Chapter 332: The Search For Peace

The circle of light hadn’t finished fading before Edric was moving.

He crossed the distance towards Lady in Dark in less than a second, his robes snapping behind him, the air around him already alive with the deep green light of his affinity.

He had identified her in the same instant he’d arrived. There was no way the hooded figure standing over Cecilia in the center of the chaos with the dragon at her back wouldn’t be the leader of this attack.

But he never reached her.

The adult dragon moved to intercept, dropping between them with an impact that shook the ground. It opened its mouth and fire erupted outwards, white-hot and wide enough to swallow three men standing side by side.

Edric threw his hand up.

Trees burst from the earth on both sides of him, their trunks swelling in seconds to the width of houses. The fire hit the wall of wood and poured around it, scorching stone and melting the edges of the broken ground, but the trees held.

The wood wasn’t ordinary wood. It was different, its surface catching the light with a dull golden sheen that no natural tree had ever worn. The fire moved around it but not through it.

Edric stepped around the barrier and surged forward, pushing his speed to close the gap before the dragon could fill its lungs again.

The dragon didn’t wait. It moved faster than anything its size should have been able to, one enormous claw driving down towards the ground where Edric had been standing.

He wasn’t there.

He was already to the left, already moving again, already inside the reach of the next swing.

His hand closed around nothing and then opened, and the axe formed between his fingers like something that had always been there waiting to be summoned.

The haft was that same gold-sheened wood, dense and cold to the touch. The blade glowed purple at its edges, a light that didn’t illuminate so much as erase whatever it touched.

He swung.

The dragon retreated a full body-length, an instinctive recoil from something it recognized as dangerous, and breathed fire again, a sustained stream meant to slow rather than kill, filling the space between them.

Edric moved through the edges of it, one arm up, the golden wood of the axe haft taking the brunt where his body couldn’t avoid contact. He felt the heat but kept moving.

He flipped upwards, legs driving off the cracked stone, rising above the stream of fire.

For one moment he was directly above the dragon’s head, looking down at the spread of its wings and the dark burn scars Kael had left across the membranes.

He brought the axe down.

The dragon wrenched sideways, faster than should have been possible, and the blade missed its neck by inches. But it caught the tip of the left wing, the purple edge making contact for less than a second.

That was enough.

The wing tip dissolved, simply ceasing to exist, the matter coming apart in a quiet rush that ended with a muffled sound like air being swallowed.

The axe continued through and hit the ground, and the stone around the impact point dissolved outwards in a widening circle before the reaction stopped.

The dragon screamed, a sound that hit the chest like a physical blow, and wheeled away, putting distance between itself and Edric.

He straightened, watching it, axe in hand, giving it the moment.

***

Above the battlefield, the Stormborn had not moved from the position he’d taken when they arrived.

He didn’t need to.

The clouds began gathering above the academy, moving lower and closer to the ground, lit from within by the constant movement of lightning through their bellies.

He stood inside them, or rather the clouds stood around him, the way weather forms around a fixed point.

He then drew the bow in his hands.

The arrow that materialized between his fingers was not just lightning shaped like an arrow. It was a concentration of storm energy so dense it could barely be contained.

He drew it back, the air around the string humming at a frequency that made the teeth ache.

Then he released.

The arrow crossed the distance between him and the young dragon in less time than it took to blink. The dragon didn’t turn. It had no warning, no instinct that fired in the half-second it would have needed. The arrow entered its chest and the energy inside it discharged inwards, the force finding no resistance from scale or bone or anything else, converting everything it passed through into heat that had nowhere to go.

The dragon fell.

It dropped straight down with not as much as a twitch. All that could be seen was just the sudden absence of anything alive inside it, and then the long fall to the burning ground below.

The Stormborn was already drawing again.

He moved through them methodically, one arrow at a time, each one placed with the same unhurried accuracy.

The cloaked figures on the ground were smaller targets, faster, and some of them were fast enough to react when they felt the charge building in the air above them. Those ones moved.

But moving meant being somewhere else, which meant being closer to where Irina Valey could reach them.

And the ones who didn’t move in time simply died.

At the other side of the battlefield, Irina kept moving, having never stopped once from the moment they’d arrived.

The spider moved beneath her, eight legs finding purchase on the broken, burning ground with a delicacy that its size made obscene.

It was made entirely of bone, assembled in seconds from what the battlefield had already provided, and it moved with the same fluid intelligence she directed into it. The webs it threw were made of darkness, each one hitting hard.

Most of the hybrids caught in them struggled free. They were S-rank, and the webs were not meant to hold them permanently.

They were meant to slow them down for the single second it took Irina to arrive.

Her scythe cut through the air quietly, reaping lives.

She didn’t fight the way the stories about her described. There was no sweeping theatrical motion or flourish. She simply moved from one target to the next, and the ones she reached stopped being threats.

***

Lady in Dark had not moved.

She stood at the center of it all and watched with the quiet pleasure of someone observing a performance they had spent a long time arranging.

The destruction moved around her like water around a stone, the blue fire of the young dragons painting the ruins of the academy in cold light, ash drifting downwards through it all.

Then she turned back to Cecilia.

Cecilia had not moved either, though not by choice. The force holding her in place was invisible and total, pressing inwards from every direction without pain, simply refusing to allow motion.

“Enjoying the show?” Lady in Dark asked pleasantly.

Cecilia’s eyes were hard. “Why do you want the dagger?”

“Isn’t that obvious?” Lady in Dark chuckled. “To bring the Sleeper Beneath into this world.”

Horror quickly painted Cecilia’s face. “Why would you want to do that?”

Lady in Dark tilted her head, as if the question was almost too simple. “Peace,” she said.

The word landed strangely, as if simply speaking them would bring about the result.

“This is the only path that leads there,” Lady in Dark continued. “I’ve looked at the others. Believe me, I’ve looked.”

“It would bring annihilation,” Cecilia said. “Nothing else.”

Lady in Dark laughed, and the sound was genuinely warm. “Who told you I was bringing the Sleeper into reality so it could claim the world?”

Cecilia stared at her.

“I’m not releasing it,” Lady in Dark said, her voice dropping into something quieter. “I’m bringing it here so that I can control it. Do you understand the difference?”

“You can’t control something like that.”

“Can’t I?” Lady in Dark clasped her hands behind her back, pacing a slow half-circle around Cecilia. “There are rituals that bind demons. There are summonings that call heroes from other worlds and tether their will to a cause. There are contracts that have bent the nature of abyssal beasts to human purpose for centuries.”

She stopped.

“So tell me, Princess.” Her voice was almost gentle. “Why would there not exist a contract capable of enslaving an abyssal entity?”

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