I launched myself from the bridge, wings snapping wide. The air caught me, and the old rhythm—wingbeat and lift, wind and weight—poured through my muscles like I'd never stopped.
I banked hard, swooping low over the front ranks of the dead.
Then I opened my jaws.
Lightning didn't just strike.
It poured.
A river of white-blue fire cascaded down, forming a curtain of crackling death that vaporized the first two rows of corpses instantly. Bodies convulsed and disintegrated. Beast-things howled as electricity ripped through them, their forms bursting apart in sprays of black.
I seared the entire length of the bridge's span, carving a trench of smoldering ruin through the horde.
The darkness recoiled, rippling backward like a living thing burned.
Behind me, the Skyguard roared.
Above and to my right, Tadewi wheeled, banking to fall into formation at my side. Her massive orange form slid into place, wings beating in time with mine.
Her voice reached me on the wind, old and clear.
"Aim higher, Lightning Prince."
"You complaining about my aim?" I rumbled back.
"I am telling you to trust me."
She folded her wings.
For one horrifying second, she dropped out of the sky like a stone.
Wind spiraled around her, then exploded outward as she snapped her wings open again—sending a shockwave that hurled the dead backward in great, shrieking clumps.
I followed, diving beside her. Where her winds threw them, my lightning burned them. Between us, we turned the head of the horde into ash and falling pieces.
It wasn't enough.
Not yet.
There were always more.
I swooped up, wings straining, and circled back toward the bridge. Corpses had begun to climb again—hauling themselves up the sides, claws digging into the stone.
The Skyguard met them with spears and blades, but their lines were starting to break.
Muir was on his knees near the midpoint of the bridge, both hands pressed to the stone, ice veins racing out from his fingers in frantic bursts. His lips moved around curses and prayers in equal measure. Revik stood over him, a shield in human form, cutting down anything that came close—human corpses, half-rotted beasts, twisted things with glowing eyes and too many teeth.
I wheeled to dive again—
Tadewi's voice cut across the wind.
"Raiden. Hear me."
I angled my wings, coming level with her. "Busy!"
"Listen! The winds have told me all the lower terrace are empty."
Empty.
Evacuation lanterns gone. No children. No elders.
Her nation had moved.
They were no longer trapped behind us.
"We can't replace the bridges," I said. "You know that."
Her dragon eyes—ancient, bright as amber caught in sun—met mine. "We don't have to,"she replied. "The people are clear. The bridges served their purpose."
"Destroy them." She said with absolute resolve.
Break the path.
Cut off the darkness' way into the heart of the Air Nation—even if it meant losing the bridges that had stood for centuries.
Even if it meant losing whatever was still on them.
I looked down at the long spine of stone stretching out below us—at Muir, at Revik, at the Skyguard holding the front.
"We still have people on that bridge," I snarled.
"Then move them," Tadewi said simply. "Or they will die on it."
Below, the dead surged again, a tide breaking around the first rank of Skyguard. A woman went down with a gurgled cry, throat torn out by a dead thing with tusks.
Muir sealed another crack just as the bridge groaned ominously.
We were losing ground.
We were running out of time.
Trust her, Lyra's voice whispered in my memory.
Trust yourself.
I tucked my wings and dove.
My roar shook the bridge as I skimmed just above it, lightning trailing off my scales in long banners. "FALL BACK!" I bellowed, the sound tearing the air. "PULL TO THE INNER TERRACE! NOW!"
The Skyguard didn't hesitate. They obeyed instinct and command and raw survival, breaking formation and retreating toward the thicker stone near the mountain.
Revik's head snapped up, eyes narrowing as he understood. He grabbed Muir by the collar and half-dragged, half-shoved him toward the mountain side.
"I am a prince," Muir protested weakly, ice still spreading from his hands even as he stumbled. "You cannot just haul me—"
"You'll thank me when you're not falling to your death," Revik grunted.
They reached the inner arch just as the first line of dead surged toward them.
I flared my wings, cut low, and slammed a wall of lightning down between the retreating warriors and the horde.
It wasn't pretty.
It wasn't controlled.
It was effective.
Everything that hit it cooked.
"Revik!" I roared. "Get them clear!"
He lifted his blade in a sharp salute.
Muir glanced back once, eyes wide, face stark with understanding. Then he turned and threw a last surge of ice down into the load-bearing spans of the bridge—reinforcing them just long enough for people to get off.
Not long enough to be saved.
The last of the Skyguard cleared the inner span, stumbling onto the safety of the mountain's stone.
The bridge, still full of dead, groaned.
This was it.
I pulled up, beating hard to gain height, and reached for the deepest part of the storm left in me.
"Now, Lightning Prince," Tadewi's voice whispered on the wind. "Break it."
I hovered above the center of the span, every muscle screaming, chest burning.
Then I opened everything.
Lightning tore out of me in a blinding column—no finesse, no net, just raw, annihilating force. It tore through the stone beneath, racing along the bridge's spine, seeking every fracture Muir had frozen and unfreezing it in an instant.
The bridge screamed.
Stone split.
Supports shattered.
Dead things tumbled as the entire structure buckled, snapped—
—and fell.
The sound was endless.
A grinding, tearing, thunderous roar as centuries of work and worship plummeted into the clouds below, carrying thousands of dead bodies with it.
For a heartbeat, the darkness recoiled in shock.
On the far side of the chasm, the remaining army of dead stood poised at the jagged edge of what had been. A cliff now separated us—deep, wide, full of swirling cloud and crackling residual lightning.
They stopped.
All of them.
As if someone had pressed a hand to their chests and said wait.
Silence fell.
I sucked in a shuddering breath, wings beating hard to keep me aloft. Every part of me shook. I'd poured too much out, again. My muscles trembled uncontrollably.
But—
The bridge was gone.
The path to the inner terraces was gone.
Behind me, the Skyguard stared in stunned, horrified silence. Some dropped to their knees. Some wept. Some simply watched, shoulders slumped with a terrible kind of relief.
"Raiden," Revik called, voice hoarse. "Come down."
I tried.
My wings sluggishly obeyed, carrying me back toward the terrace. I shifted mid-descent, scales retracting, bones folding in on themselves until I hit the stone on two feet instead of four claws.
My legs buckled.
I dropped to one knee.
Muir caught my arm before I face-planted. "Got you," he muttered. "You dramatic idiot."
I huffed a rough laugh. "That's one way to say 'thank you for saving your ass.'"
"Consider it implied."
I dragged in another breath, vision swimming. The world tilted at the edges.
Maybe—
just maybe—
we'd bought enough time.
The far side of the chasm seethed with dead things that could no longer reach us. The darkness itself loomed behind them like a storm that had lost its road. I watched it, chest heaving, waiting for it to… retreat.
Instead—
It moved.
Not forward.
Down.
Shadows slid off the corpses like oil running off stone. They pooled at the cliff's edge, thickening, churning, tendrils stretching across nothing.
"Please tell me they're just going to sit there and sulk," Muir murmured.
They did not sit.
The darkness climbed down the cliff-face in a slow, unnerving flow—like a waterfall in reverse. It reached the emptiness where the bridge had been and began to rise, pulling hunks of broken stone and shattered bodies into itself.
It was building.
A shape formed—a grotesque imitation of a bridge. Not clean stone and carved wards this time.
A causeway made of shadow and bone and jagged rock, knitting itself together right in front of us.
I stared.
"Of course," I said, voice flat. "Of course it can do that."
Revik cursed under his breath. "It's learning."
"It always was," Muir said quietly. "We just didn't want to see it."
The new bridge arched out from the cliff like a wound—dripping bits of shadow, flexing like muscle. The dead that still remained on the far side watched it form in eerie stillness.
Then—
In perfect unison—
They charged.
"Positions!" someone shouted.
Tadewi's roar cut through the air as she wheeled overhead, diving back toward the new path. She slammed a concentrated blast of wind into the foremost ranks, hurling them off the half-formed causeway.
The darkness shuddered—
then thickened—
forming low walls to keep its army from falling again.
Tadewi banked hard, circling. "We hold here," she called through the wind. "As long as we can."
I pushed myself back up to my feet, every part of me protesting.
Muir grabbed my arm. "You're done."
"I'm not," I snapped. "Not while that thing is still moving."
"Raiden—"
"Let him," Revik said quietly. "He's the storm. She's the wind. This is their fight."
"And what does that make me?" Muir demanded.
"The line," Revik replied. "We keep everyone else breathing."
He lifted his blade again, eyes hard, and moved to the front.
Muir swore, then followed, ice already forming along his hands.
The dead began to cross the new bridge.
Tadewi dove.
I shifted.
There wasn't enough strength for another sustained lightning gate. I knew that. But there was enough for what I needed now:
Precision.
I became storm and scale again, wings snapping open as I launched into the air beside Tadewi. We flew together—two arcs of power against an ocean of death.
She sliced through the ranks with compressed cyclones that hurled dead things screaming into the abyss. I strafed the bridge with targeted bursts of lightning, blowing chunks of shadow-stone into jagged gaps.
Every time we broke it, the darkness reformed it.
Every time it reformed, more dead crossed.
We couldn't stem the tide completely.
But we could slow it.
Below us, the terrace was chaos—Skyguard holding lines with pikes and spears, arrows whistling into the swarm whenever the dead made it across the span. Muir called ice up from the stone in jagged pillars, creating choke points and walls. Revik moved through it all like a blade given legs—taking down anything that broke through.
We were holding.
Barely.
It still felt like drowning.
I scorched another group of dead off the bridge, then banked hard, lungs burning, wings aching. Tadewi pulled up alongside me, her scales streaked with blood and shadow.
"You're burning out," she warned.
"You too," I shot back.
She huffed—a sound that, in any other context, might've been a laugh. "We will burn together, then."
A roar rose from the terrace—
This one human.
Skyguard falling.
Line buckling.
More dead spilling onto the stone.
I dove without thinking, slamming into the swarm with a spread of lightning that turned the closest corpses to smoking heaps. Arrows whistled past my head. A dead thing latched onto my leg; I shook it off with a burst of electricity.
Too many.
They kept coming.
I was lightheaded now, breath ragged. My vision pulsed with bright spots.
And still, the darkness advanced.
Down in the crush, I saw Muir falter—one knee hitting the ground. Revik planted himself over him again, sword moving in a blur, but even he was slowing.
A Skyguard captain went down under three corpses at once, their jaws tearing into his throat before anyone could reach him.
We were bleeding people.
Losing ground.
Even Tadewi's roars sounded thinner.
This is it, a small, cold part of me thought. This is where we break.
And then—
The world changed color.
A streak of violet light ripped through the sky above us—cutting across the clouds like someone had taken a blade to the firmament.
For a heartbeat, everyone—living, dead, dragon, god—looked up.
She fell like a star.
White hair streaming, wings flaring wide, violet fire blazing from her hands in a corona of impossible light. Water swirled around her too—blue-silver ribbons twisting through the flames without being consumed.
Lyra.
She didn't shout.
She didn't roar.
She simply arrived—and the air made room for her.
She hit the far end of the shadow-bridge with both feet, power detonating outward in a shockwave of violet fire and surging water. The first three ranks of dead disintegrated—burned and drowned at the same time, their forms torn apart by opposing elements wielded in perfect, impossible balance.
Fire roared through their hollow chests.
Water crushed them from within.
The bridge itself shuddered, shadow-stone hissing where her power touched it.
I hovered, stunned, lightning slipping uselessly from my jaws in a crackle.
Tadewi's dragon head snapped toward her, eyes wide. "Primal…" she breathed.
Lyra straightened on the bridge.
She was… glowing.
Not metaphorically.
Violet light pulsed beneath her skin, tracing the lines of her veins like living sigils. Her eyes blazed—a deep, impossible amethyst rimmed with white fire. One hand burned with pure, concentrated flame—the other cradled a sphere of swirling water shot through with silver and blue.
Fire and water.
Opposites that weren't opposing at all.
They curled around her like loyal beasts.
The dead that remained on the bridge hesitated, their empty eyes flickering as if something in them remembered what fear was supposed to feel like.
Lyra stepped forward.
Snow swirled around her ankles.
Violet fire licked up her arm.
The water sphere throbbed in her palm like a living heart.
She raised her gaze—and met the endless army of the dead without flinching.
In that moment, she didn't look like a thief.
Or a prisoner.
Or even a dragon shifter.
She looked like something the gods had tried to chain…
…and failed.
Primal.