He ground his teeth. He didn’t need to be rehashing his life’s closest calls. He needed to be focused on the enemy behind him, a being more dangerous than a cohort of windmanes. He checked over his shoulder. The vord Queen had closed his lead to a scant two hundred yards or so.

Tavi plunged into the thunderclouds gathered at Garados’s summit and let out a quick bark of mocking laughter.

A pulse of anger strong enough to destroy worlds flashed through the mist, and Tavi winced at the intensity of it. That wrath belonged to the vord Queen, and was being directed entirely at him. He banked left and reduced his speed, aware that the mountain was near but not sure of its precise location.

He almost found it with the end of his nose. The grey mist occluded the frosty grey stone of the mountaintop near perfectly, and Tavi had to shift course frantically to keep from smashing against it. He avoided disaster, steadied himself, and settled down to light gently upon a slope near the mountain’s peak, crouching. The vord Queen’s windstream roared on by. She had apparently lost track of him in the mist.

Tavi waited for a moment, but nothing happened. He stomped on the rocky ground beneath him a few times. Then he jumped up and down, feeling exceptionally foolish.

If that didn’t provoke the enormous fury, he wasn’t sure what would.

Without warning, the vord Queen’s voice called through the mist, disassociated from any particular direction. “Where are you, Father?”

Tavi blurred the obvious direction of his own voice with a windcrafting over his mouth. “Why do you keep calling me that?”

“Because your blood gave me birth. Yours and that of my mother.”

“So that was you,” Tavi said. “You were the thing Doroga dropped that big rock on.”

The Queen’s voice buzzed with steely undertones. “Yes.”

“Grampa Doroga,” Tavi mused. “I am not your father. It means more than blood.”

“You are close,” the Queen said, her words clipped and sharp. “For all practical purposes, it is a fact.”

The stone beneath Tavi’s feet quivered. He focused some of his attention downward. Though Garados was deadly dangerous, it was not swift. He should be able to leap clear if he was paying attention.

“Not quite,” Tavi said. “If I were your father, you’d be the heir to the Realm.”

“I am already the heir of this Realm, and after that, this world,” came her answer, from the mist. “All that is left is for you”—her voice suddenly changed, coming from immediately behind him—“is to die.”

He spun and barely got his sword up in time. Steel rang on steel, and again sparks bellowed forth in a thundercloud of their own, illuminating the mist around them with flashes of red, blue, and green light.