Page 338 of A Flame of the Phoenix

“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 keptgrowing 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 waslaughing.

“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’tneedanyone 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 watersurged 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?

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