Chapter 394: Judgment
The light dimmed as a looming presence blotted out the sun’s light, casting a dark shadow over our party. A deafening cry split the air, ringing in my delicate ears and making me wince. Fable tensed beneath me and suddenly lunged forward. I squeezed my knees and gripped his fur tightly, clinging to him as the sudden acceleration tried to dislodge me. The cold bite of the wind of our acceleration buffeted my body, clawing at my hair and filling my eyes with moisture, blurring my vision.
"Xiviyah!" Korra’s shout echoed in my ears.
I had no time to heed her warning or see if the others were also running. It was all I could do to cling to Fable as he dipped and wove, evading what I could only sense as a calamitous gathering of mana in the air above. His paws slammed into the ground one final time and launched us forward, and a tremendous explosion of mana and fire detonated where our party had been gathered.
Every nerve in my body tingled as a wave of heat slammed into us from behind, followed by an earth-shattering roar. The ringing in my ears, which had only just begun to fade from the dragon’s roar, returned with full force alongside a splitting headache. The concussive wave followed a second later, and I had just enough time to blindly cast an Aegis before it threw me from Fable’s back.
The world slowed to a crawl, my perception enhanced by the adrenaline surging through my veins. The ground rotated slowly beneath me as I tumbled through the air, my limbs and tail splayed out helplessly. I desperately tried to soulcast a Binding Winds, but my mind and soul were disoriented, scrambled by the shock and fear of the moment.
There, floating in the air, I closed my eyes and braced myself for the coming hell. Landing this hard would leave my body broken and would undoubtedly devastate the sunpurge. It would be lucky if I even survived, much less retained consciousness.
But the impact never came. Time seemed to have slowed, but surely I should have hit the ground by now, right?
Tentatively, I opened my eyes just a crack; then they widened in shock. I was floating in the air, descending toward a frozen, star-filled world at a snail’s pace. A silver streak bore down on me, moving so quickly its afterimages formed a continuous line leading back to Fable. Or rather, where he had been standing. The first after image showed his fur lashing about in the force of the shockwave, a look of fear and worry in his eyes as he looked at something over his shoulder. The next were blurred, but showed him moving toward me one frame at a time.
As the first fable faded away, followed by the others in sequence, something warm and soft lifted into me from below. I couldn’t control myself, or even react, helpless as a doll in his tender care. My head, which had been only a foot or two from the unforgiving stone, lifted as he nudged me with his nose and flipped me over. The next thing I knew, my face was buried in long, silver fur, my arms moving instinctively to wrap around his neck.