I was on my knees.
Not by choice.
Every breath burned. Every muscle felt flayed. Lightning still crawled over my skin in tired, fading threads, but the storm inside me had guttered out to small sparks. My hands were pressed to the stone just to keep from collapsing face-first.
Around me, the world was still ending.
Revik stood at my right, blade flashing in efficient arcs, cutting down anything that got close. Muir was on my left, frost coating his arms, boots braced wide as he forced ice into the fractures of the bridge every time it shuddered.
Dead things still slammed against Tadewi's wall of wind, their screams lost in the roar of the storm.
"Raiden!" Revik barked. "You with us?"
"Unfortunately," I rasped.
I tried to push myself up.
My arms shook and said no.
The darkness pressed at the edge of the bridge—a sea of corpse-flesh and bone and hollow-eyed beasts, stopped only because Tadewi was tearing the sky in half to keep them there. Her dragon form was a blazing arc of orange and gold above, winds spiraling from her wings in cyclones that flung ranks of dead from the cliffs.
But even she was flagging.
I could see it. The tremor in her wing beats. The drag in the air.
We were all running out.
A corpse-beast—some grotesque fusion of bear and boar—lunged past the front line. Revik met it with a roar, sliding forward, driving his sword up through its jaw and out the back of its skull. Black sludge splattered across the stone.
It still clawed at him for three heartbeats before it finally collapsed.
Muir sealed another crack in the bridge with a desperate sweep of his hand, ice flashing bright, then settling. "This is getting unsustainable!" he snapped. "I'm good, but I'm not that good!"
"You're adequate," I managed.
"You're on your knees," he shot back. "Don't start."
He wasn't wrong.
The storm-gate was gone. The lightning net I'd held across the bridge had burned itself—and me—almost dry. Tadewi had taken over the front line, her winds the only thing stopping the darkness from swallowing us whole.
I tried to reach for the lightning again.
Nothing answered.
Just a weak crackle in my fingertips, like static clinging to ashes.
Useless.
Then—
Something slid through my chest.
Not pain.
Cold.
A smooth, rushing chill that washed through my ribs, down my spine, into every shredded muscle and overtaxed nerve. My breath hitched. For a heartbeat, I thought it was the darkness finally getting inside me.
Then the chill turned warm.
Strength seeped back into my limbs—slow but real. The ache in my lungs eased. The pounding in my head dulled.
And under it, threaded through it—
Her.
Lyra.
Not her voice.
Not even her thoughts.
Just a sense of her. A pulse of power flaring somewhere far away, followed by bone-deep exhaustion and stubborn, familiar defiance.
Still alive.
My fingers curled against the stone.
"Hold on…" her voice whispered—soft, faint, not in my ears at all, but in the space just behind my heart.
I sucked in a breath like I'd been underwater for too long.
Muir's head snapped toward me. "You alright?"
"No idea," I said honestly.
Because I wasn't sure if I'd just imagined that. If I was so tired I'd started hearing things I wanted to hear.
But the strength in my body wasn't imagined.
It was real.
A gift, carried through whatever it was that connected us.
From her.
I pushed myself to my feet.
Every muscle protested—but held.
"What are you doing?" Revik demanded, cleaving through another corpse that had dragged itself onto the stone. "You can barely stand."
"And yet I am standing," I said. "See?"
Above us, Tadewi roared. Her wind slammed into the front ranks of the dead, sending them tumbling into the abyss.
But the wave didn't thin.
It just re-formed.
Endless.
We weren't going to hold this line forever.
Not like this.
The darkness pressed harder, pushing its army forward. Bodies piled at the edge of the wind barrier, climbing over each other, using the fallen as ladders. Overhead, the clouds boiled black and grey, the world beneath them reduced to teeth and claws and hunger.
A Skyguard soldier went down screaming as a corpse-beast clamped onto his leg and dragged him toward the edge.
Muir threw a spike of ice through its skull just in time.
"This is getting bad," he said, chest heaving.
"It's been bad," Revik replied. "This is just the part where bad starts getting worse."
They weren't wrong.
But something else had settled in my bones now.
Resolve.
And just enough strength to do something about it.
My gaze tracked Tadewi's arc in the sky. Even exhausted, she was terrifying—slicing through the air, sending compressed cyclones into the horde. But each pass was slower. Each gust, a little less sharp.
Her winds were a scalpel.
What we needed now was a hammer.
I exhaled.
"Stay with Revik," I told Muir, voice rough but steady.
Muir's eyes narrowed. "What are you planning?"
I turned to him fully, grabbed his shoulder. "I'm about to make the dead very, very angry."
"That's their default state," he muttered. "But fine. Do what you gotta do."
I looked him dead in the eye.
"I'm trusting my brother's life to you," I said. "Don't let me regret it."
Muir blinked.
Then—serious for once—he nodded. "On my life," he said quietly. "Go fry something."
Revik snorted. "Of course his heroic act involves electrocution."
I gave him a grim half-smile. "Would you expect anything else?"
He rolled his eyes. "Try not to die. It's very inconvenient when you're not around."
"I'll do my best."
I stepped away from them both, toward the edge of the bridge.
The darkness surged louder here—the whispering voices, the clacking jaws, the scrape of bone on stone. I let it wash over me, let myself feel all of it.
Fear. Hunger. Endless, gnawing emptiness.
"Alright," I muttered, rolling my shoulders. "Round two."
I reached for the storm again.
This time, it came.
Not as a river. Not as a tidal wave.
As a razor-wire thread running straight down my spine.
My bones remembered how to hold it.
One breath.
Two.
Lightning gathered in my chest, coating my ribs in heat. My skin prickled, hair lifting, air crackling around me.
I let the dragon rise.
Scales tore through skin, bones stretching, reforming. Lightning roared outward as my body expanded, limbs lengthening, wings ripping free in a blaze of white-gold light.
In a heartbeat, I was no longer a man on a failing bridge.
I was storm.
I was dragon.
I reared back, the bridge tiny beneath my claws, and roared.
The sky answered.
Lightning crashed across my scales, racing from horn to tail, turning me into a living conduit. The dead shrank back for half a breath, their empty eyes flickering in the glare.
Then they surged again.
Good.