On Wings of Fire: Chapter 23

The darkness of teleportation released Fyn as his feet slammed into the ground again. He crouched low immediately, scanning the vicinity.

The Temple of Peace had been overthrown. Fyn had no other word for the cracked flagstones in front of him, the debris strewn across the courtyard, and the shattered windows and gaping doors of the building itself. The topiaries were toppled over and half-burnt in places and the ornate marble fountains were dry and stained a grim reddish brown.

His body moved automatically, trained from years of hunting and being hunted, and even as his mind gaped he seized Cassia by the arm and together they dove behind an overturned topiary.

This was enemy territory. More than enemy territory — they had walked straight into the command center of Iona’s army. According to Mithrinde, they had seized the Temple first in an ambush, both as a way to drive the Orders’ organization into disarray and to make use of the high ground overlooking the city. Now a dozen small battles raged in the streets below, as the retreating godformed armies and the advancing human one clashed.

He still felt unsettled in the head after that conversation, like there was a loose pebble rattling around his brain. Mithrinde's sheer and complete takeover of his body had happened quick as a whim, a swelling in his mote and then his thoughts changing, warping to be her thoughts, his tongue warping into her words. She had held no malice against him, caused him no pain, had even left with a warm sort of welcoming feeling, like she was glad he was there.

It was better than what Selach would have done. But if there was one thing Mithrinde had said that could have come out of Fyn’s mouth, it was that a god who took his follower’s will was not worthy of worship at all.

Cassia had relented and accepted Mithrinde’s help. Fyn supposed it was her decision and not his, and for the most part he believed Mithrinde’s remorse. But whenever he thought of how upset Cassia had looked when Tilana told her the truth about the gods, he had to grit his teeth and bite back a lingering anger.

“Do you think they’re keeping them in the main room?” Cassia whispered at Fyn’s side, peering toward the shadowed, half-collapsed opening. There was still room to get through, but Fyn didn’t like the look of the structure. The rest of the front porch, with its battered and blasted columns, could come down at any moment.

“They’ll be well-guarded,” Fyn whispered back, “and I don’t see any humans out here. We should head around the back.”

“Or we can go in here and take them by surprise,” Cassia said. “I bet they think this whole side is collapsed. You can go in your drake form and distract them—”

Fyn shook his head. “You have my mote,” he reminded her.

“And no way,” he added to forestall her second suggestion, as her face lit up at the realization that she could now turn into a drake. “Save it for when we have to fly away carrying a massive crate of shards.”

“Fine,” Cassia sighed. “But you aren’t going around the back and looking for trouble. This is obviously our best way in.”

She was right — Fyn was not confident enough in his ability to sneak with these massive wings on his back to justify trying to scout out the back of the compound. They had surprise and flight on their side. Better not to lose either advantage.

They crept forward, darting between the debris and freezing at the slightest hint of movement. As Fyn crept, he recalled how Kez had mocked him, an eternity ago now, for his inability to sneak properly because of his shiny red scales. Well, with the addition of pure white wings, that was one thing that definitely hadn’t changed.

Luckily, they saw almost no one as they approached. The walls around were manned, but irregularly, and all the guards’ attention was directed outward instead of in. Once or twice one of the figures looked around with a yawn, but Cassia threw an illusion over herself and Fyn quickly enough to stave off the wandering eye.

When they reached the wreck of the front porch, Fyn held up a hand to signal to Cassia to wait. He inched forward and ducked under a beam, running his fingers along the stone to sense its stability. He was not a troll, and stone pulled from quarries and worked was more Valja’s hunting grounds than Selach’s, but foot by foot he picked out a path between the broken stones.

“This way,” he whispered, guiding Cassia in front of him and showing her where to place each foot. She was still uneasy on her right leg, and he held her at the waist to help her balance. Her curly blonde hair tickled his nose and he wondered if his fingers felt as electric to her as her nearness did to him.

After one dicy moment where his wings overbalanced him and he almost slipped, they finally ducked under the last leaning beam of wood and froze, still screened by a single fragment of column as they looked into the Temple of Peace.

The large, austere room had been polished perfectly clean the first time he had seen it, when he had arrived with Zhiron and met Cassia for the first time. Now debris caked the floor and the front corner of the roof had fallen in, the streaming sunlight catching specks of dust in its beams.

The tall, ornate golden pillar that had once held the Treatise was gone entirely, taken or destroyed Fyn did not know. In its place sat a low, flat altar covered with a patterned rug. And kneeling next to it with a large crate at her side, taking shards of pottery out one by one and arranging them on the altar, was Sasha. Her long braided hair covered her face and her fingers worked quickly.

Fyn’s heart leapt. She was completely alone, as far as Fyn could see, and the only other entrance to the room that wasn’t collapsed was a small servants’ door in the back that stood slightly ajar. She would help them, he was sure of it, once he told her they had a plan that would free everyone, all at once, from the gods, and stop a war that would soon become more destructive than any other kind of change.

“Sasha!” he called softly, leaning forward out of their hiding place, ignoring the way Cassia stiffened beside him.

“Fyn—”

“She saved your life,” Fyn reminded Cassia. “She’ll hear us out.”

Sasha paused in her work but did not turn.

“Who’s there?” she said, her voice thick and strange.

Fyn was already stepping fully into the room. “It’s me, Sasha. Cassia’s here too. We have a plan to stop the war. Will you listen?”

“A plan to stop the war,” Sasha said slowly, her voice still oddly thick. “Tell me.”

She was still frozen in that position, fingers tracing one of the pottery shards she had just laid on the altar. It looked like she was trying to piece the jugs back together. Even from here, Fyn could feel the power, and that it was rapidly leaking away. They didn’t have much time.

“We’re going to make another Treatise,” Cassia said cautiously, stepping up to and just in front of Fyn as if to defend him from her. “If all the elemental gods agree, it’ll mean none are more powerful than the rest. Then the human gods might agree to peace.”

Said like that, Fyn couldn’t help but acknowledge the audacity of the plan. More likely than not, they would make the Treatise and the human gods would shrug and carry on their genocidal war. It would be exactly what they had wanted all along — the elemental gods unable to directly challenge them as their tide of death swept across the Basin. And that was if they got all the elemental gods to agree in the first place. Including Selach.

But they had to try. For Cassia, grown up without a mote she so desperately wanted. For Sasha, torn apart from her family because of Selach’s warped idea of loyalty. For every godformed or human who had never had the chance to know their gods, or who had only ever felt their weight as a crushing rockslide.

So he could go back to Mithrinden with Cassia and stay there, a free drake.

“We need the shards,” Fyn told Sasha. His arms twitched at his sides, ready to grab Cassia and dive if Sasha threw a knife instead of answering. “We can take you with us. You’ll be free.”

Still no answer. Sasha’s shoulders tensed, and Fyn almost moved right there and then. She was shaking slightly, as if struggling against something.

Then her head turned and she looked at Fyn at last, and Sasha’s eyes were not her own. They were pure black and pitiless, bleeding through the iris and completely coloring the whites.

She wept inky clouds of magic that stank of death. The energy rippled across the room and turned Fyn’s stomach. So here was Iona’s Death witch, who killed legions with a touch.

“You should have stayed in Mithrinden,” she said in that same wrong, soulless voice. “I didn’t want to have to kill you.”

A single shard of pottery fell from her limp hand as she stood and pressed a hand to the floor, her dark eyes not leaving Fyn and Cassia’s faces. The stone beneath her cracked, dark lines streaking across the floor toward them.

Fyn’s instincts took over. “Fly!” he shouted to Cassia, heaving her up by the waist and spreading his own wings. He leapt into the air and tumbled head-over-heels, trying desperately to catch the lift he needed to balance his body. He’d never flown in human form before and it was more different than it had any right to be.

By the time he finally straightened himself out, Cassia and Sasha were dueling. Cassia swooped around her in a beautiful display of instinct and skill combined, light blazing from her wings and hands as she fought. Sasha spun on her heels to keep pace with her, her braids flying around her head and her hands curled into claws.

Darkness sprayed out from her fingers in inky jets, thrown into the air like chains to catch Cassia and drag her down toward the thick essence of Death gushing from Sasha’s form. The floor beneath them was stained completely black now, and Fyn with horror knew how the outnumbered and untrained human army had forced the guard forces of all the Orders back through the streets of Promise to be besieged in Market Square. How could anyone fight the creeping essence of disease and death itself?

“Fyn, the shards!” Cassia shouted as she spun backward, drawing Sasha a step away from the altar, then another. Her breath was labored and she only narrowly missed the next death-ribbon Sasha threw.

Fyn seized his instinct to draw Sasha’s attention away from Cassia and dove at the altar instead, reaching out to sweep the shards back into crate so Cassia could transform and carry them.

But Sasha was ready for him. The altar froze cold as he dove. His fingertips brushed against the stone and the instant he touched the blackness they turned dead and numb.

Fyn snatched his hand up and cradled it to his chest as he passed the altar and swooped high into the air again. The red scales had turned gray and flaky, a grey that had nearly crept up his hand but was even now being pushed back by Mithrinde’s white glow.

His heart pounded at the close call. The deepest and most instinctive terror of humanity had struck directly to his core — Sasha’s power was wrong, and no human or godformed should have ever been able to wield it without losing all humanity or withering away themselves. Seconds more and he doubted anything could have pushed back the advance of Death.

He wheeled around in the air again, darting in front of Cassia and joining her diversion. They had no time. The cracking stones and wingbeats and his own cry would bring more mages running, maybe even Iona herself, and then there would be no hope. But they couldn’t get close to the altar while Sasha’s evil power defended it.

Spinning around each other, Fyn and Cassia locked eyes for a second, and Fyn saw that Cassia knew as well as he did the danger they were in. She pulled up short and glanced from him to Sasha.

Flame kindled at the fingertips of her good hand, and with a cry of pain Cassia sent a blast of fire to the floor.

Sasha had to roll to avoid it, but she sprang back to her feet and stood over the crate of shards in defiance. Though her fingers were red and blistering, Cassia was already readying for another blast, even as five, ten, fifteen tendrils of death spiraled up in the air toward her.

Fyn hung stagnant, hardly aware of his wings beating. He had never felt so useless on a battlefield. The two people in the world who meant everything to him, a human and an angel, and here they were going to kill themselves and each other and all he had was a pair of wings and a light show he hardly knew how to channel. He turned to swoop down not at Sasha but at Cassia, to take his mote back and fight Sasha himself even if it meant his death at Selach’s hands—

Then, even as Sasha drove her spiraling tendrils forward with a twisted hand, her eyes flickered unexpectedly and met Fyn’s.

A sliver of brown shone through the black. A single desperate plea.

Fyn dove. He folded his wings and spiraled down, not toward Cassia but toward Sasha, falling down the center of the deadly tendrils, right over her head. She looked up, her face stoic and still as ever, and brought her hands together.

The tendrils licked at Fyn’s legs as he reached over his shoulders. They sank into his feet as he seized a wing in each hand, closed his eyes, and pulled.

And they came wrapping around him a second too late, as he slammed palms-first into Sasha’s chest, knocking her to the floor and pressing the mote of Mithrinde into her chest.