“I’m not leaving you.” She met Wynter’s gleeful strikes with her own magic. “I’ll never leave you.”

“I can’t protect us both.”

“Then, let me help,” she snapped.

He shot her a look of recognition. They had learned new ways to move, new ways to exist together in the last year. Wynter was one lonely girl who thought herself special. Wynter’s mania was pure ego. She thought she was blessed. She believed wholeheartedly that she had been chosen for this and that she was their savior, carrying them out of the isolated mountains, and that she would always reign triumphant.

Well, Kerrigan actually was special. She’d taken the wall down. She had visions of the future and ones that told her of the past. She was the one Wynter couldn’t understand, had only tried to use.

“Together,” Fordham said, and they launched forward.

But Wynter hadn’t prepared for what Fordham and Kerrigan could do together. And for a fraction of a second, that mania slipped into fear.

Wynter had control over the black shadows that Fordham used for short jumps. Kerrigan had seen him use them once to take down an assailant. Wynter seemed to have no gumption against using them, and she threw the shadows like knives.

Kerrigan smiled as she met Wynter’s black shadows with the four elements. Air to blast the dark power away from them. Water to douse them where they crawled. Earth to pull Wynter from her feet. And fire to distract her long enough for Fordham to close in.

“You were never good enough,” Wynter snarled at Fordham, coiling her shadows in like a whip and striking at him. “It should have been me!”

He dodged and then drew the edge of his Tendrille blade across her magic, disrupting the shadows. “Perhaps it would have been you, Wynter. Maybe it even should have been. You had more control,” Fordham spat. She wrapped the dark around his ankles and tried to pull him off his feet. Kerrigan stepped in, using her Dragon Ring fighting skills to slice the air down and sever the connection. “But you were always crazy.”

“I am the chosen one!” Wynter roared.

Kerrigan snorted. “Chosen for what?”

Fordham actually chuckled. It sounded good on him, and it threw Wynter off-balance. “Your cult followers can’t make you the next queen.”

“No,” she agreed, her eyes narrowing. “All I have to do is kill you.”

Wynter put her hands to her chest, tipped her head back, and threw her arms wide. Black ink released from her chest like a torrent. Kerrigan dropped to the ground as it enveloped the whole of the docks in a burst. Fordham didn’t move. He stood stoic in the darkness of Wynter’s magic. The magic that had kept his family in power for thousands of years.