We grip each other’s arms as he looks to Hee Muur, the Shadow tide unable to strip the amber color from his eyes, the green glimmer to his skin as undimmed as mine. “We can’t keep holding them off,” Rafe tells her. “We keep killing them, and they keep coming. There are simply too many.”

A sapphire Vu Trin dragon lands beside us. “Nor Hee Muur,” the young Vu Trin sorceress on its back says, military stiff. “The Death Fae, Sylla Vuul, has encased the Wyvernguard’s North Island with a web barrier, but the Mages have begun to break it down. The Vu Trin Mages Fain Quillen and Wrenfir Harrow and the Wyvern Sholindrile Xanthile have secured part of the Third Tier with a horde of Vish’nile dragons, but send word that they can’t hold off Vogel’s forces for long. Hundreds of civilians are trapped on that level.”

An Asrai Fae, Fyordin Lir, is suddenly running toward us, his fierce, lake-blue eyes fixing on me. “Where’s Tierney?” he demands, and I can read his hostility, but also the intense worry in his gaze.

I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

He looks to Heelyn. “Tierney Calix has warded the Vo River. The wards are Deathkin wards, but the power running through them...it’s all hers. Vogel’s Shadow magic can’t get through those wards, but we can’t either. Which means we can’t draw on its power.”

“Then let us siphon your magic into the barrier Hee Muur and I are going to create,” I challenge him.

Heelyn rounds on me. “I never said I’d work with you!”

“If we don’t wall off the Mages,” the Vu Trin scout insists, “they’re going to level the city.”

Dragons shriek overhead, catching Heelyn’s eye, a large portion of the Shadow beasts arrowing straight toward the Third Tier.

“Please, Noi’khin Hee Muur,” I plead. “I can’t fight them alone! Neither can you. None of us can. We need to pool our magic!”

Heelyn looks at me, really looks at me, her fury shifting to an expression of tortured indecision just as a bright flash of golden fire streaks over the river from the north. We all turn, shock lighting as I make out the luminous figure in the distance, wings outstretched as he hurls a bolt of flame at a knot of incoming Mages and huge swaths of them explode in golden conflagrations.

“So much power,” Vothe breathes out. “That can only be Yvan Guryev...”

Heelyn breathes out a hard huff of relief. “The Icaral has come.” She narrows a glare at me. “It looks like we won’t be needing your magic after all, Trystan Gardner.”