Chapter 333: Hand It Over

Lady in Dark let the silence stretch, watching the horror settle across Cecilia’s face with quiet satisfaction.

It was a particular kind of horror, she had learned over the years. Not the kind that came from physical danger, which was blunt and immediate and faded quickly. This was the deeper kind. The kind that came from understanding. From seeing the shape of something clearly and recognizing that the shape was worse than anything you had imagined.

She let Cecilia sit in it.

The truth was that she could not simply take the dagger. She had known this for years, had built her entire approach around it, and had spent considerable time being patient about it.

The dagger was not an ordinary artifact. It could not be pried from a dead hand or cut free from a spatial ring. It had its own rules, old ones, written into its nature at the moment of its creation.

The owner had to surrender it willingly, in one form or another. Kill the owner, and the dagger would simply vanish, pulling itself to a new custodian somewhere in the world, and she would have to begin the search again.

She had already done that once.

She would not do it again.

She stepped forward, and her telekinesis closed around Cecilia without ceremony, lifting her from the ground.

Cecilia’s arms snapped to her sides, her legs dangling, her fire flickering instinctively before she suppressed it. Smart. Burning herself free would take more than she had left, and they both knew it.

“Hand it over,” Lady in Dark said.

Cecilia’s eyes burned. “Never. Even if it means my death.”

Lady in Dark chuckled, the sound genuine. “I’m not going to kill you.”

“Then what—”

“If I wanted you dead,” Lady in Dark said simply, “you would already be dead. I want to know where the limit is.”

She tilted her head, studying Cecilia the way someone might study a mechanism they were trying to understand. “I want to find the thing that is powerful enough to make you hand the dagger over of your own volition. Everyone has one. It’s simply a matter of finding yours.”

Behind her, something detonated.

The shockwave reached them a moment later, a rush of hot air that pulled at Lady in Dark’s cloak and sent dust spinning across the broken ground.

She didn’t turn. She could feel the dragon through the Leech, could sense that it was damaged, bleeding, being pressed back by Edric’s relentless attacks. But it was still standing. Still fighting. It had more left in it than Edric probably hoped.

She turned her attention back to Cecilia and reached inside her head, past the surface of her thoughts, past the immediate fear and fury and calculation, down into the deeper sediment of memory.

Something froze in the air an inch from the back of her neck. Lady in Dark’s telekinesis caught it before it made contact, holding the web of darkness perfectly still between her shoulder blades. She turned.

Irina Valey was moving towards her across the burning ground, the bone spider carrying her in long, fluid strides, its legs finding purchase on rubble and shattered stone with equal ease. Its eyes, such as they were, fixed on Lady in Dark without blinking.

The spider fired.

Lady in Dark swept her hand sideways and the webs dissolved in the air, the darkness coming apart into nothing.

The ground erupted to her left as a giant hand of assembled bone drove itself upwards, fingers spreading wide to close around her.

She stamped.

The force traveled down through her foot and out into the earth, and the bone construct shattered from the base up, pieces flying outward in every direction. She caught them before they scattered, held them for half a second, then sent them back.

The projectiles streaked towards Irina in a tight cluster.

Irina’s hand moved once and a maw of darkness opened in the air before her, swallowing every piece without slowing her approach.

Lady in Dark felt the charge building above her a fraction of a second before it arrived. She snapped the barrier up without looking, the translucent shell closing around her just as the Stormborn’s arrow hit.

The barrier cracked.

The ground outside it ceased to exist for a moment, the explosion replacing everything in a radius of twenty feet with heat and force and the smell of ozone. When it cleared, Lady in Dark stood at the center of the crater, the barrier dissolving around her, looking up.

The Stormborn hovered above, eyes burning, another arrow already forming between his fingers.

Lady in Dark regarded him for a moment. Then she looked at Irina, still advancing. Then up again at the Stormborn. Then at the wider battlefield, where her hybrids were being dismantled with the efficiency of people who had been doing this kind of work for a long time.

She exhaled slowly and raised her hand.

The rubble moved.

It came from everywhere, every broken piece of stone and mortar and structural material within a wide radius pulling inwards with the sound of grinding rock.

The pieces found each other, stacked and compressed and interlocked under the pressure of her telekinesis, building upwards in three columns that thickened and shaped themselves as they rose.

Limbs formed. Then torsos. The rough approximation of heads. Three golems, each one three stories tall, held together not by any binding material but by her will alone.

She breathed her intent into them and released them.

The first turned towards Irina and moved, covering ground with surprising speed for its size, one arm drawing back.

The other two grew protrusions from their shoulders that caught the air like wings, stone grinding against stone as they lifted, angling upwards towards the Stormborn.

Lady in Dark turned back to Cecilia.

“Now, where were we?”

She reached again for Cecilia’s memories, pushing past the surface, and then her attention snagged on something.

Not in Cecilia’s mind. Behind her. In the rubble.

She almost missed it. The mana signature was so faint it barely registered, less than a candle against the inferno of the battlefield around them. But it was there, and she recognized its shape, the particular quality of something draconic wearing a human form.

The reason she hadn’t sensed him when she’d arrived was simple. He was unconscious. Deeply, completely unconscious, the kind that came from having pushed a body far past the point it was designed to go. His presence had been swallowed by the noise of everything else happening around him.

Her telekinesis closed around him gently, almost carefully, and lifted.

Noah Webb rose from the rubble, limp and pale, with blood dried in dark lines across his face. He turned slowly in the air until he hung between Lady in Dark and Cecilia, suspended, his chest moving in shallow pulls.

Cecilia’s eyes found him and went wide.

Lady in Dark watched the recognition move across her face. Then other emotions, flickering fast and bright.

“Interesting,” she said softly. Then, more clearly, “You’ll notice that one can no longer sense the Mana Leech inside him.”

Cecilia stared at Noah. “That’s not possible.”

“And yet.” Lady in Dark spread her hands. “The Leech found a more attractive host nearby and made its choice. Which means Noah Webb is no longer dying.” She paused. “He is, however, currently helpless. And entirely within my reach.”

Cecilia’s fire flickered.

“So.” Lady in Dark paused for a moment. “Here is where we are. You have something I need. I have someone you would prefer to keep breathing.” She tilted her head. “The dagger, Cecilia. Hand it over.”

She watched Cecilia’s thoughts move behind her eyes. Watched her look at Noah. Watched her look back.

“Or,” Lady in Dark said pleasantly, “I begin finding out exactly how much damage a body can survive before it stops being a body.”

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