Her speed was incredible. Even without furycrafting, the vord Queen moved with blinding swiftness. Tavi had drawn upon all the windcraft he could to expand his perceptions, and it was barely enough to allow him to defend himself. Similarly, her strength was unbelievable, easily greater than a large Cane’s, and Tavi found himself forced to draw strength from the earth simply in order to meet her attacks with enough power to stop them.

In retrospect, he thought, it probably wasn’t one of his most insightful tactical decisions.

Within seconds of Tavi’s drawing upon the earth for strength, the mountain was wrenched with a spectacular thundercrack of sound, so loud that it knocked both Tavi and the vord from their feet. In front of Tavi’s widening eyes, the peak of the mountain abruptly split, a sudden crack running from the summit down to Tavi and beyond him. Within a heartbeat, the crack had widened, with rock and stone grinding and screaming. Tavi rolled rapidly to one side, an instant before the crack—well on its way to becoming a crevasse—swallowed him whole.

The mountain groaned with an enormous basso voice, and rocks began to fall around them. Most of the falling material consisted of pebbles, but among many of those were other stones, more than large enough to kill a man if they fell on him. Tavi regained his feet and dodged a falling rock. From the corner of his eye, he saw the vord Queen simply bat a stone the size of an ale keg away with her free hand.

A red glow suddenly suffused the walls of the crevasse, the light welling up from within, and Tavi sucked in a sharp breath of surprise. He had not realized that Garados was a fire-mountain.

A medium-sized stone clipped his ribs, and though the armor absorbed the blow, he staggered and barely got out of the way of the next bounding stone. On the other side of the crevasse, the vord Queen turned toward him and crouched to leap, her sword held up and ready to strike—when a fountain of liquid fire shot forth from the crevasse, sending molten stone high into the air.

Tavi turned from that at once, bounded into the air downslope as strongly as he could, called up a windstream...

. . . and realized, an instant too late, that he was covered in a layer of dirt and dust.

The wind furies he managed to summon were far from strong enough to lift him into the air, and after an extra second or so of hanging at the apogee of his jump, he was on his way back to the ground—to the steeply inclined, stony ground of Garados. His heart leapt into his throat. If he should lose his balance, there was virtually nothing to stop him from bouncing all the way to the base of the mountain, while falling boulders and rocky outcroppings conspired with gravity to grind him to paste.