The darkness hit.
The moment it crested the last ridge, the mountain groaned under the weight of it.
There were no wards left to stop it.
"Positions!" I roared, lightning already crawling up my arms.
The Skyguard braced.
Muir exhaled frost.
Revik drew his sword, face carved sharp with resolve.
The darkness surged—
a wall of bodies and bone and hollow-eyed beasts, all moving with a single mindless hunger.
Muir slammed his palms down.
Ice erupted, forming a great frozen barricade across the bridge—thick enough to stop a giant.
The dead hit it instantly.
Claws. Hooves. Teeth.
Their weight hammered the wall again and again.
Cracks split across the ice like veins of shattered glass.
"Hold, damn you—HOLD!" Muir gritted out—
—but the wall exploded.
Ice shards tore past us like hail as the entire barricade shattered into glittering fragments.
The dead poured through.
"No more delays," I growled. "My turn."
Lightning answered me like an old friend itching for blood.
I planted my feet, threw my arms wide—
—and let the storm take me.
A massive lightning web erupted across the bridge.
It wasn't a shield.
It wasn't a spell.
It was a storm-gate, roaring and alive.
Every corpse that hit it convulsed, smoked, then collapsed.
Beasts clawed at it only to be thrown back in bursts of thunder.
The air vibrated under my power, the entire bridge glowing blue-white.
Skyguard stared in stunned silence.
But then—
Something punched through my chest.
Not physically.
Emotion.
Fear.
Not mine.
Hers.
Lyra.
So sharp it buckled my knees.
My grip on the lightning stuttered—
the wall flickered—
the dead surged forward, sensing weakness—
"Raiden!" Revik barked, grabbing my shoulder.
"Get your head back in the fight!"
"I can feel her," I gasped. "She's scared—I—she's—"
The lightning wall shrank another foot.
Muir slammed his shoulder into mine, keeping me upright.
"She's a tough girl," he growled. "Whatever she's dealing with, she'll tear it apart."
Revik locked my jaw in his hand, forcing my eyes to his.
"You won't save her by dying here. Trust her. Let her fight. WE have our own fight to worry about."
Another tremor of Lyra's fear hit me.
And under it—
something else.
The echo of power surging through her veins.
I inhaled.
Exhaled.
And fed everything I had back into the storm.
Lightning erupted—twice as bright, twice as large.
The web expanded, roaring outward until it blocked the entire length of the bridge.
Dead creatures screamed as electricity ripped through them.
Muir laughed breathlessly. "That's it—fry the bastards."
Revik readied his blade again. "We hold, Raiden."
"Yeah," I said, lightning cracking off my skin.
"We hold."
The darkness surged again.
But now the bridge glowed under my power, a line of storm-fire drawn across the mountain.
As long as I stood breathing, nothing would pass.
But in the hollow beneath my ribs,
Lyra's fear pulsed again—
and I knew whatever she was facing…
Must be terrifying.
The lightning web held.
Barely.
Every second, I felt it strain—threads snapping under the weight of the dead, new ones forming only because I forced them into existence. The air burned electric, the stones beneath my boots scorched black.
The darkness didn't slow.
It learned.
The first wave of corpses had collapsed the second they touched the storm-gate.
The second wave had pushed through the dying bodies of the first.
The third—
The third was climbing.
Dozens of them scuttled along the underside of the Sky Bridge like spiders, clawing at the stone with bone fingers, pulling themselves up from below.
"UNDER!" someone screamed from the left flank.
Too late.
A massive corpse-beast—half stag, half wolf, all nightmare—lunged over the railing, jaws snapping. A Skyguard soldier vanished beneath it with a single crunch.
The lightning wall flickered.
My knees hit stone.
Her fear cut straight through my ribs—sharp enough that for half a second, I felt her heartbeat instead of mine.
I felt her Pain.
"No—" My breath locked.
The storm around me faltered.
A gap opened in the crackling net.
The dead surged.
NOT NOW.
A hand fisted the back of my collar—Revik hauling me upright with brute force.
"Pull yourself together, Rai!" he roared into my ear. His face was streaked with blood, his blade dripping black ichor. "She's alive. You feel that? Alive doesn't mean dying. It means fighting."
Muir slid beside us, frost coating his arms to the elbow. "Raiden—listen to me." His voice wasn't loud, but it was iron. "i believe in Lyra. Do you?!"
The darkness slammed against the bridge again—hard enough that the stone shuddered under our feet. A quarter of the Skyguard fell back, shoved by the force.
I felt the bond pulse again—
Lyra.
A flash of her emotion seared through me—
frozen fear
the roar of something colossal
and beneath it—
fury.
fire.
I inhaled like a drowning man breaking the surface.
My lightning roared back to life, exploding outward.
The storm-net flared so bright half the Skyguard shielded their eyes.
"IT'S BACK!" someone yelled.
But the dead didn't stop.
They never stop.
The bridge groaned—a long, low scream of stressed stone.
Cracks spiderwebbed across the surface beneath our feet. A chunk of the outer railing sheared away and tumbled into the cloud sea below.
If the Sky Bridges fell, the entire Air Nation went with them.
"MUIR!" I shouted.
"I SEE IT!"
The Water Prince lunged past me, ice already blooming across his arms. He dropped to his knees, slammed both palms onto the fractured stone—
—and the world froze.
A surge of cold ripped outward in a perfect ring.
Cracks filled instantly with crystal.
Shattered sections fused back together.
A massive rib of ice formed beneath the bridge, anchoring it like a skeletal spine.
The bridge stabilized—quivering, but holding.
Muir gritted his teeth, veins of frost snaking up his neck. "I'm locking the fractures, but the dead are heavy. They'll break it again."
"Then keep fixing it," Revik said, cutting down a crawling corpse beside him.
"I'm TRYING," Muir snapped, voice strained. "But freezing stone while an army of nightmares is climbing over it isn't exactly a quiet afternoon!"
Another impact hit the underside of the bridge—
a sickening CRACK reverberated through the stone.
The frozen supports shuddered.
"Muir!" I yelled again.
"I SAID I SEE IT!"
He slammed one hand downward, sending a blast of cold through the stone.
The second fracture sealed.
Barely.
"Good," I growled. "Because if this bridge collapses, Tadewi loses half her people."
He shot me a sharp look—equal parts fear and fury. "Then don't let THEM get this far!"
That was all the warning I had.
The next wave of dead hit the lightning gate.
I roared and raised both hands—
lightning bursting from my palms
twisting into a net
a forest of crackling storm-lines holding back the tide.
But every time the dead slammed against it—
the bridge shook.
The ice groaned.
Muir nearly buckled.
"YOU HOLD THAT DAMN LINE!" he shouted at me.
"I'M TRYING!"
"TRY HARDER, RAIDEN!"
"I AM!"
Revik barked a laugh even as he beheaded a corpse. "Would you two shut up and FIGHT?"
We did.
And for a moment—
Just a moment—
We held.
My arms shook violently, sparks scattering off my skin in blistering white arcs. Every breath scraped like broken glass. My vision flickered between light and shadow, between the living and the dead.
The tide of corpses—human, beast, things that should never have walked—kept slamming into my lightning net. Each hit felt like a hammer to my ribs.
"Muir—how's the bridge?" I gasped.
"Ask me again when I'm not actively freezing it back together every SIX SECONDS," he snapped.
The bridge shuddered again.
Revik drove his blade through something with too many limbs. "Focus. Raiden—hold. Just hold."
"I am holding," I growled. "It's the not letting the lightning consume me is the problem!"
The storm inside me thrashed, hungry, burning through my veins.
I'd pushed too far.
Lightning crawled up my throat like it wanted out in a scream.
I clenched my jaw until the taste of copper filled my mouth.
Can't stop.
If I stop—the bridges fall.
The people fall.
We loses everything we're fighting for.
Lyra.
Just her name was enough to steady my grip.
For a heartbeat.
Then—
A jolt hit the gate so hard the entire line faltered.
The lightning net buckled.
The dead surged forward—
And then—
Something else snapped.
Not in the storm.
In me.
A pulse of emotion ripped through my chest
Lyra.
Then her voice as quiet as a whisper "Rai..."
A sharp inhale tore from me. My knees nearly hit the stone.
"Raiden!" Revik shouted. "What—what is it?!"
"Hold—I can't—" I choked out.
The gate dimmed. The lightning wavered dangerously.
Muir's voice cracked through the chaos like a whip.
"Hold it, Raiden! Don't you dare drop now—she's fighting too!"
I whipped around, breath ragged.
Muir's face was pale with strain, sweat freezing on his temples, but his eyes were iron.
"today we risk everything," he snapped. "the dead can't win today!"
Revik planted himself at my shoulder. "you can do this raiden, you will control the lightning!"
I gritted my teeth, shoved the exhaustion down, and forced the lightning back into place with a roar that tore my throat raw.
The storm gate flared bright again. The dead reeled back.
But—
I was fading.
Fast.
My arms shook uncontrollably.
Lightning sputtered.
Every muscle burned.
Every bone throbbed like it wanted to split.
The gate shrank.
Then shrank more.
"Come on—come on—COME ON!" I bellowed, dragging every last stray spark I had into the net—
—but my vision darkened at the edges.
The gate flickered.
A growl rippled through the army of dead as they surged, sensing weakness.
I dug deep for more strength—
and found nothing left.
My body went cold.
My vision tunneled, narrowing until all I saw were the dead pushing through my dying storm.
The lightning guttered—
I swayed—
And through the howl of the storm and the screams and the cracking ice-ribs of the bridge…
I heard it.
A voice whispered through the storm.
Soft.
Commanding.
Warm as breath against my ear.
"Rest now, Lightning Prince."
The wind carried the words—
and the sky split open.
A shadow tore from the clouds.
Wings unfurled with a clap that shook the mountain.
Tadewi.
Not the elder.
Not the general.
The Air Dragon.
She descended like a falling star, her roar slicing the darkness in half.
Wind didn't just howl—
it screamed.
Whole rows of dead lifted off the bridge, ripped into the abyss like dust thrown into a cyclone.
She descended like a falling star, her roar slicing through the darkness with the force of a hurricane given a voice.
Wind exploded outward in rings—
full storms, spears of air, the breath of a goddess—
obliterating the front ranks of the dead.
Bodies—corrupted and monstrous—were lifted from the bridge and hurled screaming into the churning abyss.
The darkness recoiled.
The bridge stopped shaking.
Tadewi landed at the head of the Skyguard, wings spanning the entire width of the terrace. Air swirled around her talons in violent spirals, shattering anything that dared to approach.
"Gods," Revik whispered. "Im glad shes on our side this time."
The gate flickered again.
My knees finally gave out.
Lightning discharged in a harmless crackle around my ribs as the net collapsed.
I hit the stone hard.
Muir yelled something—Revik caught my shoulder—but I barely felt anything past the numbness.
I slumped forward, chest heaving, vision swimming.
But I was alive.
The bridges were standing.
The people were safe—for now.
And Tadewi—
Tadewi stood between the darkness and all of us, ancient and terrible and radiant with power.
A laugh—weak and breathless—escaped my chest.
"Thank the gods," I whispered.
And fora moment just a moment
I let myself rest.