Chapter 768: Bloodbathed Battle
“By the name of Three Gods! That’s a Four-winged Eagle!”
“How dare this beast enter the Burning Shrine!”
“Help — help me!”
“Guards! Where are the guards?”
The crowd fractured. Some of the Sand Nation people drew weapons and climbed toward the platform, moving toward Lorgar. Others moved in the opposite direction. The organized coherence of an audience watching a duel — the shared attention, the shared breath — dissolved into individual panic and individual motion in the span of a few seconds.
Ashes could see through the smoke and the chaos.
The creature was a demonic hybrid — eagle crossed with beetle in the way that nothing natural had ever been crossed. Its back, abdomen, and head were plated with a striped shell. It had six claws: each one segmented, each section visible from across the platform, the front pair as thick as a man’s forearm and currently holding Lorgar pinned to the stone like a specimen. Four pairs of wings, which by any natural logic should have been as thin as a cicada’s membrane, were full and solid and broad. That was how it had arrived this fast and this silently — wings built for sustained flight, not for sound.
The beak was already working. It dove toward Lorgar’s neck in a rhythmic peck, again and again, while the claws held. Lorgar could sway from side to side, and did, absorbing the deflections on her cheeks and jaw. Fresh blood ran through the fur. She could not move her body, and the range of her lateral motion was shrinking as she tired.
She would not hold much longer.
Ashes had not come to this mission to let a witch die. Even a witch she had just been trying to incapacitate. The reasons were simple enough — Lorgar was not evil, not Pure Witch, and the code Ashes carried inside her did not leave room for standing aside while something like this happened to someone like that.
“Echo!”
She threw herself at the demonic hybrid and caught its beak as it descended for another strike. The sharp edge of it opened her arm on contact — a clean cut, immediately bleeding — and she held. Blood dripped, landing on Lorgar’s upturned face.
Lorgar looked at her. One eye was closed and dark. The remaining one searched Ashes’ face with an expression too complex to name cleanly.
Echo’s music spread outward from somewhere below the platform — the same calm that Echo could put into a sound when she chose it, the quality that arrived before the melody registered and already started defusing the body’s first responses. The crowd’s panic began to unwind at its edges. People who had been moving away found their feet slowing. The urge to scatter lost its urgency.
Without the crowd as interference, Andrea could work.
The rifle cracked at intervals, each report distinct, the rhythm deliberate. She was not firing in panic. She was firing the way she always fired — each bullet placed, not released. The demonic hybrid’s claws were large and segmented; she found the joint on the forelimb holding Lorgar down, and she put three rounds through the same point.
The claw broke. The clamp released.
Lorgar rolled clear and drove a kick into the beast’s abdomen, and the creature flapped backward and caught air. For the first time, the First Army’s rifles spoke in concert — but a flying target that circled and dived and banked was not the same problem as a stationary one, and the hits were not landing where they needed to.
Ashes found the human shape of Lorgar in the gap between the wings where she had fallen, and lifted her off the platform.
“Are you all right?”
“Temporarily—” Lorgar coughed, and what came up was pink. “I’m not dead yet.”
“Don’t move. You’ll make it worse.”
She could feel the problem through her hands as she checked the woman’s body — one side of the chest sunken, the bones beneath it raised and irregular. Several ribs had broken in the impact. The wolf form’s physical durability had kept her alive through an impact that would have killed a human woman instantly. In human form, she would simply not have survived it.
Above them, the Four-winged Eagle found its equilibrium and began assessing the situation with the systematic intelligence of something that had encountered resistance before and had developed approaches for it.
What it settled on was not random prey. It dove toward Lorgar, repeatedly. When it angled for another pass, it oriented its abdominal shell toward Andrea — the one below who had broken its claw — and it varied its flight path in a rocking, polyline motion that made prediction harder. When Andrea paused to refill her rifle, the beast seized the moment to throw the people it had caught toward Hummingbird and Echo, forcing them to evade and breaking Andrea’s reload rhythm.
Andrea avoided each of these by decreasing margins. Her new evolved ability — releasing a short, powerful burst of air at close range — was the only thing keeping her from being knocked clear of her position entirely. She was tracking the beast, tracking her partners, and tracking her own ammunition simultaneously. The effort showed in the set of her jaw.
It’s targeting the witches.
Ashes turned this over as she kept Lorgar still and watched the pattern. If the creature simply wanted food, the platform was dense with people, none of whom would have effectively stopped it from taking one or two. But it kept returning to Lorgar and the cluster of witches below the edge. The crowd’s ordinary people it ignored entirely.
That was not the behavior of a hungry predator operating on instinct. It was the behavior of something operating on instruction.
The First Army’s fifty soldiers were not configured for aerial targets. Their fire had hit the creature’s shell repeatedly, opening wounds it would eventually feel, but the shell was designed exactly for this — to distribute and redirect impact, to delay rather than stop. None of the shots had landed somewhere fatal.
We need to lead it over the main force. Better angle, concentrated fire, greater volume. But leading it required choosing how to move, and choosing how to move required solving the problem of what Lorgar was prepared to do with her remaining options.
Lorgar’s hand found Ashes’ wrist.
“Throw me upward.” Her voice came in segments, one word and breath, another word and breath.
“What?”
“When it comes toward us — that’s the only opening. I can’t move under my own power. I can’t pursue it. But if it comes down toward us—” She coughed again. “Throw me up. That’s the only chance I have to reach it.”
“If you don’t land the grab, you’ll die here.”
“A warrior’s second home has always been the battlefield.” The wolf’s ears, which had been lying flat against her skull, dropped further. “I’ve fought well. Whatever comes after — I’ve fought the best opponent I’ve ever had. That’s enough.” A pause, and something that might have been a ruined attempt at composure. “Thank you.”
Ashes looked at her for a long moment. The resolve in that expression was genuine — not bravado, not the performance of courage, but the actual thing: someone who had decided and settled.
She shook her head. “You’re wrong about one thing. This isn’t our last fight.”
“You don’t have to comfort me. Even if I survive wounds like these, I won’t stand properly again.”
“There’s a witch in Neverwinter called Nana. She can heal anything — someone breathing their last breath, someone with every limb broken. Completely. Back to how they were before.” She allowed herself a small expression. Not quite a smile. “I have been through no fewer than a hundred fights like this one. Some of them against opponents considerably more dangerous. And I am here. If you live — there will be more opportunities. More opponents worth testing yourself against. If you want to sharpen what you have, Neverwinter will give you the means.”
She let that land.
Lorgar’s remaining eye was doing something it had not done before. The dark pupil reflected a light that had not been there a moment ago.
“What you just said — is that true?”
“Of course.”
“Then—” The ears rose. Both of them, quick and sharp. “I’ll survive. For certain.”
“Good. Come up, then.”
She did not hesitate further. She caught Lorgar’s foot with one hand, watched the Four-winged Eagle begin its descent toward the center of the platform, and moved.
Two full rotations — the weight of a transformed partial-wolf woman and the inertia building through each turn — and she released.
Princess Lorgar of the Wildflame clan crossed the air like a black-robed arrow, aimed at the monster falling straight toward her.