Chapter 76 Chapter 76

Chapter 76 Chapter 76

Twilight's POV

I heard it before I saw it.

Not a sound exactly. More like a pressure. The kind of thing that sits at the back of your skull and pushes forward slowly until you can't ignore it anymore, until your body starts responding before your brain has finished processing why. I was in the middle of a conversation with Prati about ward reinforcements when it started and I stopped talking mid sentence and turned toward the window and Prati stopped too because she felt it as well and neither of us said anything for a second.
Then the screaming started outside.

Not the kind of screaming that meant a fight or an accident. The kind that meant something in the sky.

I was through the door before Prati finished standing up.

The courtyard was chaos in the particular way that large open spaces became chaos when people had nowhere to run that felt far enough. Guards were pointing upward. Civilians who'd been moving through the outer market had stopped completely, some of them flat against walls, some just standing in the middle of the road staring up with their mouths open, which was the most honest response honestly, because the thing above us didn't leave room for anything more complicated than that.
It was lower than it had been before.

Every time we'd seen it before it had stayed high, just at the edge of visible, a massive dark shape that could almost be mistaken for a storm cloud if you weren't looking directly at it.

Now it was low enough to see the shape of it clearly and the shape of it was wrong in the specific way that things were wrong when they came from somewhere older than the rules that usually governed size and form. The wingspan alone crossed more of the sky than should have been possible. The darkness of it wasn't a color, it was the same absence I'd felt in the egg, the same eating-light quality that made your eyes want to slide off it before you could look directly.

It circled.

Slow. Patient. Like it was looking at something.
I knew what it was looking at.

"Twilight." Devonye's voice behind me. She'd come from somewhere, moving fast, already slightly out of breath. "It's lower than it's ever been."

"I know."

"That means it's decided something." She said. "It's not circling to circle anymore. It's choosing a moment."

"How long do you think we have."

"Minutes." She said. "Maybe less."

I looked at the people in the courtyard. At the guards who were trained and scared and looking to someone to tell them what to do. At the civilians who were not trained and just scared. At the walls of Aretia around all of them, walls that were not going to mean anything to something that size if it decided to come down.
I reached for Ryaknorg.

He was there.

Fully there in a way that still felt new after days of the wall between us, warm and enormous and already awake, already aware of what was in the sky above us. I felt his attention move past me and outward toward the creature and the feeling that came back through the bond was complicated in a way I didn't have words for. Not fear exactly. Something more like recognition. He knew what this was. He had always known what this was, had been sealed away with the knowledge of it, and now it was here and he was here and I felt him gathering himself in the way a storm gathered before it broke.

I closed my eyes for three seconds. Just three. Enough to push through the bond properly, not just touching the edge of it but going fully into that space where it was just the two of us and everything else was very far away.

Ryaknorg. I said, not out loud, just into that space. I need you.

What came back wasn't words. He'd never used words exactly. What came back was the feeling of ancient wings unfolding. The feeling of something that had been still for a very long time deciding to move.

I opened my eyes.

The markings on my arms were gold. Fully, properly gold, blazing in a way that made the people nearest me step back involuntarily, and I felt the power moving through me the way it had in the throne hall except bigger, more focused, like Ryaknorg was channeling everything he had through the bond and into me because he couldn't be here physically yet but he could be here in every other way that mattered.

"Everyone get back." I said, loud enough to carry across the courtyard. "Get against the walls, get inside if you can, and don't look at it directly."
Most people moved. A few didn't because fear does that to people sometimes, freezes them in place, and I didn't have time to manage that individually.

The creature above us stopped circling.
That was worse than the circling. The circling was waiting. The stopping was deciding.
It dropped.

Not all the way down, not immediately, just lower, close enough that the shadow of it covered the entire courtyard and most of the street beyond the gate and the temperature dropped three degrees in about four seconds because that was what it did to the air around it, that consuming darkness eating heat the same way it ate light.

Something inside me responded.

Not to the creature. To Ryaknorg responding to the creature. It came through the bond like a wave, massive and warm and so old it made the creature above us feel recent by comparison, and I felt my feet leave the ground before I consciously decided anything. Just lifted, the power underneath me like a hand, like Ryaknorg himself pushing upward through the bond and lifting me with it.
I was ten feet off the courtyard ground before I fully understood that I was flying.

Not flying exactly. Being carried. Being held by something vast and warm that was moving me where it needed me to be, which was up, which was between the city and the thing above it, which was exactly where common sense said I should absolutely not be.

The creature looked at me.

From this close the eyes were worse than they'd been at distance. Not eyes like living things had eyes, not even eyes the way Ryaknorg's were eyes, ancient and golden and knowing. These were just the absence of everything. Two places where existence stopped. Looking into them was like looking at the place before the world started, before anything was anything, and the pull of it was real, a gravitational thing, wanting me to keep looking and keep falling into that nothing.
I looked away.

That took more effort than I expected and I want to be honest about that. Every part of me that had ever been curious about what darkness felt like from the inside wanted to keep looking. I looked away and the effort of it burned through me and the gold on my arms blazed brighter and I heard Ryaknorg through the bond, not words, just the overwhelming sense of stay present, stay here, stay with me.

I stayed.

"Hey." I said to the creature. Out loud, which in retrospect was a strange choice but I wasn't exactly operating on logic right now. "You don't want this city. Whatever she promised you, whatever she told you was here, it's not worth what you're about to start."

The creature tilted its enormous head.

I don't know what I expected. It wasn't going to answer. It was older than language, older than the concept of conversation. But the tilting felt like something. Like it was registering that I existed in a way that was different from registering that the buildings below existed.

"Ryaknorg chose me." I said. "You know what that means. You've always known what that means. You and him are two sides of the same thing and if he's chosen a side so have I and I'm telling you right now that side is not going to let you touch these people."

The pressure at the back of my skull spiked hard and I gritted my teeth through it.

The creature made the sound. The one that lived below where sound usually lived. This close it wasn't just in my teeth, it was in my bones, in the places behind my eyes, in the center of my chest where the bond sat. I felt Ryaknorg surge through the bond in response to it and the gold on my arms went from blazing to something that didn't have a word for how bright it was and I threw it outward without deciding to, just opened the bond fully and let whatever Ryaknorg was pouring through me go where it needed to go.

The light hit the creature.

Not physically. I don't know how else to describe it except that the light landed on the darkness of it and for a second the two things pushed against each other and the air in between crackled with something that had nothing to do with electricity and everything to do with something much older than that.

The creature screamed.

And then it pulled back. Not gone, not defeated, just back, rising fast, putting distance between itself and whatever had just hit it, going high again, back to the edge of visible, back to the slow circling that meant watching and waiting instead of deciding.

I came back down slowly, the power lowering me the same careful way it had lifted me, and when my feet touched the courtyard ground my legs shook once before I locked them and refused to let them do it again.

Devonye was there immediately. Hands on my arms, checking my eyes the way she always checked my eyes, that quick efficient assessment she'd done so many times it was automatic.

"Good." She said, which from her in this context meant you're not dying and that's enough for now.

"Did it work." I said, even though I'd been there, I needed someone else to confirm it.

"It pulled back." She said. "Not gone."

"No." I agreed. "Not gone."

Behind her the courtyard had gone very still, the kind of still that followed something people didn't have a framework for. Guards and civilians alike, all of them staring at me with the gold still fading off my arms, with the sky above us empty again for now, with the city still standing behind its walls.

Isla came through the gate from the main corridor at a run, saw me on my feet, visibly adjusted her pace, and came to stand in front of me and looked at my arms and then at my face and then at the sky.
"I felt it from inside." She said. "Through every wall."

"It pulled back." I said.

"For now." She said.

"For now." I agreed.

She looked at me for one more second, the look that said a hundred things she wasn't going to say out loud in a courtyard full of people, and then she turned to the guards around us and started giving orders in that clear carrying general's voice that made people move without having to think about whether to move.

I stood in the middle of the courtyard while she organized the chaos and let Devonye hold my arm to stop the shaking in my hands that I was reasonably confident nobody had noticed yet.
"She's going to come back." Devonye said quietly. The her wasn't the creature. It was the one wearing Isma's face. "Whatever the creature does next, she's going to come back."

"I know." I said.

"We need to find Isma." She said. "The real one. Before she does."

"I know." I said again.

Above us the sky was empty and pale and quiet and somewhere beyond the edge of it something vast and patient waited and I felt it the way I felt Ryaknorg, like a constant pressure, like a thing that was always there whether I was paying attention to it or not.

We were running out of time.