I didn’t even see him take flight. Flames barreled at the winged men soaring above the battlefield. Some fell, the smell of burning hair and flesh tainting the air. Swords clanked, arrows surged through the winds, missing their original targets. The elves used their powerful winds to shoot the arrows back at the Fire Fae, making them lurch before falling to the ground. After a few moments, they started convulsing and puking from the poison in their veins before one of our people finished them off.
Valla, Hallan, and my father battled, their movements full of grace and power. How Valla was managing to take on both of them was unbelievable. She blocked their blows with raging fire and poisoned metal. Her movements were full of complete control. She blocked and weaved and fought with a precise lethal venom. It took years to master a skill of that level, something she had to have obsessively trained herself to do over the years. Maybe she trained with her father, too. The thought made me realize how different things could be when you had a loving role model compared to one full of hatred. A part of me pitied her, but only for a moment.
Ace and I were back-to-back on the ground as we fought the Fire Fae who charged us. I sunk my battle axe into a man’s shoulder. His flames fizzled out, and he toppled to my feet. I shifted, withdrawing my blade as I readied for the next attack, when a searing, hot pain shot through my side. The man on the ground tried to attack me with his flames again in the last moments of his life. I kicked him away, finishing the job I had started, before moving on.
Rain poured down from the sky. I wasn’t sure if it was from the gods, mother nature, or from the power of my people. Fire sizzled and hissed against the cold water. Wind gusted around me, making my dripping hair plaster to my face. I tasted the salt from sweat and iron from blood with every swing of my arm as it painted the wind and water.
I glanced over my shoulder back to my father and Hallan, but something was wrong. My vision grew hazy, time seemed to slow, and sounds were distorting. At the same time my eyes found my father’s, it was as if he knew something was amiss. He hesitated, and Valla took advantage of her opportunity.
“Orion!” Hallan’s voice boomed across the land as he soared through the air, pushing my father out of the way, taking Valla’s sword through his heart. I watched as it played out in front of me so slowly, as if time had stood still. I felt my legs go weak. My father yelled for me as a bright white light stretched across the land in front of me. Was this the end? The light was erratic and crazed as it moved in every direction before it shot through my father from Valla’s hand.
Lightning. She had mastered beyond her fire.
I screamed as my father’s body fell to the ground. I moved toward him but my legs failed me as I collapsed into the mud. Everything was on fire, but no flames caressed my skin. Every ragged breath made my side flare in pain. Ace’s dirty face came into view. I felt him cradle my head as he tried to sign to me.
“Where are you hurt?” he signed, but my limbs felt too heavy to sign anything back. I tried to speak, but it came out more like a murmur.
“Side,” was all I could manage. Without hesitation, Ace ripped apart my burnt leather vest and found a leaking wound. The man from before didn’t just burn me, he had stabbed me. Ace growled under his breath.
“Stay with me, Eme,” he signed to me, but his hand grew foggier by the minute. Ace grunted as he tried to stand, and I thought it was from trying to lift me until he dropped me to the ground and turned toward an enemy. A dagger’s hilt protruded out of his back, directly between his wings. The fae man ignited his arms in flames. He looked as if he were staggering, already injured, but that could have been my vision playing tricks on me, making the world feel like it was shifting around me.
A burst of air blasted from Ace, but it didn’t harm me. The icy wind made my skin pebble against my soaked clothes. The fae that attacked barreled away like a leaf falling away from the trees in autumn.
I watched as Ace created a dome of wind around us. He turned back, cradling me quickly against his chest, before he launched us into the raging elements around us.
Fire, wind, and water came from all directions. Pouring rain pelted against my skin like shards of glass as I felt my body drift in and out. Ace roared across the land, and as if his people knew the call, they took flight, but it was too late to retreat.
Bright light, red flames, and darkness consumed the sky as Ace’s wings carried us through the devastation of Valla’s wrath. Suddenly, we weren’t in the storm of chaos anymore. The surrounding air stilled. The world had gone quiet, as if Ace had become an island of calm amid stormy seas.
We had made it out. Ace’s flying staggered as he glided through the empty skies. Dark spots clouded my vision.Unconsciousness was calling to me. I did everything I could to keep my eyes open as Ace swayed toward the ground below. His breathing grew ragged and uneven as my head lay limp against his chest. His flying faltered. I felt weightless before I met the cold earth below, and then nothing.
Chapter Nine
My arms dangled as I swayed and bobbed to the rhythm of someone walking. Blood pounded behind my temples as I came to my senses. I knew being awake wouldn’t last long. My body still felt like it was on fire and tingling all over. A rigid shoulder dug into my hips as I was bent at the waist, hanging over a man, staring at the moving ground below. I suspected it was Ace until I saw Ace being dragged through the dirt behind me. He was on his back, his wings drooped and outstretched to the sides of him. Panic laced in my chest, constricting my heart. I didn’t know if he was dead or alive. I assumed the latter since someone had thought to drag him along with us.
I tried to move my arm, tried to get it to do anything, but the most I could move was a twitch of my finger. I was helpless, being carried by a stranger through the woods with no one coming to my rescue. I tried to listen to my surroundings. I didn’t hear the sounds of war anymore. Black spots began clouding my vision again as I drifted off.
I faded in and out of consciousness.
I saw Ace’s wings leave a trail in the loose soil behind us. Then a man wearing black. The warmth of a palm resting against my cheek. And then I was laid down. Everything was out of focus when I opened my eyes; it made my head ache. I closed them again, letting them rest as someone lifted my shirt and touched my bandaged side. I winced before I heard an elderly woman’s voice cut in.
“I’ll take care of that. You need to go,” she said, and someone lowered my shirt. I remembered prying my eyes open and seeing the old woman as a man left. I never got to see his face, never heard his voice. He had tended to my wounds and saved Ace and me. I didn’t even know his name. I felt safe in the woman’s presence. Wherever he had taken us, it wasn’t out of malice. I wanted to thank him, but I was too weak to move as his figure grew smaller in the distance until he disappeared into the shadows.
I jolted awake to the sun beaming through the trees. Ace lay in a cot a few feet away; his chest rose and fell gently in his sleep. I tried to sit up, but every muscle in my body barked from the movement. Everything hurt. My head pounded from the morning light. My mouth was so dry. A skin of water lay next to the bed. Grabbing it, I smelled it before bringing it to my mouth. I drank every drop of the cool liquid. Some leaked from the sides of my lips, but I didn’t care. I touched my side, now dressed in clean bandages, as my mind processed what had happened. My first thought was my father.
I leapt out of bed, ignoring the throbbing pain that came with every movement. I stumbled out of the small hut-like home we were in. Now that I was getting a good look at it, it wasn’t much. It was tucked away in the woods. The elderly woman was nowhere to be seen.
Wind chimes, trinkets, and colorful bottles dangled from the nearby branches. Chime trees surrounded the home.
Some believed the trinkets helped with healing; others made wind chimes to represent stories about our history and our people. There was a narrow path through the branches of trees leading to the small hut. Soothing, clinking sounds resonated on the light breeze. One in particular called for my attention as I ran my fingers over the smooth, painted glass. A sun and moon were one as stars hung and danced below them, twirling in the breeze. It reminded me of a bedtime story my mother and father had told me growing up.
I forced it aside as I ducked under the low-hanging branches. The smell of ash and fire was easy to follow, even though I didn't know where I was. I tried to sprint toward it, but my limbs were still too weak. The poison slowed me down as my body continued to burn through what remained of it.
I pressed my legs to go, to move through the grimly quiet woods. My lungs burned, my side stretched in pain with every long stride of my legs, my head pounded loudly in my ears, but I pushed on. The trees changed, charred from fire. Some lay on their sides, some nothing but a long pile of soot. The land then became open and nothing remained but cinder and dust where the battle had taken place.
A sound came from my left and water whipped around my arm, preparing to strike on instinct. But when I turned, the elderly woman stood there. She had brown skin and peppered gray hair braided to the side, revealing her pointed fae ears, andlines crowded around her mouth and eyes from age as she held up her hands.
“Hello, Emelyn. I need you to come with me,” she muttered, eyeing the water swirling around my arm as I let it fall to the ground. She turned to walk away, and I followed her.
