I face her fully, my internal magic lashing with urgency. “Sylla, I want you to read me. I want you to read every last one of my fears.”

She’s quiet and still for a long moment, her gaze on me unblinking, as if she’s gauging my sincerity. Then she lifts my hand, presses it to her cool, dark cheek, and closes her eyes.

The world shudders to pitch-black, only a silvery mist remaining as my terror for Elloren rises. I start to tremble.

“Your fear,” she says, her otherworldly voice seeming to come from everywhere at once, “there’s an ocean of it.” Her voice has gone throaty, as if with sudden rapture. She slides my hand down and presses her lips to my palm.

“Follow it,” I insist, trembling. “Follow every thread.”

She presses her lips harder against my palm.

Her spider eyes snap into existence as she pulls back, fixated on me with a sudden, dangerous intensity. The side of her mouth lifts into a snarl.

Black Witch power could bring the End of Nature.

Her damning premonition reverberates through my mind, and it’s a shock, having her thoughts sounding deep inside me as her darkness swirls around us both.

“So, you believe in the flawed story as if the whole of it is true?” I challenge.

Sylla is on me in a flash, fully morphed to spider, the room surrounding us snapping back into view, a cage of legs around my form, her jaws twitching so very close to my head.

What is it you want, Mageling? Her voice in my mind is an otherworldly vibration, but I’m beyond Death Fae intimidation at this point.

I hold her lethal, multi-eyed gaze.

“Help me find my sister,” I implore her. “Before the Vu Trin do.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

SHADOW WITCH

Fallon Bane

Amazakaraan
Seventh Month, present day

Fallon Bane soars from the Northern Spine’s moonlit pinnacle on dragonback, Damion and Sylus to either side of her, spearing toward Cyme. Her black hair whips behind her, her grayed wand gripped tight in her fist.

Her wand is powerfully strengthened by Vogel’s Shadow power, the magic’s fabled evil transformed into Righteous Might by Mage hands. She can feel the wand’s backflow of amplifying strength through her lines.

She smiles, an ecstatic shiver of grayed ice running through her as she exchanges a wickedly smug look with her brother Damion, flying to her left, then turns to meet the gleeful gaze of her brother Sylus, soaring in on her other side, a horde of Mage soldiers on broken dragons massed behind them.

Grasping tighter hold of her dragon’s shoulder horn, she scowls as the Amaz battle cry rises below them like a potent tide.

We’ll put an end to their bleating soon enough.