Wren followed Liv up to where her father, in the shape of some horrible monster halfway between a man and a bat, fought against Valtteri ka Auris. She could see that, though Liv’s father possessed magic that was honestly terrifying in scale, he was at a disadvantage in terms of mobility. A column of ice might keep Valtteri above the mass of fighting soldiers below, but it also exposed him to archers. Nor would it actually get him within arm’s reach of a flying opponent.

And so Nighthawk Wind Dancer was doing what the Great Bats of Ractia had done for over twelve hundred years: harass their opponents, wearing them down moment by moment, striking and then retreating, until at last, when they saw an opening –

She could picture the moment her father would rip away Valtteri’s gorget, breaking the leather buckles that secured it, and then fasten the fangs of that gaping maw on the Elden warrior’s neck. How Nighthawk would rip out the jugular in a gout of blood, and drink it down, hot and fresh from his victim. After all, Wren had used that particular move often enough herself, and she didn’t even have the advantage of her father’s chiropteran maw.

Liv used her volley of flying swords to force Nighthawk back while she closed. Wren knew exactly what Liv was thinking, without having to exchange words out loud. It was clear from the way she moved: she was terrified that her father would be hurt or killed. Watching Henry and Julianne die had planted a seed in the girl’s belly, and that seed had bloomed into near-panic. Not that Liv would be likely to admit it, if Wren knew her friend.

Nighthawk blocked the first sword, and then seemed to decide it wasn’t worth the effort to deal with them all. Instead, he collapsed into blood, letting them pass through his viscous form with little more than a series of splashes.

If Wren could have grinned in bat form, she would have been doing it right then. Either her father hadn’t seen her yet, or he was dismissing her. She beat her wings, flung herself forward, and shifted into her newly acquired cougar form.

Wren’s timing was perfect. She’d made the same shift her father was making a hundred times, used it to dodge her enemies’ attacks on so many occasions that it was as natural as breathing. Her father reformed just as Wren completed her change into the shape of a cougar, and she was upon him before he could react, her predatory jaws locked around his throat.

However her father had acquired his horror of a fighting form, it hadn’t been designed to fly under the weight of two people. Wren’s cougar form was lean and muscular, and despite its power was actually slightly smaller than her human form. Still, seven stone of solid jungle predator latched onto the man’s neck was enough to send them both tumbling out of the sky.

Nighthawk’s leather wings wrapped around Wren as they fell, his clawed fingers scrabbled at her jaw, trying to pry her mouth open and force her away. Wren, for her part, had gotten only a tenuous grip: the thick fur beneath her teeth, combined with her father’s thick strong muscles, prevented her from really sinking her fangs in and tearing the throat open.

The wind whistled around them, and Wren heard the screams of dying men and women, and the ring of metal on metal, from below. She couldn’t see the ground, but knew it was rushing up at her fast. Fly for long enough, and you had a kind of instinct for how high you were, and how long it would take you to fall. What that instinct told Wren now was that she didn’t have enough time to finish it.

She shifted into blood at nearly the exact same time her father did, and they both splashed across the trampled, beaten earth of the mountain slope. As one, they shifted again, Wren to her human form, enchanted knives out, and her father into the winged monstrosity he now seemed to favor, spear in hand. They rolled away from each other and back to their feet, just out of reach, and began to circle, crouched low to the ground.

“Daughter,” Nighthawk Wind Dancer greeted her, with a smile. “I knew you had not died at Soltheris. I did not believe it for a moment. And then Manfred returned from Coral Bay and told me that he’d fought you there. I knew that, one day, you would return here.” His eyes were pools of blood, with no white and no color. They showed nothing of his thoughts or feelings.

“You were right,” Wren grunted. “I’m here to kill her. Maybe that will free you.” She clicked her heels together, and the world slowed.

Wren had time to see the swirl of battle around her clearly, as her father seemed to freeze, motionless. She could see Arjun, crouched atop a disc of blue mana, skimming over the heads of the crowd, wand out, as he used a mana shield to block a gout of fire from Aariv. Opposite the healer, Bryn swung round on her own disc, the two of them keeping the old priest trapped between them. His arm was a thing of horror where Arjun had destroyed it, replaced entirely by machinery, covered with the same armored plates used in the construction of the Antrians. As Wren watched, sigils etched into the metal of the old man’s vambrace lit, and a mana shield began to coalesce behind him, to block Bryn Grenfell’s mana knives.

Seija, the Elden woman who’d taken over leadership of the Ractian warriors of House Iravata, rolled away from a dying wyrm and came up with her lance in hand, raised to set aside Miina tär Eilis’s lunge. Liv’s cousin, who’d nearly died of an open neck at the pass, had a Lucanian rapier in hand, likely taken from a corpse. She continued past her opponent, slapped a hand on Seija’s etched steel pauldron, and rusted the metal away, exposing the other woman’s unarmored shoulder.

Somewhere above, Wren knew that Liv would be fighting, probably doing something equal parts awe-inspiring and foolhardy. She thought she caught a glimpse of Ghveris, enchanted blade rising and falling in the midst of the swirl of bodies, and the hope that he would be safe skittered across the surface of her thoughts like a stone skipped across water.

Then, Wren pushed off with her back foot and dashed at her father. Nighthawk was better than her – he’d been the one to teach her to fight, after all! – and he had a spear, besides. Daggers were a poor matchup for a weapon with that kind of reach, and Wren knew that she had to get inside his guard to be able to do anything at all. That, or she had to force him into a form where he couldn’t use the weapon.

Nighthawk was already bringing the tip of his spear in line to ward Wren off, but she had the luxury to see the moment he realized that he wouldn’t be able to stop her. His eyes, those horrible pools of scarlet, widened, and he visibly began to brace himself for impact.

She ducked around the tip of his spear, trapped it between the edges of both sigil-etched knives, and then pulled the weapons apart, slicing neatly through the wood haft of the spear in a single motion. The front half of the weapon began to fall, and Wren spun on one heel, raised her other leg, set her boot against the wood, and kicked it away, sending it spinning off across the battlefield. She completed her rotation, got both feet on the ground, and punched her father in the jaw with the pommel of her right dagger.

Wren could see the transition to blood form starting, but she was faster than the shift, and Nighthawk’s head whipped to the side, one of his broken fangs flying out along with a thin stream of blood. She rolled around his body, stabbed him once in the back as she passed, and only stopped moving when she’d opened up a distance of perhaps fifteen feet between them.

The world rushed back in, bringing with it all the sound and chaos of the surrounding battle, and Wren watched her father stumble, drop his spear, and bring one hand up to his jaw. His body shuddered for a moment, but did not complete the shift into blood. Until that very moment, she hadn’t known that you could halt a shift once it had begun.

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“You’ve gotten good,” her father said. He reached down to a sheath at his belt and drew a hunting knife. “Who trained you?”

“Archmagus Jurian of Carinthia,” Wren answered. Again, the two of them began to circle each other.

“Enchanted your knives, too, I’d guess,” Nighthawk observed. “And the boots?”

“From General Mishra in Lendh ka Dakruim.” Most of the soldiers near their duel had pulled back, though whether out of respect or fear, Wren couldn’t have said. One foolish cultist came at her from the side, wielding a hooked bush knife on a short wooden shaft. Wren turned to blood, reformed behind him, slit his throat, and then kicked the body aside. Her father, rather than take advantage of the distraction, simply watched her.

“You should come back to us,” Nighthawk said. “I’d like to introduce you to your brother.”

“I don’t have a brother,” Wren snarled, and lunged forward. There was only a small bit of magic left in her boots, and she wanted to save it for an emergency, so this would be a straight knife fight. She flipped the dagger in her left hand to lie with the blade flat against the back of her forearm, and used it to knock aside her father’s thrust. At the same time, she stabbed at him with the knife in her right hand, but her father caught her wrist in his grasp.

Wren strained against Nighthawk’s grip, but he was still so much bigger than she was – he always had been, and even after she was fully grown, that was one thing that hadn’t changed. “What did she do to you?” Wren demanded, as they wrestled.

“Only opened my eyes,” her father told her, twisting her wrist so that Wren had to drop the dagger in her right hand. “She is our mother, Wren. She will be our salvation.” Those horrible eyes, nothing like her father’s real eyes, sent a shiver of cold through Wren’s body, and she had to look away.

She dropped into her blood form, falling out of her father’s grasp into a viscous pool that could not be held, and he stepped back a pace to give himself room. Wren reformed as a cougar, and leapt for Nighthawk’s throat. He brought both his arms up, crossed together to protect himself, and she sunk her teeth into the meat of her father’s left forearm, drawing blood.

For the first time during this fight, Wren savored that thick, metallic taste. A rush of power shot through her, so strong that it was nearly overwhelming. In panic, she let go of her father’s arm and scrambled backward on all four paws, her tail lashing back and forth.

“You see, now?” Nighthawk asked her. “The blood of the Great Mother herself runs in my veins, daughter.” He held up his forearm, to show her as the punctured skin where her teeth had pierced his flesh healed over with new, pink skin. “You could fight me all day and into the night, and I would still outlast you. What will you do when you can no longer shift forms?”

Thunder rolled overhead, and lightning connected the sky and the land, killing men and women everywhere it struck.

Wren took her human form and grinned. “I don’t have to beat you,” she told her father. “Just hold you long enough for Liv to kill that bitch of a goddess.”

Nighthawk looked up, and in an instant grew his leathery wings, his horrific, chiropteran snout and fanged maw. But before he could launch himself upward, Wren was on him, stabbing at the delicate membrane of his wings, forcing her father to retreat.

“Get off!” her father roared.

Wren caught only the briefest glimpse of something enormous coming in from her side, and splashed against it in blood form, letting herself slide off along the rushing, scaled coil, until she could reform when her attacker had passed. The merest mouthful of blood from her father was enough to let her shift half a dozen times without feeling hunger; it sung in her veins.

A wyrm, maw gaping wide, lifted its head next to her father. Though it was smaller than the others on the field, that still made it large enough to tower over her.

“Noghis,” Nighthawk said. “Good, my son. Occupy your elder sister for a short while. I shall deal with the girl.”

He leapt up, beat his wings, and began to rise.

Wren jumped to follow him, but as she shifted into bat form, Noghis changed as well, and the two bats fluttered around each other, biting and scrambling for air. They tumbled to the ground, and rolled away from each other as wyrm and cougar, each hissing at the other with fangs barred.

But if Wren stayed to fight Ractia’s son, there was no one to keep her father from reaching Liv.

“Go!” Ghveris roared, crashing through the ranks of the enemy with his enchanted blade raised high. Half a dozen cultist and Iravatan Eld clung to his shoulders and back, hanging from the great plates of enchanted steel that armored his form. The weight of them all seemed little more than an inconvenience to the mighty Antrian, and he sliced at Noghis deeply enough to part scales and to draw blood.

Wren leapt up a second time, beating her wings desperately for height, and saw her father flying at Liv, who was focused on a circle of blood-letters before the gates. Wren shifted in midair, threw her second dagger, and shifted again as it ripped through the membrane of her father’s left wing.

Nighthawk screamed in pain, turned to look back over his shoulder, and began to lose height. Wren pursued him down to the ground, where she once again took the form of a cougar. Before she could leap at her father, however, he shifted into the wyrm-form that he’d stolen, which rose above her, above the battlefield, to a massive height. His head lashed forward, and it was all Wren could do to spring aside and avoid the bite.

Rain began to fall - scarlet rain. One drop hit Wren, while a dozen more ran off her father’s scaled coils. It soaked down through her fur coat, and touched her skin.

If she’d been one of the knights from Whitehill, or perhaps even one of the Eld, Wren would have died right then. But she was a member of the Red Shield Tribe, one of the Great Bats of Ractia, and there was no one with more control over her own blood than she had. Wren felt the smallest clot enter her veins and begin to move, but with a thought, she simply broke it apart, into pieces small as dust. Then, she leapt onto the trunk of a nearby tree, pulled herself up into the branches, and launched herself at her father’s back.

As Wren landed on the great, blood-slicked scales the rain drops froze in the air above. She had little time to pay attention to that – nor even to the thunderous crash that came when Silica fell out of the sky and tore up what seemed like half the mountain before she came to a halt.

Instead, Wren sank the sharp claws of her forepaws in between her father’s scales and hung on at the base of his neck, just behind the head. She found the place where the scales met, and bit, bit down hard, until her fangs were sunk as deep as they could go.

Nighthawk thrashed his coils, lashed his tail, and tossed his serpentine neck from side to side, seeking to throw his daughter off, but she hung on. She got the claws of her back legs wedged in, and began to rip and tear, digging through scales just as easily as she might have disemboweled a stag.

A gout of flame reached out for her, as Aariv tried to scour Wren off her father’s back, but it was blocked by a shield of ice from Valtteri, who rode a moving crest of ice uphill. Seija, half her armor rusted away almost entirely, threw herself at Liv’s father, but a bark of fire from Ghveris’s shoulder mounted weapon cut the Elden woman down, leaving her gasping on the ground. That left Aariv trying to stop Valterri from forcing his way up the mountain to the very peak. Steam boiled up from where their magics met. There were no more regular soldiers now, from either side – only the most deadly combatants, clustered together in a brutal melee.

Dimly, Wren was aware that Ghveris now wrestled with Noghis, mana shield flashing, sigil-etched blade rising and falling not far away. Wren was surprised to find that she wasn’t even slightly concerned that her friend would lose. Ractia’s son was, after all, only a child – no matter how powerful his mother might be.

And like a child, Noghis panicked.

In a flash of light, he disappeared. A tether, Wren realized. Just like Liv uses.

With the child fled, Ghveris turned on the father.

Nighthawk struck downward with his jaws wide and his fangs dripping venom, but Ghveris caught the upper jaw in one hand, the lower in the other, and wrenched the great wyrm’s entire head to the side. Wren went over with him, but hung on, ripping bloody flesh from her father’s back with every kick of her rear legs.

Nighthawk shrunk beneath her, and Wren followed him through blood to their human forms. Her father screamed, his back bleeding from where she’d ripped it to pieces. Even if the wounds would heal eventually, they clearly hurt in the meantime.

Before he could reach for her, Ghveris caught him by the wrists and held him down, with Wren perched on his chest.

“Don’t make me kill you,” she pleaded with her father. “Stop fighting.”

Then, with a terrible grinding that could be heard all the way downslope, the doors into Nightfall Peak opened.