steer the fortress away from a smaller cloudship before it crashed directly into them.
Far below, a scripted spire stood proudly from an open courtyard. A teleportation anchor.
Even for a Monarch, it would have been hard to send their entire cloudship through space in one trip. Malice had sent them to the one place she could reach easily.
Moongrave. Capital of the Akura clan.
The fight for Sacred Valley was over.
17
The cloudship was anything but quiet as they drifted in the wind over Moongrave.
While Lindon had been focusing on the battle with the Dreadgods, bloodspawn had risen all over the ship. Some of them had been destroyed, but others were still attacking, and it took him and Eithan a moment of concentration to destroy them.
In the meantime, virtually everyone was shouting something.
“What happened?” Lindon’s father demanded. “We’re not moving!”
His mother clung to Kelsa, holding a glowing blue-and-yellow sword in one hand and a matching shield in the other. Products of her Soulsmithing, which she must have been hiding somewhere. She looked to Lindon with terrified eyes. “Where are we?” she asked, and she probably meant to sound demanding, but it came out as a plea.
Kelsa pushed her way free of her mother, dashing aside to the open windows to peer down, getting a look around and shouting descriptions of their surroundings.
Orthos was a burning lump of shell in the corner, and his head snuck out of his shell. He let out a long breath of smoke. “Safe. We are safe.”
Yerin wasn’t shuddering in the corner anymore. She was slumped against the wall, her head hanging. “Useless,” she mumbled.
For Lindon, every second crawled by as though Dross was speeding up his thoughts, but that one word from Yerin speared him through the heart.
He turned around and gathered her up. She let him, all eight arms hanging limply to her sides.
“Lost my spine. Almost buried you all.”
No. She wasn’t the one who had led them all to the edge of their deaths.
“I’m so sorry,” Lindon whispered into her hair. “Yerin, I…I’m just…I’m so sorry.”
She gave a dry laugh. “Sorry for dragging us along?” Yerin tapped the side of her head. “Mostly, there’s only one in here. For a blink there, we had two again. Both of us about to ruin our robes, and curled up like we’re looking to die.”
Lindon squeezed tighter. That wasn’t what had scared him.
She hadn’t frozen up. She’d tried to leave. He had seen the Moonlight Bridge begin to activate.
If she could have, she would have tossed herself to the Bleeding Phoenix.
A hand rested on Lindon’s shoulder, and he turned to see Eithan looking serious. “Ziel isn’t here,” he said in a low voice. “Nor are Jai Long and Jai Chen. They’re resourceful enough that they may survive, but in a battle like that, there are no guarantees.”
Kelsa straightened up. “Jai Long? They left. They’ve been gone for…what, two days?”
Eithan gave her a sympathetic smile, but he didn’t correct himself.
And Lindon knew just as well what Eithan wasn’t saying.
Dross, what happens if the Wandering Titan keeps heading east?
[He might stop at the mountain. If one of them had a huge power source like that, best to guess that they all do. Then maybe he’ll feed on that and go back to sleep!]
And if it doesn’t?
[…there’s no source of aura to interest him for who knows how many thousands of miles east. The Desolate Wilds and Blackflame Empire are too weak. He’ll probably stop to feed on something, but more likely he just keeps wandering until he gets tired.]
And that was assuming the Titan didn’t stop and turn Sacred Valley upside-down looking for whatever prize it wanted. Lindon had been assured several times that ancient security measures had stopped that from happening before, but there was no guarantee it would be the same result this time.
The most likely scenario was that it wandered east, wrecking the Desolate Wilds and the Blackflame Empire. The same way it had destroyed Sacred Valley.
Lindon pulled away from Yerin and removed Suriel’s marble from his pocket. The candle-flame burned as steady and blue as ever, but its calming aura felt like a lie.
The vision of his own future had stopped when he died, so he hadn’t seen what the Dreadgod had done after destroying Sacred Valley. Maybe in this reality, they had averted a worse future. Even if that were true, the fate had come a lot sooner.
And Lindon had failed to stop it.
[Ah, but look at it this way,] Dross said. [Did you fail?]