He cast a spell of his own, bursting the rocks in front of them with a serrated tendril of dark energy. It rose up, just as Nematus had done, waving in the air, ready to strike them.

‘Not trees, perhaps,’ Elowen muttered, ‘but storms might.’

She raised her hands to the sky, drawing down a vortex of clouds. Electricity sparked and crackled within before shooting down in a bolt that struck the tendril, bursting it into fragments.

‘You can call storms?’ Liska said, staring at her friend in awe.

‘I can use all kinds of magic,’ said Elowen. ‘That was the way with all mages when we first came here.’

Bitterblight was not as impressed, though. It sent out a shockwave of pure hatred that was enough to knock Embla off her feet. She fell to the ground and began to tumble and slide down the steep slope of the crater, her passengers bouncing free and falling along with her.

Liska felt herself roll over and over, pointed shards of rock scratching and jabbing her as she tumbled. She kept tight hold of the heart all the way, even though it meant taking blows to her head.

When she finally stopped, she struggled to her feet, finding herself just metres away from the shadow tree, blood streaking her face from several small cuts. Elowen and Fishbone were close by and Embla almost on top of Noxis himself, but the mage’s eyes were fixed on Liska alone. Her cloak had fallen back, revealing Nammu’s heart. A single gleaming point of light in that dark smoky pit.

‘You,’ Noxis said. ‘You’re the ones my son warned me about. You’re the ones that I sent Thresher to catch.’

‘Thresher is gone,’ said Liska, that final image of her sailing through the air fresh in her mind. ‘And everything else will be too if you carry on. Your own son will be killed! Doesn’t that bother you?’

A flicker in Noxis’s eyes. Perhaps the last shreds of his humanity fighting back, but then it was sucked under. Eaten. The veins on his neck and bald head pulsed a sickly grey, and his eyes blazed with pure madness.

‘I don’t care! I have no son!’ he screamed. ‘And it doesn’t matter that you have that tree’s heart! It won’t be enough to save you!’

Liska couldn’t believe he had turned against his own kind, his own blood, so completely. ‘Why?’ she shouted. ‘Why are you doing this?’