Page 222 of A Kingdom of Wild and Power
She was the second.
Tabitha Wysteria
Adriana swerved as another blast of magic tore through the air beside her. Her wyvern roared, spitting torrents of blue fire down upon the witches and warlocks below.
Yet far fewer fell than she had hoped.
Shimmering shields of magic had risen around them, deflecting the wyvern’s flames so that the fire broke uselessly against invisible barriers.
The battle was proving far more difficult than anyone had anticipated. As usual, the kingdoms had forgottentheir own history, forgotten why witches had once been so deeply feared. Wars against them had always been rare, for good reason.
They were simply too powerful.
One witch could stand against ten trained warriors.
There was a reason drakonians had struck first in the dead of night, long ago, slipping into the homes while the witches slept peacefully in their beds. Killing a witch was never as simple as brave tales made it sound.
Ahead of her, King Ozul guided his enormous wyvern sharply to the right. So Adriana veered left.
A part of her longed to land, to leap and draw her sword, and fight upon the ground where the battle felt honest and clear. But the skies needed warriors as well.
Many soldiers had been given wyverns to mount, their task to strike from above while the armies clashed below.
And the land itself made the fight even worse.
The witchlands stretched vast and treacherous, riddled with swamps and hidden hollows where witches could vanish and strike without warning. Broken ruins dotted the landscape like the bones of forgotten cities, and the witches knew every shadowed corner of them.
Again and again they lured their enemies there, only to unleash their magic from the darkness.
Adriana kept a vigilant eye upon the shifting lines of the army, guiding her wyvern in wide arcs above the battlefield. Whenever a flank faltered or a unit began to fall back under the witches’ relentless magic, she swept down to lend her strength, her mount’s wings cutting through the smoky sky.
Yet despite the sheer size of King Ozul’s forces, doubt gnawed quietly at her.
She was no longer certain they would cross the witchlands so easily.
Far behind the front lines, beyond the chaos of fire and spellcraft, the wounded were carried to the long rows of tents where healers worked tirelessly. In one of those tents lay her husband, Keir.
Adriana had left him there.
With every passing day he looked worse. His body was weakening, slowly unraveling beneath the immense power it struggled to contain. It would not be long now before the vessel failed completely, before the mortal shell finally tore itself apart.
Adriana refused to think too long about that moment.
She did not want it to come.
Selfishly, she wanted to remain here in the mortal world, living the fragile illusion they had built together—pretending she was nothing more than a woman with a husband and a life among mortals.
But the truth would not be denied.
Soon she would have to leave.
Their borrowed time had run its course.
Mal Blackburn had become the God-Killer, and the world itself seemed to be splintering apart beneath the weight of it.
Adriana could no longer afford to cling to the lie.
The life they had built had always been temporary. They had both known it from the beginning.
