She was up and out of the building immediately, dashing for the control scripts. Her spiritual sense gave her all the information she needed, and the air throughout Ghostwind Hall boiled as some of the others sensed it too.
Yerin arrived in the control room to see golden light shining from all the projection constructs.
Lindon had left automatic defenses, but they wouldn’t be enough. Reigan Shen had found them.
And they weren’t ready.
12
Lindon emerged from the Trackless Sea to see Reigan Shen shredding a plague-spirit with a whip made of life madra.
The spirit fell apart, revealing the floating island it had been defending. Windfall drifted on dark blue clouds over the ocean, its crops blowing in the breeze.
Its scripts were intact, including floating stones that bore new defensive scripts Lindon had left behind. Between the plague-spirit and this new layer of scripts, the island could stall even a Monarch for a while.
It had done so, but Windfall’s primary defense was always supposed to be its veils. Reigan Shen had found them somehow.
Despite the Weeping Dragon storm filling the northern sky, the Monarch was willing to fight.
And Lindon was exhausted.
Yerin hovered in front of the cloud fortress. She deflected a blast of Shen’s into the sky and retaliated with a Striker slash.
Lindon shouted wordlessly and poured madra into a stream of dragon’s breath.
It was swallowed by one portal as another opened. A hand of blue-gold lightning extended and released a river of storm madra at Yerin.
She braced herself behind her sword and pushed against Tiberian Arelius’ attack. Her spirit was at its peak, stronger than Lindon had ever felt it, her will iron. Even so, she was being forced back.
Reigan Shen appeared behind her. “Activate,” he commanded.
Yerin pitted herself against him, and for an instant, she resisted both Monarch techniques. But only for an instant.
“No!” Lindon shouted, pushing his willpower against Shen’s.
He was too weak.
Yerin disappeared in a flash of white light as her Moonlight Bridge, which Reigan Shen had helped create, activated at his command. She reappeared inside the doorway containing the portal to Ghostwind Hall and was sucked into it.
Time moved so much faster inside that she was attempting to emerge again only an instant later, but Tiberian’s lightning blasted through it.
A quarter of the house vanished. If not for the reinforced scripts, the whole island would have disintegrated.
Lindon felt the portal collapse, and his hopes died with it.
[They’re not dead!] Dross desperately shouted. [It’s just the entrance! They’re still in there!]
Lindon knew. But now they would be helpless to escape until he released them, unless they found a way to open it from the inside.
And he had no time left.
Outside the cloud fortress, bolts of living blue-gold lightning sizzled as they fell to the sea. The sky was dark, the waves tossed in the wind, and the Weeping Dragon looked down on him from the clouds.
Much closer, Reigan Shen stared at him with no sympathy. He pointed a shining dagger in Lindon’s direction but didn’t attack. Instead, he slashed open a portal in midair that opened onto a palace of white and gold.
“Close!” Lindon commanded.
Shen dispersed the working without a word. If Lindon had any remaining strength at all, the lion would have been hopelessly trapped, but instead he stopped halfway into the portal and spoke.
“If you see Ozmanthus on the other side,” Shen said, “tell him I didn’t kill you.”
He would have if he could, Lindon knew. Lindon’s heart boiled with hatred, and his arm twitched, but he was torn up from the inside. His mouth tasted copper, and he glared at Shen with the intensity of the Void and Dragon Icons combined.
Lindon choked out words past bloody teeth. “He’s…not coming…for you. I am.”
“Can you?” Shen asked.
The portal winked closed, and Lindon lowered himself to Windfall’s island as rain began to fall.
The Weeping Dragon was here.
Tiberian’s lightning thundered through the portal into the pocket world, and it blasted Yerin back inside. Though it scorched her body and spirit, she forced her will against it to hold back the tide.
She stopped the bulk of the Striker technique, but strands of lightning flickered off to the side, tearing trenches from the stone of the central island. Worse, the power was pushing against the barriers of the pocket world.
No…the worst part was that Lindon was still outside.
Green runes appeared behind her, and she was relieved to feel Ziel’s madra intercepting the stray bolts. Yerin refocused, ready to dive through again.
Before she could, the portal crumbled. It tore to pieces like a house of sand blowing away in the wind.
Yerin’s soul shook as she watched the spot where the portal had been. On the inside, she screamed, but her body didn’t get the message.
She had felt what was happening outside. Their constructs were cut off now, but she knew what condition Lindon was in. He was on his last legs, and now he was facing down Reigan Shen and the Weeping Dragon. Alone.
Only seconds passed. Every breath into Yerin’s lungs stretched like it took a full minute.
Her fear became panic and advanced beyond that, stretching into a rejection of reality. She had not worked so long and fought so hard to die here.
The world seemed to hum around her, like it had when she was trying to sense the Sword Icon. She heard a distant music, faint and ethereal, but it echoed through her bones. She realized distantly that she had summoned the Phoenix Song, which allowed her to hear the sounds more clearly.
The music was a complex melody that combined what she remembered of the Sword Icon, the razor-edged silence of Eithan’s deadly techniques, and the sounds of bloodlust from the Phoenix Song. She knew what that song meant.
It was leading her to the ones she was about to kill.
Yerin didn’t know who she blamed for this situation. Reigan Shen, the Dreadgods, all the Monarchs, maybe Fate itself. She forgot the distance between herself and her target. Whoever or whatever it was, she was going to cut them.
Her sword was in her hand, and there was a ragged network of cracks in the pocket world where the portal had collapsed. To her, it was like a keyhole, and she stabbed her sword inside like a key.
It didn’t penetrate deeply enough, but she focused her will like she never had before. The sword sank until it pierced something deeper than reality.
A familiar hand grabbed her by the shoulder and tried to pull her back, but Ziel might as well have tried to pull down the moon. She turned to glance at him over her shoulder, but only because it didn’t cost her any time. She was still cutting her way out.
Whatever Ziel saw in her, it caused him to shudder. “That’s not going to lead where it came in,” he said urgently. “You’re casting yourself into the Way. You could end up in an entirely different world.”
She still heard the distant song. “I won’t,” she said.
“It takes skill to navigate. Do you know how?”
“Learned to swim by falling out of boats.” She finished her cut and opened a ragged hole into endless blue. The power shook her and tore at her, but she still heard the song. “I’ll tell you one place it won’t take me: here.”
Ziel made a frustrated sound, but before Yerin leaped into the gap, he hurled silver runes around her. If they were intended to stop her, she fully meant to break them, but they only formed a protective bubble.
“We’ll see you soon,” Ziel assured her, but he didn’t follow her in.
Then the irresistible currents seized Yerin and tossed her into the flows of order. She felt herself crushed, battered, and buffeted by force she could scarcely imagine. Her spiritual senses were blinded; this was beyond madra, beyond aura. It felt like she was inside the pillar that held up reality itself.