By the time they’d opened the eleventh, and last, casket, Liv had got the process down to a routine. With two squads of soldiers defending both the entrance to the undercity, and the door into the room itself, Ghveris took it upon himself to handle the trapped strip of enchanted iron which had been placed onto each casket. Utterly immune to the attack, which couldn’t penetrate his armored shell, he simply used his mana-blade to pry the iron up out of the sides of each casket, one by one.

  Liv pulled each of the dreamers out, first breaking the effect that kept them preserved in a state of hibernation, and then extracting a person at a time from the shared dream. At that point, they were in Arjun’s care, though Wren, Soaring Eagle and Aisia were all present to both assist the healer and to provide what comfort they could. Keri and Miina stayed with Liv, ready to take action in case there was another wyrm attack. With soldiers from Mountain Home in each of the two squads supporting their group, Keri didn’t have to carry the burden of lighting the entire process.

  Liv’s original plan had been to take their time, and pull all of the dreamers out over the course of perhaps two or three days, taking a small group back up to the encampment at a time. But with the constant threat of the black wyrm hanging over their heads, she didn’t want her people away from the main body of the army any longer than necessary.

  As a result, once the final Child of Ractia had been turned over to Arjun’s care, she hurried back up the center aisle to the soldiers who’d kept watch the whole time. When they saw her approaching, trailed by her personal guards, every one of them snapped to attention.

  “We’re leaving in a quarter bell,” Liv told them. “I’ll need some of you to help move the people we’ve rescued; they’re all going to be weak. Some of them might need to be carried. Pack up anything you don’t want left behind.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” one of the men answered, his attitude making it clear he was the commander of the squad. It didn’t take more than that for the rest of the soldiers to make themselves busy.

  “You’re not going to use one of your platforms?” Miina asked, coming up on Liv’s side. She kept her voice low, so that it couldn’t be heard over the activity at both ends of the chamber.

  “No.” Liv shook her head, and watched as Arjun and the Red Shields helped all of the people they’d rescued wrap enchanted scarves about their faces. “I don’t want to waste any mana I don’t need to use, in case that wyrm you found comes at us.”

  It took longer than she’d hoped for to get eleven people up through the ruined undercity, even with all the soldiers helping. Like Aisia, none of these people had moved in a thousand years. The magic had preserved their bodies, but they were disoriented and weak all the same. Liv thought there was probably a research project in there, somewhere: a comparison of what condition the cold sleep spell left a subject in at varying lengths of time. Unfortunately, she wasn’t going to have time to do it herself.

  As they moved through the passages and up stairways, the orbs of light cast to drive away the shadows moved with them, sending patches of darkness slinking off like a mouser who didn’t want to be pet. Liv knew it was uncharitable to expect just anyone with the word of light to be as good as Keri, so she didn’t complain, but to her the difference was obvious.

  Every time she got a glimpse of a shadow, before it was wiped away by an orbiting set of spheres, Liv couldn’t help feel like they were being watched. It was that indescribable sensation that made one turn their head, only to find someone’s eyes across a crowded room. The feeling only made her want to hurry everyone along.

  When they got to the collapsed section of corridor where Ghveris had fallen, revealing the undercity, Liv found one of the Red Shield scouts waiting at the foot of the stairs, accompanied by a soldier who’d come to them from Ashford. As soon as they saw her, the soldier took a knee, but the scout immediately began speaking.

  “Word from the crater,” she said. “It’s moving.”

  Liv wished that she could have felt surprise. She tried to think of something she could have done differently, some way that she wouldn’t have been caught outside the camp with so many people who all needed her protection - but the only thing she could think of would have been to leave the dreamers trapped, and hope that the enchantments keeping them alive didn’t fail before Silica arrived.

  “Keri,” she said. “You have command of everyone here.” He not only knew Soile’s plan better than Liv did, but he was the one better equipped to put it into action. Liv thought back to that argument they’d had, in Al’Fenthia, and almost smiled.

  Now that speed was the most important thing, Arjun conjured a plane of coherent mana for the people they’d rescued. Liv watched it rise up and out of the hole that had been left in Ghveris’s wake, drew her wand, and muttered an incantation under her breath. She didn’t need to use words to conjure her wings; but every scrap of mana she could save now, before the fight actually began, was a small victory.

  Once she was ready to fly, Liv looked up to the sky, where dark clouds had blotted out the sun the entire time they’d been at Godsgrave. She let Cel wake in her mind, and cast her thoughts up, up, to where lightning occasionally flickered through the roiling gloom. There, she grasped the tiny crystals of ice present in the clouds, took hold of them, and began to build up a greater and greater charge. While she was working, she felt Miina take her by the arm and guide her up the stairs.

  “Arjun,” Keri was saying, as Liv stepped up onto the blasted and cracked stone of the crater floor, “Get those people back to the camp. Asia will go with you, along with all the soldiers I can spare. Don’t stop, don’t turn around, just make the best time you possibly can.” He began to sort by word of power, keeping Olavi with them but sending the soldier who’d lit the undercity with Arjun. Every man or woman from Al’Fenthia, with the word of growth, went with Arjun, while those Keri judged best able to fight the oncoming wyrms remained.

  “I should remain to fight,” Soaring Eagle said, and Liv turned her attention to that argument.

  Wren shook her head. “You’re the chief,” she told her cousin’s husband. “You’re the one who needs to get the people we rescued back home to Clear Water Cenote. You’re the one who needs to teach them, to take care of them. That’s the entire reason we came here. Go with Arjun. Be their scout along the way.”

  Ghveris reached out and placed an immense, heavy gauntlet on Soaring Eagle’s shoulder. “It is no shame,” the war-machine told the other man. “Your task is more important than being a mere warrior. Get our people home alive.”

  Liv agreed, but she let the three of them sort it out among themselves. For her own part, she felt a sense of building anticipation as she stirred the clouds. It had been months since she’d really fought anything that actually pushed her - not since the battle of Nightfall Peak. Milisant’s assassination attempt, the archmage test - neither of those things had truly been a battle. The insects and minor wyrms at Godsgrave hadn’t endangered her nearly as much as using the crown had. If anything, she’d been worried about the people she was with, not herself.

  And so, as Arjun’s plane of mana went skimming off upslope, surrounded by dozens of jogging soldiers, and two bats circling overhead, Liv turned toward the direction she knew Iravata’s corpse lay. She let her feet carry her out away from the men and women that Keri was organizing into ranks, where the wind from the storm growing above her and at her command stirred the dust around her boots. Somewhere behind her, she could feel Kaija using Cel to raise a rampart of ice.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “Don’t tell me you’re actually looking forward to this,” Miina grumbled, from a place at her left side.

  “Not exactly,” Liv said. “I don’t want to fight this thing. I’d rather Silica get here, and we see if the two of them can talk to each other. But -”

  “But?” Miina asked.

  “I spend so much time listening to reports, or reading numbers,” Liv said. “Talking about taxes, about food stores, about all the thousand things that need to happen to keep this kingdom we’ve built from falling apart. But none of that’s what I’m really good at.”

  “No,” Miina agreed. “Don’t get me wrong - you do fine. But what you’re really meant to do is this - throw yourself into some completely unreasonable fight and come out on top.”

  Keri came jogging over to them. “We will catch its attention when it comes,” he said. It was exactly what Soile had explained to Liv already, but she listened anyway. “We will hold it in place as long as we can, so that you can cast. Don’t take too long.”

  “I won’t.” Liv turned toward him, reached down and clasped his hand in her own. She wished that she wasn’t wearing gloves, and that he didn’t have armored gauntlets on. Since they couldn’t touch, skin to skin, that way, she raised herself up on the toes of her boots and sought his lips with her own. The helms got in the way, and two layers of enchanted scarf slid between them, but it was something.

  Then, she beat her wings once and propelled herself up into the sky, where she could watch everything that happened.

  ?

  Arjun’s group was almost to the rim of the crater when the tide of mana beasts came in sight, surging up from the lowest point of Godsgrave in a tide of dark scales, burning eyes, and skittering gold. Vultures, grown to enormous size, circled low, unwilling to risk the clouds that regularly surged with flashes of lightning.

  The movement was not regular, but jittering, and it took a moment’s examination for Liv to realize why: whenever one of the monsters reached a patch of shadow that it could make use of, it dove down into the darkness, disappearing momentarily only to emerge from another place fifty or a hundred yards ahead. As a result, the entire mass of oncoming beasts covered ground far more quickly than they had any right to.

  There were other things in that stampede, as well: Liv caught glimpses of jungle creatures that had stumbled into the edges of the rift, and been twisted by mana. There among the wyrms and the insects ran a cougar, its coat black as the night between the stars; there stalked shadow wolves, an entire pack of them, just like the ones Sidonie had described from Duskvale.

  But those were a minority, among the overwhelming number of wyrms. Miina had said there was a clutch of eggs near Iravata’s corpse, and Liv could only imagine just how many such clutches had been hatched over the centuries. Now, it seemed that every wyrm which made its home in the miles-wide crater had been marshalled all at once, and driven forth to be thrown against her people.

  And they were being driven: Liv could see that clearly.

  At the back of the rushing, living tide, came the largest wyrm that she had ever seen. Any hope Liv had cherished that Miina might be exaggerating was dashed at the sight of this monster: if anything, her cousin had understated it. The black wyrm would have, if it had landed at the top of Bald Peak, brushed the curtain walls out of the way with a single swipe of its tail. Like Silica, it had wings, and they stretched out from its shoulders, beating against the heavy air. But this monster had grown to such enormous, unreasonable bulk that Liv doubted it would ever be able to take to the air again. Nor were there any shadows in the crater large enough for it to leap through, as its smaller cousins did. Instead, its great speed simply came from its size.

  Liv tried to imagine Keri, Wren, Ghveris and Miina, standing among the few troops they’d lined up to receive this charge, doing anything at all to that monster, and failed. The only thing she could picture was her friends being crushed beneath its coils. To be honest, she could hardly imagine them holding the line against that oncoming tide.

  “Lucent ?n’Iravatim,” Liv whispered, raising the stormwand up above her head, tip pointed at the rumbling clouds. She didn’t bother to shape the lightning as it came, dispensing with Julianne’s trick of a spinning wheel, and she didn’t hurry it, letting it come in its own time. In fact, Liv didn’t even try to put a number to the jagged forks she called on. Instead, she simply convinced the charge she’d spent this entire time building that its easiest path down to the ground lay directly through that oncoming tide of wyrms.

  The clouds flashed, and thunder rolled. Spear after spear of lightning rained down around Liv, connecting the sky with the horde of monsters below. Where each bolt touched, the rock of the crater exploded. Wyrms and golden insects were sent flying in every direction, what was left of their bodies smoking and charred. Some few were not instantly slain, but instead lay where they’d been thrown, twitching in horrible pain.

  Liv couldn’t kill all of them, of course: there were too many for that. But she could reduce their numbers, and break up the overwhelming charge, so that when the horde reached her friends, they at least stood a chance.

  Far below her, Miina’s magic, the word of time, lashed out, dissolving vulture, wolf, and wyrm alike into swirls of bone-dust, carried away on the wind. The weapons mounted on Ghveris’s shoulders cracked and roared, nearly as loud as the thunder itself, cutting down any enemy that even tried to approach him. Wren took her newest shape, that of a wyrm every bit the equal to those which charged their position, and sprayed venom. Keri raised both hands, and from each a bar of brilliant light, so bright that Liv could hardly even stand to look at it, swept forward and burned through the ranks of the mana beasts.

  And her friends did not fight alone. Keri had been very careful about choosing who would remain with them, among the soldiers he had available. Soldiers from her own family lashed out with shards of ice; those from Mountain Home burned their enemies before them. Spikes of stone rose up from the ground, impaling an oncoming wyrm, and Liv guessed that the soldier who’d sculpted the stairs was among those fighting below.

  At the rear of the rushing horde came the black wyrm. Liv woke Cel and Aluth in the back of her mind, holding them both ready at the same time. Once, she could not have done this: she thought back to how desperate she’d been when she was fighting Julianne, and could see now just how far from ready she’d been at the time.

  But now, the words of power hummed for her, practically singing in tune with each other, waiting only for her words and her intent to unleash them.

  Liv waited.

  They’d first found this entrance to the ruined undercity because Ghveris had been too heavy to stand where the stone had become so thin and brittle.

  The black wyrm was a hundred times as heavy, a thousand. Liv couldn’t even calculate it in her mind.

  With a sound like the very world itself screaming, the floor of the crater gave way beneath the body of the black wyrm, crumbling away and dropping the monster down into the ruins. Great clouds of rock-dust rose up around the collapse, like boiling banks of fog, and sprays of steam erupted from where the fissures had burst open at the seams.

  Liv’s friends stood on a battlement of adamant ice and reinforced rock, the only solid, reliable piece of ground left for hundreds of yards. Their spells had stopped, for the moment, and she was glad that they all had enchanted scarves to filter air for them to breathe - otherwise, she wasn’t sure they’d have survived. Liv risked a glance toward where she’d last seen Arjun’s group, and was relieved to see that they’d gotten over the rim of the crater and were hurrying through the gate into the encampment.

  The horde had been broken, she saw, as the dust began to clear. Most of the mana beasts had been dropped down into the undercity, crushed beneath falling rock when they weren’t killed by the fall itself. Only the vultures still circled, beneath Liv and above the ground, but they looked skittish - not only of the storm, and the lightning, but of what was happening beneath them.

  The black wyrm was not dead. Even now, Liv heard its roar, saw its thrashing coils. Hurt, of that, she had no doubt: there would be broken bones, scales scraped away, leaving raw flesh beneath. Wings trapped and torn. But given time, it would find a way out.

  This was the moment. All Liv needed to do was cast Skyfall, and let her archmage spell do its work. She had more than enough time to set the magic loose, just like they’d planned, and by the time it was done she couldn’t imagine even a wyrm that large surviving.

  But if she did that, Liv would have to explain to Silica, when the other wyrm arrived, what she had done. And Silica was - if not precisely a friend, at least an ally. She’d been kind, in her own way, and willing to tell Liv stories about the world that had gone away with the old gods.

  If Liv was going to have to tell the wyrm of Feic Seria that she’d killed this creature, she wanted to at least be able to say she’d done everything she could to avoid that, first.

  She tucked her wings, and flew down toward the head of the wounded serpent.

  volume nine is off and running!

  here. I am more available there than I am here.

  Dramatis Personae

  Livara T?r Valtteri Kaen Syv? - Archmage, former scullery maid at Castle Whitehill, the bastard daughter of Maggie Brodbeck and Valtteri Ka Auris. Mountain Queen, and Lady of Winter. Making risky decisions. [36+ Rings of Mana, not counting mana stored in items.]

  Inkeris "Keri" ka Ilmari k?n B?lris - A young warrior of the Unconquered House of B?lris, father to Rei. Might actually have the more dangerous job in this scene. [20 Rings of Mana.]

  Ghveris, the Beast of Iuronnath - Formerly a Great Bat in service to Ractia, now the remains of his body form the heart of an Antrian juggernaut. Linguistic consultant. [Mana Battery: 10 Rings]

  Miina t?r Eilis, of House D?ivi - Daughter of Eilis, niece of Eila, cousin of Liv, Lady in Waiting. "You are, aren't you? You're going to enjoy this!" [21 Rings of Mana]

  Soaring Eagle - Husband of Calm Waters, father of Blossom. Red Shield Tribe. Banished from the battle.

  Soile - A Commander of House Keria, now essentially Liv's general. Will not be sleeping tonight. [17 Rings of Mana]

  Thora - Lady's Maid to Liv. Has determined that Keri does, in fact, have some use.

  Wren Wind Dancer - Daughter of Nighthawk, cousin of Calm Waters. Has to be the one to talk sense to a certain tribal chief.