Despite being taken by surprise, the alliance troops had been hardened by, at this point, months or even years of conflict. The vicious, grinding fight up the mountain the the summit; the battle at the pass between Whitehill and Courland; the long expedition on foot and by boat across the continent of Varuna, and even the eruptions throughout the north had long ago whittled away any soldiers who weren’t disciplined, capable, and committed to the fight.

From where she stood in front of the great double doors into the mountain, Liv could see mana shields flicker into existence, where Arjun and Bryn moved to protect the wounded and exhausted men and women who’d pulled back downslope. Beams of brilliant white light connected the viscous orbs with soldiers of House Bælris, and left smoking, scorched ashes in their wake. A great hedgerow rose, blocking the forward progress of Ractia’s conjured army, and Liv recognized the distinctive shift of color from deep, bloody red to a sort of pale pink that occurred when one of the orbs was frozen. That would, she guessed, be Kaija.

Still, the allied forces had already fought an exhausting, uphill battle, only to now be confronted, with no warning or time to prepare, by an enemy that neither tired, nor felt pain, nor dismay or fear at being stymied.

“Don’t look away from me, girl - you aren’t one of us yet,” Ractia hissed. Great wings coalesced at her back, extending out from the goddess’s shoulder blades twenty feet in either direction. They reminded Liv more of a butterfly’s wings than a bird’s, and seemed almost to be made of colored glass, like the windows of a temple to the trinity. Golden panes of mana, stained and shaded orange or red to the edges by the presence of blood, were divided from each other by structures of black iron.

“Genevieve’s trick,” Liv grumbled to herself. She should have anticipated it: after all, any magic that a human woman could figure out a thousand years after the gods had been killed, no matter how talented she was, had likely been known to those who had brought magic to the world.

Ractia lifted into the air, her wings not so much flapping as stretching, and fire began to lick around their edges. A single, massive beat of the wings, angled forward, sent a storm of fire, needle-thin slivers of iron, and golden shards of mana shooting forward at Liv, her friends, and the elders.

Ghveris’s mana shield flickered into existence, positioned in front of he and Wren, and Liv created a second blue disc, interposed between her own body and the oncoming assault. Before either shield could be tested, however, an enormous wall of ice rose up out of the ground, forty feet long and nearly as high, between all eight of them and the incoming storm.

Shards of ice and frozen dust exploded from the outer surface of the wall, and gusts of steam where fire melted the ice. Valtteri ka Auris dragged himself forward to the barricade he’d created, pressed one hand up against the frozen inner surface, and continued to channel his mana into reinforcing the wall. Liv could sense half a dozen ornaments, tied at the end of his braids, being exhausted of their mana in a heartbeat.

She remembered the moment, years before, when Master Grenfell had tested her own wall of ice in the courtyard of Castle Whitehill, and how the clouds of steam had boiled up around her while she desperately tried to keep even the thinnest layer of ice standing before the onslaught of fire magic. Liv didn’t have high hopes for her father’s success in the same contest of endurance against Ractia.

Liv leaped up, beating her own wings of blue mana, raised her wand, and called down lightning from the clouds above. “Lucet Cvelia o’Mae!” With a shout, she shaped the crackling, blinding bolts into a great wheel and flung it directly at the goddess.

With a cry, Ractia drew a long, thin spike of iron up out of the ground. The wheel of lightning hit the spike, while the goddess lunged backward on her beautiful wings, and shot down the length of metal into the ground.

Suddenly, the goddess jerked to a halt, and then was yanked down to earth by a thorned vine, looped around her ankle. Ractia hit the mountainside with a thunderous crash, and Liv saw that Aira tär Keria was carefully climbing out from behind the broken wall of ice, cane in hand. The old woman cackled, made a motion with her hand, and the vine slammed the Lady of Blood from one side to the other, whipping her about by one trapped ankle.

“Go save our troops and come back, Livara,” Aira shouted. “I’ll keep her occupied for the moment.”

Ractia dissolved into a vapour of blood, which streamed up into the air away from the vine, and then coalesced back into her physical form, including the wings she’d created moments before. “You’ll occupy me, will you?” the goddess snarled. “Impudent.” She reached out toward the vine, made a grasping motion, and then pulled her arm back. The vine withered in a moment, suddenly dry as late-autumn leaves, and a floating orb of water hovered through the air back toward Ractia.

“Go!” Aira shouted, just before the orb shot forward and encompassed her head, and then she couldn’t speak at all.

With a wordless cry of frustration, Liv turned aside from the fighting and fought against the air itself to gain height. In the brief moments she’d been occupied fighting Ractia, she could see that the allied army - what was left of it - had begun a full scale retreat down the mountain. The warriors from Kelthelis had raised a great wall of ice to bar the advance of the blood-orbs, but they were already at work tearing it down, using their whips of blood to lift debris left behind by the battle and fling it against the ice. Already, cracks were beginning to form.

Liv could tell that if she didn’t do something, the wall would come down in moments. There was no way that so many wounded, exhausted soldiers would be able to get to safety, not carrying their comrades. They would try, certainly, Arjun and the rest; Liv knew her friend well enough to understand he would never willingly leave behind soldiers who might yet be saved. But it was a long way down to the plateau, and there was no guarantee the defenses there would stop or even slow the advance of the orbs.

A half dozen plans flitted through Liv’s mind, each of them discarded in turn. Could she freeze hundreds of Ractia’s creations? Not in a single spell, certainly, even though Liv doubted they had any Authority to speak of. She could bring a storm down on the mountain top, if Ractia didn’t use her own Authority to contest Liv. Perhaps it would work, with the goddess distracted - though how long the elders could occupy the Lady of Blood without Liv to help them was still an open question.

But Liv doubted even one of the Vædim would pay attention to something happening high overhead, up in the sky, while they were themselves hard pressed on the ground. She took a deep breath, and woke both Aluth and Cel.

Days upon days of practice made her confident with it, now. What had begun as overwhelming had, under the hard testing of the elders, become merely difficult. As miserable as the experience had been, Liv supposed that she could thank the old women for that, at least.

She forced herself to hold the breath for a long moment, almost until Liv felt she would burst, while she rehearsed the incantation in her mind. It would be the first time she ever spoke it aloud.

“Celent Næv’belim Æn’Ceuvim,” Liv chanted. This was the easy part; this she’d cast before, isolated from the remainder of the spell. But the incantation did not stop there. “Cveia Sāit Væris, Aluthet CoÆ'Væris. Cveia Aluthim Sāit, Celet Næv’bel Æn’Ceuvim.”

Mana surged through Liv’s arm and into the stormwand, which she pointed up to the sky. Once again, as they had at the pass, both words began to push against each other. It was the exact same feeling, as if two different concepts were fighting for supremacy, and Liv knew that no matter how hard she struggled to hold onto them, she wasn’t strong enough. If she did that, it would be like her fight against Genevieve Arundell all over again - an explosion, which she’d be lucky to survive, this time.

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But her grandmother had told her - had shown her - what to do. That moment when Eila had stood behind Liv, whispering in her ear, holding her hands. Close your eyes - easier to feel, that way. It was as if her grandmother was embracing her now, instead of fighting, maybe dying. Your conception of the magic must be unified. You are not combining two things. You are understanding a single, joined vision. There is no separation between words.

Liv pictured it, in her mind, and then she made it happen. Cel and Aluth stopped fighting, joining together to compliment each other at her command in a single spell. A wave of mana erupted from Liv’s wand, rushing up into the sky, higher and higher.

Nearly half her mana capacity left Liv’s body in that single casting - a full seventeen rings of mana, exhausted all at once in the most exhausting spell she’d ever performed. For a long moment, it almost seemed as if nothing at all had happened, but she could already feel the changes taking place in the clouds.

Liv beat her wings, flying backward, away from the army of viscous blood orbs, and back toward the fight against Ractia. She wasn’t certain just how powerful this would be, just how destructive. They hadn’t had time to test -

Ten spears of adamant ice, dense as steel, fell out of the sky. No, not ten - Liv could feel the waste heat from freezing them into existence already meeting the mana threshold she’d set, and freezing more projectiles into existence. And as the spears shot down through the air, they generated more heat by the very act of falling, something that she hadn’t anticipated.

“Blood and shadows,” Liv swore, diving for the ground to get behind something, anything, before the spears hit. She’d thought there might be enough waste heat to coalesce another few spears, maybe fifteen in total instead of ten, but every single spear was making heat as it fell. More and more of them froze into existence, a runaway cascade of magic that quickly doubled, then tripled, the number of falling weapons.

Not a single explosion, but dozens, rippled across the army of blood orbs. The light was blinding, and a wave of pressure threw Liv out of the air, sending her tumbling end over end, wings wrapped around herself. If she hit the ground like this, she was going to break something - maybe her neck.

A thought solidified a chute of ice, and Liv fell into the curve, letting it carry her uphill and away from the blast, as impact after impact shook the mountainside. She tumbled out and rolled across the dirt, wrapped her arms around her head, and waited for the explosions to stop.

When the mountain finally stopped quaking, Liv raised her head. She felt such a ringing in her ears that she could hardly hear anything at all: someone could have been screaming in her ear, and she doubted that she would have noticed. For a moment, she was afraid to even look at what she’d done.

Downslope, both the icewall, and the army of blood monsters, were entirely gone. There was simply nothing left. Overlapping craters across the entire stretch of the ascent had left nothing but a narrow, blasted land where nothing survived - no trees, no grass, nothing. While Liv gaped, her mouth hanging open in spite of herself, she couldn’t make sense of it. It didn’t even look like the same part of the mountain - hadn’t there been room enough for ranks of soldiers to march forward, abreast? There was hardly enough room now for ten people -

Liv realized that half the ground had disappeared. Crumbled off the mountain, perhaps, simply collapsed, raining dirt and rock down into thin air, to fall onto the trees far below. Her spell had actually blown off a chunk of Nightfall Peak, reshaped it. She wondered whether the silhouette would look different from below, and guessed that it would. That made two mountains she was responsible for reshaping, though Bald Peak had taken Rosamund weeks of effort and still wasn’t finished. This had been done in a few, terrifying moments.

For a moment, Liv imagined what would have happened to the crown army if she’d been able to cast this spell when they attacked the pass into Whitehill. Her mind shied away from it - from the idea that she could, in all likelihood, slaughter thousands of men and women with a single piece of magic. Movement came, through a cloud of dust, and she got a glimpse of the allied soldiers stirring downslope. She hadn't killed them.

But there was still more to do here, and now - because Ractia wasn’t defeated, yet.

LIv shoved herself up off the ground, staggered on her feet, and beat her wings. She didn’t have the slightest idea where her frozen swords had ended up, or even if they’d survived what had just happened, but she still had the stormwand clutched in her hand, and she could still cast. Once she was high enough, she could see that at least some portion of the allied army had managed to run far enough away to survive. She’d have time to think about that after the immediate battle was done.

When she reached the doors, Liv found that the elders had taken shelter, as well, behind a layered half-dome of stout wood, frosted over with ice. Ghveris’s mana shield flickered and died as Liv came in sight, his mana battery finally exhausted. When Liv saw Wren and the Antrian crawling out of the shelter, she realized that Ractia had withdrawn her Authority - at least, for the moment.

Not all of the elders were safe: Aatu had been pierced and stretched upon a frame of wickedly sharp iron spikes. In some places, his muscles and bones had given way entirely, leaving a hand or lower leg separated from the rest of his body, connected only by a few strands of skin.

Ractia, on the other hand, had surrounded herself in a flower-bud of wood, iron and mana, which only bloomed outward, one petal after another, once the goddess seemed to be certain that the quaking of the mountain had stopped. Her wings draped about her like a cloak.

The spell looked nearly identical to the flowers of ice that Liv had used for years to protect herself, including during her duel against Princess Milisant on the beach. She tried not to think about that: Liv didn’t like the idea of any similarity at all between herself and Ractia.

The goddess looked down the mountain, and Liv could see her eyes widen.

“Did you do that?” she asked, calling up to where Liv swooped in.

“I did,” Liv said, flexing her legs to absorb the impact as she landed. She shook her right arm out, then raised the stormwand and pointed it at Ractia’s chest, as if it was a sword in line with her opponent, ready for a thrust or a lunge.

Blue light flared around Ractia’s eyes.

“Out of anyone here,” the Lady of Blood said, “you are closest to us. Not there yet - but you must feel it, certainly. You need mana to live. This world is not yours, not truly. Without the mana generators, it would kill you.”

“Aariv already made your offer,” Liv growled. Wren stepped up beside her, and then Ghveris, her father, Aira, her grandmother, all of them. They were hardly steady on their feet, battered and bruised by the battle so far, and what Liv had done to the mountain - but they were there. Next to her. “I’ll survive just fine on my own. I don’t need you.”

“You do,” Ractia said. “Even if you don’t realize it yet.”

“All together,” Liv’s father said. “We strike her at once.”

Ractia raised a single, delicate hand, and Liv prepared to cast. To either side of her, her family, her friends, her teachers, tensed, ready to throw themselves back into battle. Ractia’s eyes settled on Liv. Was it her imagination, or did the goddess’s hand tremble? Could she possibly be afraid?

“Nesēmus.” The goddess vanished in a flash of light.

“Hands!” Liv shouted. “We planned for this. Aira first.”

They all reached out to get contact with the old woman, and as soon as she was certain she had them all, Aira invoked her own tether, taking them to a floating tower, where Elder Ilmari waited.

“Not here,” Keri’s father said, and stepped forward, reaching out his own arm to join them. They flickered between waystones, picking up an elder at each one: the crystal, the bridge which had been their first beachhead, the cenote, even Feic Seria. With six elders - even missing Aatu - they’d been able to coordinate rapid movement between each one in advance, and now the plan functioned flawlessly, shifting them from one escape route to another, picking up fresh, rested reinforcements along the way.

It was at Feic Seria that they arrived last, where soldiers waited at the doorway which led out from the waystone room to the corridor - and it was Aira who said aloud what they’d all been thinking, who put words to the panic which had been steadily rising in Liv’s chest.

“She isn’t here,” Elder Aira said. “She isn’t at any of the rifts we set guards at. She’s run away, and we don’t know where.”

Liv heard someone scream in frustration, and only realized that it was herself after she punched the sandstone wall of the room, sending a spike of pain shooting through her left fist and up her arm.

After all the fighting, all the planning, and all the death, Ractia had escaped.