A Minotaur cuts down a parent. The three-headed dog corners several children. Our light creatures flap and flail against the dar now sticking to their feathers. Someone screams, and I glance over my shoulder and see parents and children circled up, surrounded by advancing nightbeasts—a bull’s-eye of death.
The nightbeasts howl or thump the ground, smelling victory. Smelling blood. The chimera clambers up the wall like a gecko and drags Stranna off her ballista. I shoot at it with my slingshot, frantically searching for nightmist inside me despite knowing it won’t serve me. Won’t obey. And I really don’t want to create something that may turn and attack Stranna. Or me. Or the children.
A screech breaks the air. I whirl.
My phoenix streaks across the sky, a stream of fire and gold trailing behind it.
Hope blossoms. She’s here. She’s alive! I can get in the air and go after Luc and chase him off. Or even better, she’ll take him down.
But she passes him. I raise my arms so she’ll see me. She veers downward. Luc releases lightning shards from the sky like rin blades. They slice through her wings, her tail, her body. Again and again.
“No!” I yell.
She screeches and tucks her wings tight against her body, a bullet headed straight toward me. With a mighty flap that sprays phoenix blood through the air, she slows long enough to drop something at my feet. Then she whines, crackles like a wet log in fire, and bursts into flame, falling like a meteorite into the sticky sea of tar. Nearby nightbeasts scatter from her impact, but there’s nothing but a pile of dying coals.
I am too stunned to react.
A Minotaur stomps through the tar and crushes the phoenix coals beneath its hooves. The tirones shout their approval. Then they turn as one to Luc, awaiting his command just like the Roman gladiators awaited the emperor’s thumbs-up or thumbs-down in the games.
And Luc does hold out a thumb, parallel to the ground, then drops it. “Kill them all!”
They don’t need to be told twice.
Parents swoop in front of their children—vulnerable shields against the advancing death blows.
I scan the ground for the item the phoenix brought me. It’s a single grain of glowing wheat, still covered in ash—the one Luc kicked away in the Arena. He thought it had burned. Thought he’d destroyed it.
Yet here it is in my hands. Waiting for my command.
The fate of this battle rests in the palm of my imagination. The circle of a hundred nightbeasts closes in on the parents and children. What sort of creature can I create that would destroy so many nightbeasts? What weapon?
Luc commanded and created these animals—will they disappear if he is killed?
Time doesn’t stop for contemplation. The circled group is seconds away from death.
I send my thoughts far beyond this moment—to the end goal. Jesus thought beyond the cross. I need to do the same.
And then I know. I know what to make, but the only question is if it’s possible. I close my eyes and grip the kernel tight in my fist.
It grows warm. Then hot. Before it can scald my hand, I launch back my arm and hurl the kernel into the air like a major league pitcher. Despite its small size, the grain shoots into the sky, propelled by something other than the force of my throw.
It grows and grows, brighter and stronger, but farther away.
Even farther.
Not flying, but floating. Rising on some magical helium. Then it explodes in blinding light.
I tear my eyes away. Roaring fills my ears. My skin blisters under the instant heat, but then the heat levels out.
I blink away momentary blindness. A blanket of silence fills the castle. The tar shrinks back and sizzles into nothingness when it crosses the water of the moat. The black forest withers like overcooked asparagus and every last nightbeast lies dead.
Stranna shoves the carcass of the chimera off her. Luc’s stingray lies on the ground like a discarded blanket. Every child and parent stands, shielding their eyes and looking up at something that has been denied us all since the very beginning of this virus. Something that not even nightmares could quench.
Sunlight.
In the sky, bright and golden and with the warmth of summer, shines a perfect golden sun.
Luc bolts. Through the veil of the Nightmare’s edge, across the wheat field, back toward the coliseum.
“Oh no you don’t.”
I sprint down the stairs of the castle wall and leap from the fifth stair onto the back of my rhino. He stands there like he was waiting for this moment. With nothing more than a nudge, he lumbers through the broken gate, over the pile of dead bison, and after Luc.
“Cain, no!” Stranna yells from the wall. “Leave him be!”
I don’t know what I plan to do, but I can’t just let him run back to his place of power—even if the sun did obliterate his nightbeasts. He’ll recover somehow. And then he’ll be back.
I gain on him. He glances over his shoulder, spots me, and pivots to a stop, drawing his gladius.
“You really want to do this, Cain?” he shouts. “Against me?”
Good question.
He’s in the blackened wheat field, but it’s clear that this is his territory. Though he has to try twice, he manages to call up enough nightmist to cover himself in Roman armor and line his belt with fresh weapons.
He throws a single dagger, and it plants itself in the head of my charging rhinoceros. The rhino’s front knees buckle, and I go flying into the blackened stalks of wheat.
