“Arrogant rogue!” Grand Magistrate Vane’s voice boomed from above, the crimson projection of his consciousness flaring with a violent, incandescent light.
“You dare interfere with the mandate of the High Houses?
Die!” The sky erupted.
Vane didn’t just summon a flame-arrow; he dropped a localized meteor of condensed fire straight into the ravine.
The air warped under the heat, turning the upper lip of the shale trench into bubbling, red-hot glass.
The raven-cloaked stranger didn’t flinch.
He planted his back foot, shattering the shale beneath his boot, and swung his massive, notch-bladed executioner’s sword upward in a sweeping arc.
“First Form of the Gale: Heaven-Splitting Vacuum!” he growled.
A massive, crescent-shaped blade of pure, compressed wind exploded from the iron edge.
The vacuum blade was completely colorless, visible only by the way it violently distorted the smoke and light.
When the wind met the falling meteor of fire, the collision shook the very foundations of the forest.
The wind didn’t just block the flames; it suffocated them, tearing the oxygen out of Vane’s spell until the meteor cracked and dissipated into a harmless shower of ash.
“John, now!
While the sky is blind!” Martha hissed, shoving her husband’s shoulder John didn’t hesitate.
Seizing the absolute chaos above, he kept Thomas tucked firmly against his chest and bolted from beneath the root overhang.
He sprinted down the narrow, shadows-choked floor of the ravine, moving in the exact opposite direction of the spell collision.
Martha ran right at his heels, her eyes darting back as the battle intensified.
Behind them, the three Ash-Hounds leaped from the burning ridge, their obsidian jaws snapping as they lunged toward the stranger.
“Flea-bitten mutts,” the raven-cloaked man grunted.
Without looking back, he executed a rapid, circular spin.
The heavy iron sword whistled through the air, creating a localized cyclone that ripped the three magma beasts off their feet and slammed them into the stone walls of the ravine, shattering their obsidian armor into dead, cooling rock.
“Intercept the low-born!” Vane roared, his fiery projection fracturing as he channeled a secondary spell.
“Do not let the child reach the deep valley!” Two Embers Seekers detached from the ridge, their boots wreathed in minor fire-runes that allowed them to slide down the steep shale slopes like crimson streaks.
Their runic bows were drawn tight, aiming straight for the backs of the fleeing weavers.
“You’re fighting me, Embers trash,” the stranger’s gravelly voice echoed.
With a flick of his wrist, he didn’t chase the soldiers; instead, he slammed his massive sword flat against the ravine floor.
The concussive shockwave of compressed air traveled through the ground, blowing out the shale right beneath the feet of the descending Seekers.
The slope collapsed into a miniature avalanche, burying the two soldiers up to their chests in loose stone and abruptly ruining their aim.
John’s lungs burned as he sprinted out of the ravine’s mouth, entering a deep, mist-shrouded valley where the gnarled trees of the Ash-Weave finally began to thin.
The roaring sound of clashing fire and howling wind began to fade into the distance, but the sky behind them remained a violent, flashing canvas of red and silver-gray.
Thomas let out a faint moan in his father’s arms, his small fingers tightening around John’s tattered tunic.
The silver light in his eyes was dimming, entering a forced dormancy after the massive strain of the awakening, but his breathing was finally stabilizing in the cool, unburned air of the valley.
They were running blind into the heart of the Wildlands, entirely dependent on the strength of a stranger they didn’t know, and leaving a trail of broken laws behind them.