Chapter 769: Unyielding Will
“Siyaaaaa!”
The Four-winged Eagle had not anticipated a counterattack. Whatever its intelligence was, it had not included the possibility of the target becoming projectile. Its beak opened and it struck without adjusting its dive — no time to dodge, no impulse to try.
What happened next made the crowd go quiet in a different way than fear had made them quiet before.
Lorgar transformed in the air.
The massive Desert Wolf met the strange bird’s face with full momentum behind a two-handed strike, the impact thunderous enough to be felt at the platform’s edge. The eagle’s head snapped sideways. Its beak — which had been large enough to lift an adult person cleanly — buckled at the joint and broke away.
The timing had been too close for either of them to adjust. They collided anyway.
Lorgar hit the platform again, and blood came up with the sound that followed. But her teeth were in the creature’s flesh before she stopped moving, and she did not let go.
The demonic hybrid felt the danger and reacted to it the way living things react to pain in their throat — frantically. Its wings beat in large panicked strokes, trying to gain altitude, trying to lift the weight of a Desert Wolf clinging to its neck. The wings were wide and strong. They were not strong enough. Lorgar weighed what she weighed, and she did not release.
“Andrea!” Ashes called from below.
“I knew you’d have to depend on me eventually.” Andrea caught the rifle Echo held out, reversed the motion, and stepped up onto the platform in the same movement, summoning the Magical Longbow as she cleared the edge.
The two beasts came down together.
A flash of white light — and the Desert Wolf that had been holding on was gone. Lorgar had reached the end of what she had, and what she had had been enough. The outcome was decided.
Ashes crossed the platform to where the demonic hybrid had landed, taking a dead Sand Nation warrior’s robe from the ground as she passed. The creature was staggering — not from the fall, but from what had accumulated. She could see the damage across its shell: scratches and small punctures scattered densely, some weeping a green-grey fluid and a blue that was not blood in any color she recognized. The First Army’s fire. Individually insufficient, collectively exhausting.
She found Lorgar in the gap between the fallen wings and lifted her down from the platform.
Andrea stood where the beast’s attention was. The Magical Longbow glowed steadily.
The demonic hybrid’s head swung toward the light, orienting on it the way injured things orient on obvious threats. The light was significant. The light was doing something it needed to concern itself with.
“Hey.” Andrea’s voice was pleasant. Conversational. “What are you looking at? Fly away if you can.”
“Shriek—!”
It finally understood the situation and spread its wings in a rush — but the body had accumulated too much damage for that to be fast, and the light was already moving.
The longbow’s arrow was not an arrow. It was a compressed gold sun, and when it struck the demonic beast’s body it did not stop inside it. It passed through, opening channels of light behind it, and those channels became beams, and the beams became a glow that expanded outward from the inside — as though the creature had swallowed something it could not contain, and the thing it could not contain was escaping through every surface at once.
The light quieted.
A circular crater a few meters wide occupied the center of the platform. On its edge lay a single piece of what had been the Four-winged Eagle, and smaller pieces distributed widely in all directions, a rainfall of flesh and remnant.
Andrea stood in it with her longbow still glowing, her hair catching the light, her posture one of conscious presentation.
“Why are you still materializing the bow?” Ashes looked up at her from below the platform edge. “You’re wasting your magic.”
“Obviously for their benefit.” Andrea gestured toward the crowd with the bow. “For everyone here to remember my heroic appearance — ah, damn.” Her hand came up over her mouth. “It’s your fault for making me talk. What if some bird fell in my mouth?”
Ashes declined to answer that.
Guelz Burnflame’s face had gone the color of ash.
He was a large man who had been in many difficult situations and had maintained his composure in most of them. His shoulders shook slightly when he received his daughter from Ashes’ arms. He looked down at Lorgar for a long moment before he could speak.
“Is she—”
“Still alive.” Ashes shrugged. “But the condition is poor. Even the best herbal remedies will only delay the end.”
“You have a way to treat her?”
“Yes. And she can be restored exactly as she was before the duel.”
He stared at her — the long, measuring stare of a man trying to determine whether what he has heard is true, and finding he cannot resolve the question by looking at the speaker’s face. “Then — what is the price?”
“You’ll know soon enough.” She tugged her hand gently and said, “But what I want to know first: will you acknowledge the holy duel’s result?”
The silence had a shape to it. He was working through something that did not resolve quickly — old pride and new mathematics and the thing that had just happened on his platform, which was also happening in his chest.
“Wildflame isn’t Iron Whip,” he said finally. “We don’t deny victories won through blood and honor.” He exhaled. “And besides—”
He looked toward the crowd.
“No one could deny it. Listen for yourself.”
She had already heard it.
The name had started somewhere in the platform’s upper ring and spread downward and outward until it covered everything — every voice in the crowd and on the Burning Road beyond, one single syllable repeated until it became the only sound the arena contained.
“Osha. Osha. Osha.”
Echo climbed onto the platform.
She stood at its center, small in the space that was still smoldering at its edges, and when she spoke, her voice found every ear in the crowd without apparent effort — carried by her ability, placed into the listening air the way she had learned to place it over months of practice.
“I am the chief of the Osha clan, Drow Silvermoon — but I also have another name. Echo of Graycastle’s Witch Union.”
A murmur moved through the crowd and stilled again.
“I lost everything after the Iron Whip clan’s betrayal. My clan was exiled. I was sold into slavery — from the Port of Clearwater, all the way to the King’s City in Graycastle. I was fortunate enough to be rescued by a witch organization. After that, I was placed in a small town in the Western Region, and my name became Echo.”
She paused. The crowd was fully quiet.
“I prefer the name Echo to Drow Silvermoon — though the experiences that led me there were painful, I am happier than I ever was in the desert. That town, which was once a desolate border settlement, has become a thriving city. Most of what it became was brought about by one person — His Majesty Roland Wimbledon of Graycastle, the man who changed my fate.”
Below the platform, Ashes blinked. “This — this isn’t the rehearsed speech.”
“Well.” Andrea chuckled. “It’s what she has been wanting to say. And at this point, all we can do is applaud her.”
Echo seemed nervous in the first few lines — the voice a little tighter than usual, the pauses slightly longer. But as she moved into talking about Neverwinter — the city itself, what it looked like, what it had become — something loosened in her delivery. She became more certain. She was not reciting; she was remembering.
“I know why you’re wondering what any of this has to do with you. A distant city in the North — no matter how prosperous it is, no matter how beautiful, what does it matter to the people of the Sand Nation?” She looked out over the crowd. “Perhaps it was true once that it had nothing to do with you. But things have changed.”
“His Majesty’s rule is that Neverwinter never discriminates based on origin. His city holds people from every background — ordinary Graycastle citizens, witches, even people from clans and foreign nations. This alone should tell you something about his character. He wishes to do for the Ironsand people of the Mojin Clan what he has done for the witches — to bring you out of this bloodsoaked and barren desert and into a better life. And I am here, carrying the will of His Majesty Roland Wimbledon, to deliver this to you all in the name of the strongest clan.”
Her voice rose.
“He has decided to become the chief of the Mojin Clan. To unify the entire desert. And to treat every one of you as his own people.”