Nightrender whipped her sword into guard position and braced herself just as the fire reached her. It rushed down, an inferno of red and gold and sickly pea-green, and split around the flat of her blade.
Nightrender drove her sword into the dragon’s leg, shredding threads of malice even as fire licked around the obsidian. She twisted the blade and sliced across, and the leg drooped and spread into the ground, leaving only a flaming stump in its place.
But even as she watched, the leg began to grow back.
She growled low in her throat, searching the beast for another weakness, but any limb she removed would only regenerate. And it didn’t have a heart or brain to pierce….
Wait.
The malice dragon fired another blast of flame, forcing her to guard, but not before she’d caught sight of a dense knot of darkness in its chest, where the malice threads were thicker and stronger. It did have a heart—a dark heart made of smoke and malice—and if she could break those bonds, that would be the end of the dragon.
There will just be something else.
Nightrender bent her legs and arched her wings, ready to fly straight into the heart and cleave it in two, but the dragon didn’t obey physics as she did. Without any kind of push-off, the beast lifted itself into the air and flew straight for the haze-veiled sun.
Nightrender followed. With a roar, she burst through the forest’s cover of smoke and brandished her sword, gaining on the dragon with every beat of her wings.
But the dragon was fire and smoke and malice, and so, so swift. It whipped around to face her, spitting small blasts of flame. She dodged and spun away, falling a short distance before her wings flared and she pushed herself upward once again.
They circled each other, Nightrender cutting and the malice dragon spurting fire, skimming over treetops and tumbling through the air. She strained her wings, pushing herself harder until she finally had an opening: she came around in front of the dragon, inside its wings and talons, and she was staring straight into its wicked heart. Her eyes burned with heat from the fire, but she didn’t blink. She didn’t hesitate.
Half blinded by sparks of ice-white pain, Nightrender plunged her blade into the malice dragon’s heart, severing the black and green threads with a short twist and jerk.
Numinous fire surged into the beast, burning away all the malice, and—without those magical fibers holding everything together—the fires of its body went out, the smoke thinning until there was nothing left. Just blue sky.
Nightrender blinked to clear her vision, gasping for clean air as she pumped her wings. They were heavy—her whole body was heavy—but the malsite still waited below.
She gathered her strength and flew back into the forest. There was less resistance than before—only a few fires straining toward her in a threatening manner—and within an hour, the burned trees were simply burned trees. Like a sore cleared of infection and allowed to scab over, the forest would heal.
Yet her work was not finished. (It was never finished.) People from the surrounding towns might have seen the dragon, and so she trudged from one place to another, asking the residents if they needed to be treated for fire-blindness.
They slammed their doors or ran away from her, some clutching the small jars of “obsidian” they wore around their necks. They feared her more than they feared the malsite they’d always known. She was the strange and unknowable—the monster.
She looked the part. With ash and sweat matting her hair, her armor ripped and hanging off her wiry body, burns and smoke streaking her face, she was not the version of Nightrender mortals preferred to see.
And so, without healing anyone who might have looked upon the dragon, she returned to the hill where she’d landed earlier. The forest was already more serene. No constant cover of smoke, no sinister fires hiding within.
Was she a monster? She had always thought herself above humans. A servant of sorts, yes, but still better. She had awareness that spanned ages, a sense of scale they couldn’t comprehend. The Numina had created her to defeat darkness, and one day she would.
Or so she’d always believed.
For the hundredth time, she searched all her memories for any hint of the Red Dawn, any clue as to why she would have hurt humanity the way she had. But no matter how hard she looked, no matter how she tried to narrow it down, the hole remained.
And then another memory flashed out, a pinprick of pain in the back of her mind.
Nightrender bit her lip, struggling to recall what she had forgotten. But it was gone. Completely gone.
How was she supposed to keep going like this? She was losing everything, all her history, all her knowledge, all her experience. All of her. And clearly, it wasn’t going to stop. The gaps were growing.
She couldn’t fend off this Incursion without her whole self. She needed to do something about this. Soon. Otherwise, she would be little more than mortal herself.
Nightrender wiped tears off her face. (It was only because the malice fires hurt her eyes, and definitely not because she couldn’t remember the melody to her favorite sonata.) Her body shook with exhaustion, but there would be no rest.
It was time to stop feeling sorry for herself.
22.
RUNE
Rune had all but sequestered himself in the royal reading room at the Grand Temple library, returning to his own quarters only to wash and change clothes—and to sleep no more than biology absolutely required. The rancor, though dead, continued to haunt his nightmares.
It was much better to stay up late reading about the history of the Dawnbreakers—about how many heroes had died grisly deaths beyond the Malstop.
Grand Priest Larksong ambled into the room, pushing a cart of newly restored ancient tomes.
“Don’t you have people to deliver those for you?” Rune barely looked up from his notes.
“Yes, of course, but it’s nice to visit you up here. No one bothers me while I’m with the crown prince.”
Rune snorted. “They don’t want my recklessness rubbing off on them. You’re the only one who doesn’t mind the risk.”
Outside the open door, John Taylor gave a faint hmph.
“Except for John, who is paid to take the risk,” Rune said, then looked back at Dayle. “Thank you for the delivery. What I’ve read so far has been illuminating.”
“I’m just glad these old manuscripts are getting some use.” Dayle gently unloaded the books, stacking them with the others Rune hadn’t yet read. “We’re fortunate that the librarians and grand priests of old were able to save these after the Red Dawn. Now they are some of the most precious in my collection.”
After the Red Dawn, books on the Nightrender and her champions had been purged all across Salvation, even from the greatest libraries. By royal decree, of course. From the new royals. The old royals were, obviously, dead.