Three ranks of massed infantry, two hundred and fifty men and women in a mixture of Elden enchanted steel and Lucanian jack of plate, charged forward at Liv’s command, and she followed with the mounted knights and elders.

To Liv’s surprise – she’d never been part of a charge, before – the movement was really a march, just the same as when they’d been coming up the mountain. A part of her had expected that they would all simply run forward as fast as they could, probably while screaming war cries. Instead, Ghveris kept the soldiers together, moving at a brisk but sustainable pace, in good order.

It made sense, when she was able to take a moment to think about it. Two-hundred yards was a good distance to run, especially wearing armor and carrying weapons. As nerve wracking as it was to be taking their time, at least this way her soldiers wouldn’t be exhausted by the time they got close enough to actually do a bit of fighting.

Still, Liv itched to simply fly ahead and meet Nighthawk in the air above the battlefield. Every moment she was delayed was a moment that she wasn’t helping her father. She could only catch glimpses of the fight between the two men, because Wren’s father used his monstrous, winged, form to swoop down from above, then climb back up into the sky to avoid counterattacks.

A pillar of ice rose up, with Valtteri ka Auris crouched atop it, one hand holding onto the edge, carrying him thirty feet up. Three glittering hoops of ice, nestled each within the other and smaller toward the center, froze into existence around Liv’s father and began to spin, each along a different orientation. An arrow shot up, but was snapped into two pieces and knocked aside before it could reach Valtteri. Even Nighthawk, the next time he swooped down, couldn’t find an opening through which to attack without losing his spear, and was forced to abort his dive.

In the meanwhile, the arrival of Ractia’s lieutenants had swung the momentum of the battle, not simply halting the allied vanguard’s advance, but actively beginning to push them back. Aariv, the eastern priest, flew in circles above the battlefield, scorching the soldiers below him with the same jets of flame he used to keep himself in the air. Liv couldn’t see the flash of blue in his eyes from so far away, but from how he flitted back and forth, deftly avoiding any arrow, crossbow bolt, or magical attack that came his way, she had no doubt that he was once again using Bheuv.

The remaining loyal wyrmriders of House Iravata had thrown themselves at Seija, forcing her away from where Elder Aatu had fallen; if he was still alive, Liv had hope they might be able to pull him out. Wherever Seija’s lance stabbed, however, horrible, gaping wounds opened, revealing glimpses of white bone, or spilling the tangled ropes of a wyrm’s guts out onto the trampled earth of the battlefield.

Noghis, distinct from the other wyrms on the field due to his smaller size, was in among the allied troops, lashing about with his tail, trusting his scales to turn aside their weapons. Every time his head reared back and struck, fangs latched on to some brave man or woman who’d followed Liv and her father here, only to die in this place.

The one small victory, so far, was that Manfred hadn’t risen up from where Liv’s father had smashed him down with a fist of ice. So far as she knew, the man, no matter his tactical skill, was no mage. With the distance he’d flown, and no healing magic or enchanted armor, he should be dead or dying.

And of course, on top of all this, Ractia had not yet shown herself – so everything that was happening was still mere prelude to the true battle.

A second command from Ghveris, at perhaps fifty yards, finally sent the infantry into a run. The ranks broke apart, no longer three tight lines, but now a mass of soldiers careening forward at full speed.

“Wait,” Kaija shouted, holding her hand out to restrain the riders.

“Hold!” Sir Hardwin of Ashford called out, echoing her. “Hold until they’ve met the enemy!”

A space opened up between the riders and the charging infantry: Liv saw some of the soldiers slip on the ice that had been left to bridge the enemy’s ditch. Others leapt it, and though the charge stumbled, it was not halted. The allied troops slammed into the chaotic battle with a massed weight that Liv could feel, even from a good distance behind.

“Right?” Hardwin called over to Kaija, and the former armorer nodded.

“Wheel right!” she shouted. “Charge!”

Liv was happy enough to let the two of them make the decision. The riders swung round to the enemy flank, and she was pleased to see that here they would not hit their own infantry as they came on. Instead, a group of mercenaries had fallen in around a knot of Antrians, and together the enemy troops had managed to hold their ground.

They were upon the ice-bridge before Liv had time to think, as the horses galloped forward together at full speed. Steria leaped the bridge of her own accord, carried along by the horses of the knights, Liv’s guards, and the tundra riders surrounding them. Liv wondered if some part of the mare’s brain conceived that she was running with her herd, caught up in primal instincts from a time before horses had been tamed.

A staccato bark of fire from the Antrians was all the warning Liv had, and she threw up her wand to create a shimmering pane of blue mana, veined with gold, just long enough to catch the bullets. She saw two other mana shields, which showed that Arjun and Bryn had heard the volley coming, as well. Liv held her shield until the last moment, just before riders at the front of the charge reached it, then let it dissolve into motes of glittering mana, which she pulled back to her using her Authority.

The riders who had gotten out in front of Liv slammed into the mercenaries and into the mana shields of the Antrians, and Liv found herself not only in a swirling mass of trampled mercenaries, riders being pulled down from their horses, and swinging weapons – but also now within the shoals of a rift.

Liv took a mana-laden breath, filling her lungs with magic, and found her nearest protector. “Take my reins,” she ordered Lina. All around her and the elders, the mounted guards under Kaija’s command formed a circle, hacking out a safe space around Liv and the elders where the enemy could not come. The moment Steria’s reins were out of her hand, Liv began to cast. “Aluthent Dvo Fetim Æn’Mæ.”

With a beat of cerulean wings, Liv rose up above the battle, and was not surprised to find that Wren, in bat form, flitted around her as she climbed. With half a thought and a whisper of intent, Cel roared to life at the back of her mind, and a cloud of frozen swords shot out toward Nighthawk.

The horror that had once been a man batted one blade away with his spear, then dissolved into a vapor of blood, allowing the other five swords to splash through unimpeded. Nighthawk reformed after the blades had gone by and begun to swing around to return to Liv, then beat his immense wings to rise higher, opening distance between him and where Liv’s father crouched on his pillar of ice.

A bat flew past Liv, then shifted in midair, and Wren, in her recently acquired cougar form, latched her mouth around her father’s neck. Together, the two of them tumbled down toward the ground, Nighthawk’s wings wrapped around them as they fell. Liv was able to track their path just long enough to see both splash into pools of blood when they hit, and then they were lost amidst the back and forth of soldiers fighting.

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“Are you alright?” Liv called over to her father, beating her wings of coherent mana to stay as close to him as she could.

“No one’s going to kill me with a simple spear,” her father called back, his face split by a grin. “Look at you. Fighting just like your aunt. She never had the wings, though.”

“Those spinning hoops are interesting,” Liv remarked, unable to keep a smile from her own face. Had she and her father ever actually fought side by side before? He’d rescued her in Freeport, but they’d nearly always been in different places since the war against Ractia began. There had been the once, briefly, when Ractia had sent a unit of Antrians to probe the rift at the bridge… but that had hardly been a battle.

Liv raised her wand to the clouds above the mountain peak. She needed to be careful not to hurt any of their own soldiers, which limited her options. There, Arjun and Brin, riding skimming discs of blue mana, orbited about Aariv. The priest threw a gout of flames at Arjun, but Bryn swooped in to catch it, forming the fire into a ball suspended between her outstretched hands, which she then threw down into the open maw of an enemy wyrm. A moment later, a blast of fire blew out the neck of the monster, and it dropped, head nearly severed by the explosion, to lie twitching on the ground.

Not far from that fight, Liv saw that her cousin had ridden forward toward where Seija kæn Iravata was rampaging through the allied forces with her enchanted lance. Miina thrust a hand out, and the scales of the enemy wyrm faded, cracked, and began to fall. The creature tumbled, skidding across the ground and throwing its rider clear. Within mere moments, the enormous serpent was nothing more than a withered, decaying corpse – though Liv doubted that sort of spell would be quite so effective against Seija herself.

Elder Aira threw a handful of seeds in the direction of Noghis, and enormous, thorned vines, glistening with poison, erupted from the ground to surround the juvenile wyrm. Liv’s grandmother and her great-uncle Eilis had split off from the third elder, and instead approached a cluster of Antrians. At a glance from the brother and sister, the steel armor of the Antrians rusted out, quickly changing color to an orange-brown and falling off in flakes to reveal the inner workings of the machines. They stumbled and fell as their own legs were suddenly unable to hold their own weight.

“Lucent Aiveh Nevn Æn’Manim!” Liv shouted, and brought her wand down.

Nine spears of lightning stabbed down from overhead, connecting the heavens with the mountain slope in threads of brilliant light. Each one of her targets was an enemy soldier who’d found a moment’s stillness in the fighting, no longer immediately engaged with any of the allied troops. One was a mercenary who’d just crushed the head of an Elden soldier with his flanged mace; another was an Iravatan warrior with a short arming sword in either hand, kicking the body of a Whitehill knight off his left blade.

No matter what they were doing, each one of the nine died in an instant. Around them, dirt sprayed up in a blast, leaving only blackened, scorched earth and twitching, burnt corpses. After a moment’s hesitation, thunder cracked and rumbled across the Varunan mountain range.

Liv flew higher, and inhaled the power of the rift. She let it thrum through her body, sink into her bones and vibrate through her muscles to dance, tingling, across her skin. She’d used a truly ridiculous amount of mana in only moments of battle, leaving her with a mere fifteen rings remaining. But the surging mana of the rift filled her, and she drank from it eagerly. There was no way that she would ever run out of magic, fighting inside a rift.

A crossbow bolt shot up out of the enemy rear, from one of the mercenaries, but a casual thought turned it aside with a shield of blue mana that appeared just long enough to protect Liv, and then dissipated again.

From this height, Liv had a clear view up the final slope to the summit itself – which, she saw, was something of a misnomer. In fact, Ractia’s forces had not built at the true highest point of the mountain. Instead, they’d made their camp, now a rough town, up against a final piece of rock that thrust up toward the sky. There, a gate had been revealed, where vines and fallen scree had been hacked away or cleared.

They were tall, enchanted with Vædic sigils, and made Liv think instantly of the Tomb of Celris, and the great doors there, hidden inside the frozen canyon, surrounded by ancient statuary.

But before she could get into the ruins themselves, Liv saw one last group of enemies. Gathered at the intersection of two streets of packed earth, in the center of all the barracks and houses, the stockades and the corrals, a score of robed figures stood in a circle, chanting with their arms raised.

They appeared human, though they did not wear the fashions of either Lucania or Lendh ka Dakruim. Instead, each had the pelt of a jungle animal secured about their shoulders. The jaws of a jungle cat hung down over the face of an old woman, while a bear decorated the head of the man next to her. Each of them carried wicked looking daggers, and they had set up a stone altar there at the intersection, with a figure of Ractia raised behind it. There, they had painted the altar dark with wet blood.

Corpses were tossed off to one side: animals, yes, but also Liv could see alliance captives, some dressed in Whitehill jack of plate, others in Elden armor. They lay discarded in a heap, each one with their throat opened.

“Blood-letters,” Liv said, though so high in the sky she spoke only to herself.

Silica rose above the rock into which the gates were set, still surrounded by a colony of bats: one of the great wyrm’s eyes had been pierced and collapsed, and it leaked blood and viscous fluids that streamed back along the scales of her face as she flew. She threw herself, back first, into the rock, leaving one of the bats as nothing more than a smear of blood and fur, then beat her wings and was off again.

Liv reached up to the clouds again, only to find that another hand – or hands – was there before her. While she had been taking stock of the summit, a horrible power had risen up from the blood-letters. It felt, to Liv, less like they were casting a spell, and more like, somehow, they were channeling Ractia’s Authority through their rites.

The clouds darkened, and it began to rain.

Liv raised a half-globe of solid blue mana over herself, because she didn’t trust whatever was coming down. Scarlet drops appeared on the translucent shield, then began to run down its curved sides before falling below Liv to continue on down to the ground.

The rain of blood hit Silica first, because she was fighting in the air, and had no mana shield to protect her. For a moment, Liv fooled herself that it would do nothing to the mighty, ancient wyrm. Then, Silica’s great, scaled body spasmed and fell, boneless and limp, down to the slope below. Trees cracked and tore out of the earth as the wyrm tumbled down the side of the mountain, digging up great furrows to mark the passing of her immense body. The Great Bats who had been harassing her, unaffected, dove down toward the battle.

Liv followed them. She tucked her wings and flew straight toward her grandmother and her great uncle, pulling her shield along and keeping it above her. “The rain!” she shouted, as soon as she was close enough that she thought they might have a chance of hearing her. “Stop the rain!”

All around the battlefield, where drops of blood fell upon the allied soldiers, men and women began to lurch to one side and fall. A clot of hardened blood, Arjun had explained to her. And when it reaches the brain…

Liv was never more grateful for the unconditional trust her grandmother had shown in her, since the moment they’d met, than in that moment. Eila tär Väinis and her brother raised their hands up toward the sky, and every glistening red drop of blood simply stopped, hanging overhead like a doom foretold but not yet come.

Her boots skidded across the dirt as she came in fast, and Liv nearly fell over. She allowed her mana shield to dissipate, now that the falling blood had been caught frozen in a moment of time. “It’s the same spell that dropped Keri,” she panted. “We can’t let it touch any more of our people. Do we have anyone with Ve? They can take control of the clouds and –”

Something hit Liv in the back, and she went tumbling with a great weight, rolling like a log downslope. Metal armor crushed against her, and if it wasn’t for her own boiled leather and enchanted steel, she was certain she would have broken something. Finally, she and the person who’d tackled her tumbled apart and came each to their own respective halt, downslope of the battle. She lost awareness of her six frozen swords, and they scattered along the slope.

Manfred, Captain of the Grey Company, lurched to his feet. The steel plates of his armor were crushed in, mangled and broken, and his helm had been flung aside in the mad tumble. A strand of white hair stuck to Liv’s cheek, and only then did she realize she’d lost her own helmet, as well.

Sigils pulsed and glowed a hot red, etched all along the mercenary’s armor. As Liv watched, dents flattened, as if someone inside had taken a hammer to them. With each pulse, the cuts and bruises on the man’s face healed. He drew a long, wide war-knife from a sheath on his hip, and smiled, though his mouth was full of blood and there were gaping holes where his teeth were missing.

With a wordless war, he lunged at her, and Liv only just managed to knock the first strike aside by lifting a blade of ice from where it had fallen and interposing it. “You should be dead,” Liv gasped.

“The Great Mother heals,” Manfred said, his voice a choked gurgle, followed by a cough of blood. And then, knife in hand, he was on her.