynaxtar let us stand there for a moment, studying each other. Then, without a word of instruction, she leaped into the skies.
I didn’t have to look to know Thorn followed. His deep-gray ether swirled on our heels like the heart of a storm. We had to get him within reach of Cypherion’s scythe to truly harm him.
Angellight blasted toward us, but Dynaxtar was a creature born of legends—she dipped and dodged, flying in jagged paths to avoid the Angel’s sloppy attacks.
Thorn’s magic wasn’t precise. It was as wily as the Angel who bore it, like the winds of a hurricane and the lashing rain that drenched it. My hair and clothes clung to my skin under the force as if my khrysaor really was tearing through a storm.
She was working to loop around him. To catch him off guard and breathe that fire again.
And with the creature I trusted implicitly guarding me, I allowed my Fate ties to open. I pushed through the mass of fortunes I bore as the Fatecatcher, their magic stronger than ever as it channeled through me and to the Starsearchers below, fighting with their imbued weapons. Up here, at least, I wasn’t swarmed to a crippling point.
I searched through the readings for my ties, my own Fates screaming their fortunes at me. Arenothos was blessedly quiet, chastised after our last interaction, but others roared.
Cruelty and Adoration.
Prophecy and Demise.
Foolish—
No. The previous one blasted forward with a burst that rivaled a star exploding.Prophecy and Demise, brandishing a tale of a chosen one from start to finish. It was either the blink of an eye or an eon as the story unfolded. Sisters once born with the powers of constellations, ripping stars from the sky to breathe life into them and banish them again.
They rode into battle atop their loyal creatures, legions of flying beasts at their backs. They challenged the known gods, and Fates, they scorched others from this very world. Compressed them, made them smaller.
A massacre that, in turn, sent the sisters to an untimely grave—but a temporary one. Bodily, they rested for eternity, but their spirits…
Their spirits rose again with the force of a god’s blood. With the fury derived from an Angel’s grave, a Fate’s death, sworn to one end. In that god’s blood, a root grew. A leash that wrapped itself around one sister.
One sister who not only bore the myth but enraptured the Angels with her own magic. She became the tether. The key to a god’s downfall.
Faces I knew too well faded in and out of the reading. Ophelia, Jezebel, Tolek. Dax and Celissia. Lancaster, Gatrielle, and a few I hardly recognized. In a flash, they all blinked out, nothing but bright starfire illuminating my mind.
Then, magenta eyes flared through the unending white. A determined blade in her fist and resolve gritted between her teeth.
“No,” I gasped as the reading shattered into a thousand falling stars, and I wrenched myself back to this realm. Thorn was still on our heels, but we’d have to deal with that later.
“Dynaxtar!” I called, leaning forward. “Find the others!”
Chapter Eighty-One
Malakai
Spirits,Tolek was fucking mad.
He was gone, his mind overrun by Thorn. The Angel had disappeared once that tunnel of light Ophelia was in exploded, but Cypherion and I lured Tol away from the heart of the battle, away from where he could hurt himself or anyone else. We backed him toward a corner, between a glass blowing boutique and an imported liquor store, moss clinging to the damp niche in the buildings.
Tolek’s stare was manic. And it wasn’t the whirl of shining excitement my oldest friend often had. This was darker—it belonged to someone else.
“Tol,” Cypherion pleaded, holding his scythe stiffly. “Snap out of this.”
