“Holy crap,” he muttered, unable to believe his eyes.
Those were the hostiles we’d seen attack Ben and Rose’s team, hours earlier. Only there were literally thousands of them, shooting upward in a slightly arched and unified trajectory at an incredible speed. They looked like incandescent missiles—and they were headed toward our two ships.
Panic hit me like a cold wave, blocking all my senses for a split second.
“Phoenix, we have to do something!” I blurted out.
“They’re coming after the fleet!” Grandpa Caleb managed, downright petrified.
Serena hit the comms buttons again, frantically trying to reach out to our ships. “Jovi! Anjani! Incoming hostiles! Deploy the dragons! Now!” she shouted, then switched to the next channel. “Jax! Hansa! Incoming hostiles! Let the dragons out!”
All we got back was static. I was starting to feel sick at this point.
“What do we do?” I murmured, unable to think properly.
River was shaking. Grandpa Caleb was pale as a sheet of paper. We were all stunned.
The ships tried to steer in opposite directions, as the cloud of flashing lights rushed toward them. Phoenix zoomed in closer, just in time to see dozens of dragons released in full form from the bottom of the starships. From the back, escape shuttles were dropped—a couple hundred black dots on our screens, from this distance.
But it was too late. The flashing lights swarmed around and swallowed both ships whole.
I heard myself scream, but I didn’t even remember opening my mouth.
Everything happened in petrifying slow motion. I felt Caspian’s arms come around me, his emotions pouring through me as he tried to keep me calm. My eyes stung as I watched both of our starships get pummeled by those things. Within seconds, they had both exploded.
First, a pair of blinding white lights that made us squint, then momentarily look away.
Then, as the flashes darted away in troubling unison, the ships burst into enormous balls of fire. Orange-and-black flames blossomed all around them, as billions of pieces of flaming debris shot outward.
“No…” I croaked.
I heard gasps and growls around me, but I couldn’t move.
The starships were disintegrated. The flames ate them up, and the flashing lights shot through them and further tore them apart. The hostile swarm split into multiple groups. Some stayed around the falling clouds of debris, while most spread outward and tackled the escape pods, one by one.
Phoenix’s hands trembled as he zoomed in farther.
Tears streamed down my cheeks.
They picked the escape shuttles out from between the many burning ship parts, as they plummeted toward the ground, then flashed away and vanished, one at a time.
The dragons released a flurry of icy shards and columns of hellish fire, but they didn’t stand a chance, either. The flashing creatures rammed into them. Dozens of explosions painted the sky a bright orange.
My knees gave out, and I wasn’t the only one.
I heard someone fall on the floor.
There were eight hundred people on those ships. Many of them had just died.
Dragons. Fae. Incubi and succubi. Druids and Maras. Witches. Warlocks.
Our friends. Our family.
“Jovi,” Serena gasped. “Anjani… Jax… Hansa… No…”
This was a catastrophe of titanic proportions. A tragedy unfolding at an incredibly fast pace, even though for me it seemed as though time had stood still—enough to make me understand the magnitude of what had just happened. We had hundreds of escape pods on each ship to make sure everybody got out safely in case of emergency, but we couldn’t know how many survivors there were. I could see a number of pods, but the flashing lights kept snatching and taking them away.
The pain was too much to bear.
I slid down on my knees, and Caspian stayed with me, holding me tight. I could feel him shivering, yet he didn’t let go. We were in this together. He was doing everything he could to take some of the excruciating pain tearing me apart on the inside.
“No,” I mumbled, no longer able to see clearly.
Tears streamed down my cheeks. I broke down completely.
I’d never seen destruction on such a scale before. I’d witnessed the fall of Azure Heights, and I’d thought that would always be the worst of my memories in the future. But this… this was so much worse.
These were our people. Our allies and teammates. Our closest friends. Our partners.
They’d trusted us; they’d stuck their necks out for us.
And they’d all just gone down in flames.
All that blood. The allies lost, the lives lost…
Phoenix
My heart broke into a thousand little pieces, watching that entire tragedy unfold. My blood boiled, and my face was covered in sweat.
“What do we do?!” Harper cried out.
“We need to help them!” Serena sobbed.
Draven put his arm around her and held her close. I was shaking, but instantly stilled when I felt Viola’s hand on my back. I looked at her and nearly fell apart when I saw the pain in her violet eyes. A flurry of emotions burned through both of us—anger, pain, and grief—but the single most devastating feeling was the helplessness.
One quick glance around the room told me the same thing I’d begun to think but was too afraid to voice. Caleb and River were both livid. Hazel and Tejus were stunned. Fiona, Zane, Arwen, even Lumi and the Daughters… they were all speechless.
“We can’t,” Viola croaked, tears glazing her eyes.
“Wha—What?” Serena managed.
“They’re too powerful,” Safira said, her voice trembling. “Our abilities are not the same as they are in Eritopia.”
I looked out again. My eyes stung as I fought back tears of my own.
Pieces of the ships continued to crash into Strava’s surface in millions of burning pieces. The flashing lights picked out the last of the dragons. Most were killed. I shuddered, watching as the escape shuttles vanished.
From what I’d seen, most of the shuttles had gone out. I counted at least five hundred survivors. Unfortunately, they were intercepted by the flashing lights, and I had no idea what they intended to do with them. We’d lost some people, too, and the troubling part was that we didn’t know who, just yet.
The swarm of flashes regrouped, now somewhat smaller than before. I assumed it had shrunk because the others in their ranks had taken prisoners. We’d left Caia and Blaze on Calliope, with Victoria and Bastien, Field and Aida, and the others, since someone needed to keep an eye on the operations we still had ongoing, including Avril’s Druid investigation on Persea.
But Heath… Heath was one of the dragons we’d sent out with the fleet.
“Jovi. Anjani,” Harper breathed, struggling to regain her composure and failing miserably. She continued to cry, while Caspian kept holding her and syphoning some of those bad feelings away. “Jax and Hansa, Varga, Wren… They were out there, dammit. We need to do something!”
“Oh, crap!” Serena croaked, her eyes nearly popping out of her head as she stared at the swarm of flashing lights. They’d all come together again, and they were now headed toward us.
My blood ran cold.
Arwen was the first to react, her hands balled into fists at her sides.
“They’re coming for us, now,” she hissed, her eyes narrowed with pure hatred. I had never seen her like this before, and she scared me a little. Not only was her daughter down there, still very much in danger, but she’d also witnessed this entire disaster, from beginning to end. “My shields were nothing to them,” she added. “All the charms that Lumi and I put in. All gone. And now, they’re coming for us.”
Lumi cleared her throat, impressively cool despite what she’d just seen.
“I wouldn’t be too worried about us right now,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I asked, then angrily pointed at the screen. “They’re coming for us next, and we don
’t have the firepower to take all of them down! They obliterated our fleet! They killed our friends, our allies!”
“Phoenix!” Lumi snapped. “Look!” she said, nodding at the screen and forcing me to follow her gaze.
The flashing lights were definitely determined to come after us, but very few managed to pierce through Strava’s atmosphere. Many burned out, leaving thin trails of black smoke as they fell, plummeting toward the ground.
The few who did get out froze instantly.
Harper shot to her feet and came by my side to get a better look.
The hostiles were close enough for us to use our True Sight and see them up close. They’d been brave enough to try to come after us, but the cold vacuum of the cosmos was too much, even for them. There were two dozen of them, petrified and pale, their lips blue and their skin crackling purple from the insanely low temperatures of outer space.
“They’re humanoids,” I murmured, staring at them.
Even in death, they were beautiful. The males had strange eyes—one green and one blue, while the females had two deep blues. But, upon freezing, they all turned white and glassy. Their bodies were wrapped in what looked like white silk, with metal armor covering their chests, waists, and limbs. They had large wings covered in soft white plumes. They were truly superb, but so deadly. So vicious!
“They can’t live outside Strava’s atmosphere.” Arwen sighed heavily. “Not without oxygen and thermal cover, just like the rest of us.”
Lumi scoffed. “They didn’t know that, though,” she replied, pointing at the bodies that were now floating aimlessly around Strava. “They’re incredibly powerful and fast, yet didn’t figure out the vacuum of outer space, it seems.”
“They’ll most likely stay in orbit forever, or until something else bumps into them and pushes them back in,” Arwen said. “We need to grab one or two and study them.”
“We need to help the others!” Harper croaked, wiping her tears. She was now slowly shifting to a state of pure anger, based on how she was trembling to her core. I felt the same. The powerlessness was just too much for either of us to bear.
“There’s nothing we can do for them right now!” Lumi replied.
Out of all of us, Lumi seemed to be the most calm and level-headed. Sometimes, if I had to be honest, she scared me with how cold she could be. However, given the circumstances, deep down I felt grateful that we had her on board. She was grounded enough to keep us from doing something potentially suicidal.
“The majority of our fleet survived,” River interjected. “You saw them, Lumi!”
“I saw them, yes. I also saw those creatures take them,” Lumi shot back. “If we go down there now, we will suffer the same fate or worse, we’ll end up like the ones who didn’t make it. The only thing we can do right now is stick around for as long as we can, in orbit, and gather as much information as possible. Then, we need to go back to Calliope and figure something else out! Going in guns blazing clearly isn’t going to work!”
Jax, Hansa, Varga, Jovi, and Anjani may have died out there, or may have been captured in one of the escape pods. Most of the dragons were dead, but some had also been intercepted and taken alive by those flashing creatures, too. Blaze’s father, Heath, could be one of them. We didn’t know anything for sure, and that hurt the most.
“They took prisoners, for sure,” Grandpa Caleb said, a muscle ticking nervously in his jaw. “That means they wanted them alive. Otherwise, they would’ve killed them.”
Tejus nodded slowly. “Whatever these creatures are, they’re well above our level,” he replied. “And there are more of them than we initially anticipated. We have to find another way to enter Strava if we want to rescue Derek’s and Rose’s crews. Lumi is right: there isn’t much we can do right now. Not like this.”
Harper exhaled. “What are we going to tell Victoria and Bastien?” she murmured.
A couple of seconds passed in deafening silence.
“The truth,” Grandpa Caleb replied. “We don’t know if they’re dead or alive at this point.”
“It’s the same thing we’ll tell Blaze and every other son, daughter, parent, sibling, and friend that the members of our fleet have just left behind,” Draven said.
“We lost a dozen Druids on those ships,” Patrik replied, his voice raw with emotion. “We’re endangered enough as it is.”
We all slowly lowered our heads, letting it all sink in.
There was no point in fighting our emotions. Grief was a powerful thing, and it had us in its grip. I gave my sisters a sideways glance and a soft nod. I didn’t know what else to do.
We were vastly outnumbered and clearly overpowered. We didn’t know the enemy at all, but we’d seen enough to understand that they brought a whole new level to the table. None of us were physically or psychologically equipped for that. On top of that, more of our people were still down there on Strava, dealing with those flashing creatures up close.
We’d lost so many people in the span of minutes. I still couldn’t believe it.
Granted, most had survived the explosions, but I had no clue as to what fate had in store for them. I just knew we had to rethink our strategy and logistics, because we had a lot more people to get off Strava now.
Part of me held on to the ridiculous thought that maybe I was dreaming about all this. That I would soon wake up and breathe a sigh of relief, happy to see Jovi, Anjani, Jax, Hansa, Heath, and the others alive, well, and full of energy.
But the reality was different.
It was cold and cruel. Then again, I wasn’t one to let such fickle things as all-out war bring me down. If anything, it flamed the fires within me.
“One thing is for sure,” Lumi said. “We’re in a whole new kind of trouble.”
Even with witches, warlocks, swamp witches, dragons, and the Daughters of Eritopia on our side, we still didn’t have enough to take those flashing creatures head on. We just had to find another way.
“I’m not ready to give up, yet,” I said.
“Hell, no!” Harper snapped. “We’re getting everyone back! We’ll find a way to obliterate those flashing creatures, too. We’ll find a way.”
One by one, the rest of our crew began to nod slowly. We weren’t ready to give into despair. It hurt like hell, and we had a lot of families to notify… plenty of hearts to break, but we weren’t done yet.
Not while we were all still breathing.
Derek
Time to wake up, Derek.
I heard the voice as if I were stuck at the bottom of an extremely deep barrel. It echoed around me, prompting my consciousness to resurface.
“Wake up, there’s something you need to see,” the voice said, now clearer.
The darkness began to dissipate as I slowly opened my eyes. The air caressed my face. The sunlight warmed me up. I instinctively panicked—sunlight wasn’t something I was allowed to be in. For centuries, it had been one of the few things that could kill me.
I quickly covered my face, the image before me still hazy blobs of color on a pale blue backdrop. I felt my hand get pulled back. I immediately jolted upright, ready to resist—though I wasn’t sure what I was going to resist, exactly.
“Don’t do anything foolish,” Ta’Zan said. “The collar will shock you again.”
I froze. All my memories came back in one heartbreaking avalanche. The resort. The cave with its strange pods. The glass boxes. The Faulties and the Perfects. Ta’Zan had knelt next to me, watching me carefully. I breathed a sigh of relief as I remembered I’d swallowed a pill that stopped the sun from burning me.
For a moment, I wanted to just enjoy the feeling of sunlight on my face, until I remembered why I’d gotten myself shocked in the first place. I’d lost it, after Ta’Zan had told me about his endeavors and his plan for the entire universe. My stomach churned, and my chest tightened, but I had to keep my cool. I couldn’t afford to lose myself like that again.
I took several deep breaths, reacquainting myself with everything ar
ound me.
“Take it easy, Derek,” Ta’Zan said. “I genuinely dislike seeing you suffer.”
I couldn’t help but scoff. “Right.”
“I’m serious. I know I might seem cold and heartless—”
I cut him off. “You don’t seem cold and heartless. You are.”
He shook his head slowly. “You’ll think differently later down the line, I assure you,” he replied. “But, in the meantime, look up.”
I frowned at him, then glanced around first. We were still on the top of the diamond colosseum, overlooking hundreds of islands scattered across the turquoise ocean. Each had a similar structure of its own, with Perfects dashing above in sparkling flashes of light. The sky had turned orange and pink along the horizon, courtesy of the afternoon.
Then, I looked straight ahead and up.
My heart stopped.
Giant black puffs of smoke stretched across that portion of the sky. Thousands of lights flashed here and there, intercepting what looked like falling pieces of debris… and shuttles… And there were hundreds of those. It took me a minute to realize what I was watching.
Ta’Zan handed me a pair of strange binoculars, smaller than the ones I’d grown accustomed to, with thick lenses and a slim white casing. “You need to look closer,” he said.
I put the binoculars up to my eyes, then gasped.
Those falling pieces of debris had, until recently, been spaceships. The Perfects weren’t intercepting junk, but rather navigating between them at high altitude to capture the escape pods. Farther away, beyond the atmospheric layer, was another vessel, smaller and intact. It was pulling away. The Perfects were now scattering and returning to different islands.
“Those are your people, Derek.” Ta’Zan sighed.
“Wha—What?” I croaked.
There had been complete devastation in the sky. It looked like a solid fleet had been simply obliterated and blown apart. There were still starship parts plummeting toward the ocean, flaming as they left trails of black smoke in their wake.
I crumbled on the inside, breaking into a cold sweat.