below them and focused, willing a teleport. Silvery light chased over him and he braced himself, somehow managed to hit the ground running.
And brought Syn with him.
“What the—” She dropped him and beat her wings, twisted and turned, and looked back at where they had been. “Oh, crap.”
He looked there too.
A bright ball of crimson fire was shooting straight towards them.
Hartt focused to teleport, cried out as the spell hit the ground before he could muster another one and he tumbled through the air, the world spinning around him. He couldn’t tell which way was up as it all blurred together, didn’t have a chance to brace himself either. He slammed into the packed snow and rolled across it, arms and legs flailing, every bone in his body aching as he crashed into the thick trunk of a pine at the edge of the forest that hugged the base of the mountains.
He lay face down in the thin snow, his rapid breaths shifting it in front of his hazy eyes as he battled to shut down the pain ricocheting through him and tame the darkness that tried to steal control again. This time, he could give in to it, but he wouldn’t. The abyss beckoned if he did. He wasn’t strong enough to stop it from devouring him. He had to maintain control, or he would lose it forever.
Would become not just tainted, but lost.
When he felt able to move, he slowly pushed himself up off the frigid ground and onto his knees. He grunted and gripped his side as pain speared him, thanked the gods for his armour as he felt the bruise there that would have been a hole in him if it hadn’t stopped the branch from penetrating him. His lungs ached as he breathed and he gave himself a moment to recover as he peered into the moonlit darkness.
Distant specks moved like shadows across the blanket of white.
The damned spell had tossed him close to a mile from where he had been.
He started back towards the others, walking at first but slowly building into a run. The desire to teleport was strong, but his will was stronger. He focused on sprinting, covering the distance in a way that wouldn’t drain him. He needed the rest of his strength for the fight ahead.
His eyes darted over the fight and he almost smiled as he saw that Isla had taken down another three mages with the help of Grave and Night, and Frey stood over the body of a fourth as Syn gutted a fifth. With each death, the clones disappeared, improving the odds for his side.
The remaining mages were beginning to look tired, used spells to attack his allies rather than clones of themselves. They were weakening.
Hartt did smile now.
They could win this.
His eyes darted to his left, towards the stronghold, as something moved there. He changed course when he saw what it was.
The black-haired mage.
The other witches were falling back to him, moving within a ring of his clones. There had to be at least twenty of them, all of them armed with silver blades that reflected the moonlight. Hartt could easily handle that many.
The mage’s head swivelled towards him and Hartt could feel his gaze on him, growled as he redoubled his effort, sprinting faster, his boots chewing up the snow.
His eyes widened as the male seized another mage by the back of his neck and shock rippled across the male’s face, his mouth opening on a silent scream. The black-haired mage tugged the blade free of his heart, grinned as he kept his eyes locked with Hartt’s and kept hold of the dead male, his arm lowering with him as he sank to the ground.
The sensation of power coming from the mage’s direction grew stronger, more than doubling, and Hartt couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The mage had sacrificed one of his own side to give himself a boost in power.
At once, twelve new clones appeared around him. They closed in on the other mages rather than moving to reinforce the defensive perimeter the black-haired male had built around him. The remaining three mages tried to make a break for it, but only one of them managed to disappear before the clones were on them, had seized them and were dragging them towards their leader.
A sense of dread built inside Hartt as he raced towards the mage, as the male cut down another of his side, growing stronger still. Another dozen clones appeared,