into the head of the Dreadgod with an explosion of force. Trees far below were stripped of leaves. Even miles away, the broad windows on their cloudship cracked. The sound was deafening.
The Phoenix was hammered down from the sky, almost slamming into the earth before it caught itself on its massive wings and a cushion of wind aura.
Lindon took a deep breath. If it had crashed into the ground, the impact might have destroyed the entire Desolate Wilds.
He sent pure madra flooding into the controls so they drifted away from the fight as the Monarch of the Hungry Deep met the Bleeding Phoenix in battle.
Legions of spirits rose from the Phoenix, tiny versions of itself splitting off from its body. They looked like red raindrops rising upward from its body. Northstrider responded with another punch that launched a serpentine dragon of scarlet madra. The dragon devoured the cloud of phoenixes, roaring as it did.
That was the only exchange slow enough for Lindon to catch.
In the next second, the Dreadgod unleashed lightning, a wall of sword-madra slashes, a smaller cloud of bird-spirits, and a beam of concentrated destructive light from its beak. All of its techniques were tinged blood-red. It moved constantly as it fought, a blur of motion covering half the sky.
Northstrider conjured dragons, he struck with blows that split the clouds, he summoned planes of black force that shielded him, and he moved even faster than the Phoenix. They spiraled around one another so that even Dross couldn’t track them perfectly.
But it was obvious, even to Lindon, that Northstrider was out of his depth.
The dragons he Forged were torn apart by the slightest brush of the Phoenix’s talons. His walls of force—no doubt created by a sacred instrument of some kind—shattered before they could cover him. And the feeling of the Phoenix continued growing by the moment.
Even so, Northstrider wasn’t overwhelmed. The battle was tilted against him, but not so terribly as Lindon had imagined.
He understood for the first time the dilemma the Monarchs faced with the Dreadgods. They could fight on an almost even level, but if the Monarchs pushed too hard, the Dreadgods would awaken and work together. And the Monarchs had people to protect, while the Dreadgods didn’t.
But there was something to that explanation that didn’t quite satisfy Lindon.
The Monarchs were that close in power to the Phoenix; Malice had fought it more or less to a standstill for three days the last time. And even if the Dreadgods joined forces, they were still outnumbered by Monarchs.
There had to be something else. Something…
A feeling of utter cold passed over Windfall like a glacier shooting through the sky. Lindon’s body and spirit shivered together as it chilled him on a more-than-physical level, but it was past them in a second.
The Phoenix’s head came up, and it snapped its beak onto one of Malice’s glistening blue arrows. The missile shattered.
A purple-armored fist followed it an instant later as Malice punched the Dreadgod in the ribs.
This time, the impact did blow out Lindon’s windows.
He was ready for it, pushing out with force and wind aura to blast the glass shards back before they slashed all the Sacred Valley refugees to ribbons. The crowd was screaming, but Lindon couldn’t hear them.
Now darkness was interspersed with red light as the second Monarch joined the battle. If Lindon had thought it was hard to follow before, it was chaos now.
And devastating for the land beneath.
Malice strode through foothills, and they became a plain. The impact from one of Northstrider’s strikes stripped a forest bare. One of the Phoenix’s techniques was deflected, and bloody fire rained down.
There was only one saving grace: the Monarchs were pulling the battle away from Sacred Valley. Every second, they were further north.
Lindon’s heart hammered, and he checked the viewing constructs in the fortress. Some of them had blown out, or the scripts that controlled them had, but some were still intact. An image floated over his console, flickering and indistinct because of the damage.
The eastern slopes of Mount Samara were covered in rubble. And filled with bodies.
As he watched, armies of bloodspawn rose like ants.
He quickly turned the projection to another direction, trying not to vomit all over the control panels. How many people who had left Sacred Valley on foot had survived? Had anyone?
His own spiritual sense told him that the suppression field had stopped the worst of it for the people inside, blunting even the physical force from the blows. Crowds still pushed their way