Page 49 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

Tovian moves through the chaos like a dark current, efficient and devastating, and I can’t watch him right now. I will watch him later. Right now I am running.

Velka and I drop into the trench system at a dead sprint. The iron grating on Leif's pen is bolted with a lock the size of my fist and I jam Vorgrym's gifted blade into the hinge mechanism while Velka guards the lip above.

"Sabie." Leif's voice is hoarse but immediate. "You're insane. You absolute?—"

"Yes, I know I'm crazy." I wrench the hinge. Metal screeches. "Can you stand?"

"My legs work. My pride doesn't."

"Your pride will recover." The grating gives. I drop into the pen and get under his arm, taking his weight across my shoulders. He leans into me, and even through the chaos I can feel how badly he is shaking. "I've got you. Come on."

As we step up the trench wall, I hear a massive displacement of air — sudden, enormous, like a great weight dropping from height.

I twist my body and put it in front of Leif's.

The impact is heat, first. Blinding, searing heat across my side and shoulder, and then the snow is rising up to meet me and I am falling, and the sound that tears out of me is a harsh jarring scream ripping out of my throat. I hit the ground hard enough to scatter my vision into fragments. White. Black. Red bleeding through both.

The lacerations are deep. I can feel each one individually, can feel the exact path each talon carved. I press my palm to my side and the copper smell hits my throat, sharp and sudden.

I roll onto my back. The sky is full of fire and wings and violence, and somewhere above me Velka is screaming Tovian's name.

Then the world stops.

I watch it happen across the span of thirty feet — watch the exact moment Tovian’s gold eyes find the blood soaking through my coat.

There is no wasted motion. He catches the closest warrior by the throat, the sound of vertebrae snapping like dry kindling. With a casual, backhanded jerk, he rips the gargoyle’s wing clean from its socket

I watch, paralyzed, as he descends upon the next two. He drives his thumbs into the eye sockets of one, the granite skull caving inward with a hollow crunch that vibrates in my own teeth. He doesn't flinch as the creature's life-force spatters across his chest. He simply pivots, his talons whipping around like a serrated scythe to disembowel the warrior rushing his flank. The warrior's midsection opens in a jagged horizontal line, spilling gray, calcified organs onto the floor in a steaming heap.

The silence is the most terrifying part. The enemies are screaming—high, whistling sounds of absolute agony—but Tovian is a void. He is a statue granted the gift of murder. He catches a blade meant for his throat in his bare palm, the metal snapping against his skin, and uses the jagged shard to throat-punch the attacker. He twists the metal deep, carving through stone and sinew until the warrior’s head hangs by a single, pulsing tendon.

He is tearing them down to their component parts. He reaches into the chest cavity of the last standing soldier, hisclaws hooking under the ribs. With a sickening, rhythmic heaving motion, he pries the ribcage apart.

He stands in the center of the carnage, chest heaving, his hands dripping with the thick, dark evidence.

The scouts that survive do what prey does.

They run. They hit the sky and scatter into the mountain dark, screaming as they go, and even through the thickening fog at the edge of my consciousness I can hear the shape of what they're carrying with them — the words already forming, already spreading across every ridge and valley they'll touch before dawn:

The Ashwing Alpha has gone mad. The human has broken him.

Tovian gathers me from the snow. His arms are shaking. His hands, enormous and blood-soaked, hold me with a gentleness so violent in its contrast that my chest cracks open somewhere I can't reach.

"Sabine." His voice is destroyed.

The dark is already closing in at the edges, and the last thing I feel before it takes me is a cold, devastating certainty settling into my bones like frost.

I am the thing that destroys Tovian.

26

TOVIAN

Iwatch them leave.

Not all at once. That would require a spine. Instead they peel away in ones and twos—a general here, a faction leader there—each one finding some tactical reason to fold their banners and pull their troops back from the passes. General Keth of the Hollowcrest faction speaks first, citing supply lines. Morragh of the Stoneback clan cites troop morale. The others nod along, their eyes sliding away from mine the moment I look at them directly.

They don't say what this is actually about. They don't have to.