The mountain air whipped violently past Seraphina’s face as she dove over the ruined balustrade without a second of hesitation.
Below her, two colossal titans were plummeting through the storm clouds at terminal velocity.
Kaelen and Azgorath were locked in a savage, blood-drenched death grip as they fell thousands of paces through the icy mist. Kaelen’s eighty-foot shadow-wings beat desperately against the violent turbulence, creating localized pockets of anti-gravity to slow their catastrophic descent, but Azgorath’s massive weight and spiked chains dragged them relentlessly down toward the jagged sea of basalt needles below.
Gloom-Weaver flared in the dense fog, its dark-matter edge carving through the warlord’s spiked shoulder-guard, black blood boiling away into the freezing gale. Azgorath roared, two of his four fists hammering repeatedly into Kaelen’s armored ribs, the hydraulic force of the blows denting ancient dragon-steel and spraying crimson droplets into the mist.
Through the psychic conduit of their mate-bond, Seraphina felt every jarring blow rattle her own bones. The agonizing ache of his bruised flesh sang in her blood, but so did his unyielding, feral rage—a sovereign beast fighting not just for his realm, but to keep the darkness from touching his queen.
Kaelen! she called out across their shared link.
Stay above! his deep, ragged voice echoed back into her mind, breathless and fierce. If we hit the crags together, the shockwave will crush you!
I'm not leaving you!
Seraphina snapped her twenty-foot solar wings tight against her back, angling her body into a steep, aerodynamic dive. Her Sunblood flared hot in her veins, turning her into a falling golden meteor that sliced clean through the thunderclouds, closing the distance in heartbeats.
Two hundred paces from the jagged floor of the gorge, Azgorath tore his horned helm free with his lower left arm, revealing a monstrous, fanged maw dripping with green slime.
"Die with your ancestors, dog!" the warlord bellowed, raising two executioner’s blades high to impale Kaelen through the chest.
"Not today, carrion!" Seraphina screamed.
She arrived like a sunburst. Unfurling her wings at the very last second, she crashed directly into Azgorath’s exposed back. Her bare hands gripped the massive iron spikes of his armor, channeling an overwhelming torrent of raw, white-hot plasma straight through the warlord’s spine.
Azgorath shrieked in agony as five thousand degrees of solar fury melted his colossus-plate into liquid slag, searing flesh and nerve. His grip on Kaelen faltered, his swords tumbling away into the mist.
"Now, Kaelen!" she gasped, her hands smoking from the immense expenditure of magic.
Kaelen seized the opening with ruthless precision. With a savage twist of his hips in midair, he kicked free from the warlord’s burning torso. He wrapped one massive arm around Seraphina’s waist, hauling her flush against his chest, while his other arm thrust Gloom-Weaver downward with devastating, two-handed fury.
A singularity of dark-matter gravity erupted from the tip of the broadsword.
Instead of striking stone, Kaelen detonated a localized gravitational repulsor against the rock floor just fifty paces below them. The resulting shockwave acted as a massive kinetic cushion, catching their falling bodies and arresting their deadly momentum in a cloud of shattered gravel and swirling snow.
Azgorath, however, had no cushion.
The scorched warlord slammed into the basalt needle below with the force of an artillery shell. Stone fractured like glass, sending an avalanche of black boulders crashing down over the crater, burying the screaming titan beneath hundreds of tons of frozen rubble.
Kaelen and Seraphina tumbled across the snowy scree at the base of the gorge, rolling several paces before coming to a halt against a drift of powdery frost.
Silence descended upon the mountain canyon, save for the whistling wind and their ragged, synchronized breathing.
Kaelen lay on his back in the snow, his dragon-steel breastplate cracked, dark blood smearing his lips and chin. His wings lay limp across the white drifts, trembling with utter exhaustion.
Seraphina pushed herself up on trembling arms, straddling his waist. Her white armor was charred and blood-streaked, but her amber eyes were wild with desperate, frantic concern.
"Kaelen," she breathed, her hands frantically checking his chest, her fingers wiping the dark blood from his lips. "Look at me. Look at me!"
Kaelen’s eyelids fluttered open, revealing molten silver irises that locked onto her with breathtaking, possessive warmth. A slow, pained smirk touched his bloody mouth, his scarred hand rising to cup the back of her neck, pulling her down until her forehead rested against his.
"I told you... to stay above... little sun," he whispered roughly, his chest heaving with laughter that quickly turned into a cough.
"You're an arrogant idiot," she choked out, a mixture of a sob and a laugh escaping her lips as she leaned down, pressing her mouth to his in a fierce, trembling kiss that tasted of iron, snow, and desperate relief.
Kaelen’s arm tightened around her waist, pulling her closer, his kiss hungry and demanding despite his battered body.
Then, from beneath the mountain of rubble fifty paces away, a muffled, sickening tremor shook the ground. Green lightning crackled between the shattered boulders.
Kaelen’s eyes snapped open, his jaw tightening into hard stone.
"The beast still breathes," he growled, struggling to sit up. "And he's calling for reinforcements."