Chapter 792: Four Hours to Dawn (End)
"Bullseye!"
No triumph in Sylvanna’s answering nod, only survival—thin and costly. "Climb," she rasped. "Altitude before the forge settles."
Raëdrithar obeyed, wings hammering the wounded air. Sylvanna’s vision narrowed to a tunnel rimmed in blue sparks. The lightning sickness regrouped, sending cold knives under her ribs. She tasted blood where she’d bitten through her lip, but she rode the agony, used it to focus. Below her, scorched masonry and dying phantoms boiled together, swallowed by rising steam.
On the plateau, Vaelira felt the air jar as the mirror exploded—pressure change like a giant exhaling. Her shield arm vibrated under another wraith impact; frost crept down the steel boss where a memory-leeching hand had pressed moments earlier. She slammed forward, locking shields with the trooper to her left. Mud sucked at her boots, trying to drag her down. She refused.
"Push!" Her voice shot down the line, flaring lungs already rubbed raw by smoke. "You hold, or you drown!"
The soldiers answered with a guttural roar, equal parts courage and terror. Pike shafts bristled, stabbing into translucent torsos. Each hit burst a firework of stolen images—tavern laughter, an infant’s first word, the color of a mother’s eyes—then shredded them to nothing before they could leech further.
Helyra, kneeling at the center anchor point, wrestled a glowing quartz rod deeper into fractured shale. Sparks spat onto her sleeves; rune-ink seared tiny holes through the fabric. "Frequency’s dropping! We lose resonance and the net collapses!"
Vaelira risked a glance. Fifty paces behind her, another rod shuddered, its light flickering like a dying lantern. If it failed, the spectral tide would pour through the breach in seconds.
"No failure," Vaelira barked. "Stabilize or break—those are your choices."
Helyra’s jaw set. She drove a bronze spike home with the pommel of her dirk. The rod’s glow steadied, a steady violet hum cutting across the battlefield howl. The line held—barely.
A Brine-Wraith vaulted over the shield ridge, mouth yawning wider than any jaw should. Its scream came out as scattershot nursery rhymes, each word a scalpel aimed at memory. Vaelira pivoted under the sound, blade greeting the thing’s chest. Steel groaned—ghost-flesh resisted like rubber—then parted, spraying fragments of ice-blue regret across her gauntlet. The creature collapsed into steam that tasted of salt and childhood summers long gone.