Page 120 of Children of Fallen Gods

My back slammed against a wall.

I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move, as if my control over my body had simply been severed. My thoughts felt as if they were moving through sludge. Pain tore through my abdomen. I looked down. For a moment my mind couldn’t reconcile what I was seeing.

A wooden handle. Violet blood.

A spear. A spear in me. A spearthroughme, pinning me to the wall.

There was a sudden crack. The earth beneath me shattered. It was nearly impossible to see in the darkness, but what I could make out through my blurring vision were several stones hurling at me through the air, and beyond them, a silhouette with their arms lifted.

No.No. If I was to die, I would die dragging them down with me.

But then a voice rang out in a language I didn’t understand. The rocks froze. The silhouette stopped, turning, replying. Two voices spoke back and forth.

A figure emerged from the smoke. It was a human man. His hair was white, though he did not look old, and his eyes so starkly silver that even from this distance, they glinted through the shadows. He was tall and thin, with a smattering of silver facial hair, wearing laced-up battle clothing. He stopped and spoke to the stone-wielding man — and then turned to me.

My hands managed to grab the spear that impaled me, so tight they trembled. Yet the slick of my own blood undermined my grip. I snarled as the man approached me, his eyes glinting with obvious interest. As he drew close enough for the bloody light of flames to catch his face, it revealed a garish scar that extended from the right corner of his mouth all the way to his ear.

It seemed at-odds with the rest of his appearance. I had expected some barbarian. But this man was neat and dignified, the type that appeared better suited to a library than a battlefield.

He muttered a word that I didn’t understand. His fingertips brushed my jawline, turning my cheek. He wasso close— I could rip his face from his skull. But my muscles would not so much as twitch.

Was human magic really capable of such a thing?

But he was not the only one with power. I still had a grip on Caduan’s magic. I forced myself to focus.

Focus.

I could see it, feel it — the force that bound me. And I poured all of my stolen magic into severing that tie, into breaking free, pushing past it—

It cracked just enough for one brief opening.

I snapped at the human’s hand, catching his ring and little fingers between my sharpened teeth. His blood, rotten and red, flooded my mouth, and I spat it onto the ground as the man leapt back and howled.

And at that same moment, Caduan swept into the room. His magic roared to life in my veins — more powerful than it had been before, and I knew it because I could feel it burningthroughme, like a mirror compounding the strength of the sunlight.

At first my mind could not make sense of what I was looking at.

He was surrounded by vines. Moving vines. Tree branches and plants and leaves were unfurled around him, driving through human attackers like spears or encircling their throats.

The silver-haired human lunged. Light sparked to his fingertips, lethally powerful. He lifted his hands and Caduan stumbled back, as if struck.

The hold on my mind released. Temporarily, I was sure. I had seconds.

The spear was not coming out of the wall.

But I was.

With a roar, I tightened my grip around the handle, and slowly — so slowly, too slowly — I pulled myself forward.

Caduan lunged. The vines moved with him, matching every attack, every movement, even every wince of pain. But the human tore his hands through the air, releasing a sudden invisible force so strong that it snapped Caduan’s tree branches into splinters and would have knocked me back to the wall if I hadn’t been holding on to the spear so ferociously.

He descended upon Caduan.

The world narrowed to these precious seconds.

I let out a scream. One pull, two, three and then I was out, and I was running.

I didn’t think. I wielded Caduan’s magic, reflecting it back to him twice as bright. And in the same moment, I grabbed my dagger and drove it into the man’s back.

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