“Oh, would you look at that?” Oril said, a sadistic smile spreading across his face.

  “For once, somebody else did the eating,” Lhogan laughed back.

  But El wasn’t listening to them. Not really. Her ears were hearing their words, but her brain wasn’t processing. Her Spark was gone. For good this time. There was no mistaking it. The burning Ember had devoured it completely.

  The cracked ground hard under her boots, and the sky above so far out of reach, El lifted her head and met Lhogan’s flaming eyes.

  “Aw, is the little piggy gonna cry?” Lhogan asked.

  El, in answer, turned and dashed toward the distant storm. Her legs pumped as fast as she could make them go, but compared to flying, she might as well have been crawling. It was at least five hundred feet to the storm and as soon as…

  Her ears perked, and she dove to the side, just in time as a flaming blade cut through where her neck had been, and Lhogan sailed past. Where would Oril come from? El rolled on the ground, kicked her legs up and over, and got to her feet.

  A flaming sword thrust in straight at her face.

  El barely leaned to the right, the blade sizzling past and through her hair, then snapped her elbow up into Oril’s extended chin. His flame armor ignited to life, but he grunted from the impact and spiraled out of control as he flew past.

  Not waiting to see if she’d actually hurt him, El sprinted toward the storm. The hum of flaming wings was behind her almost immediately, and she instinctively brought her only weapon up as she spun, the Ember.

  Lhogan’s flaming sword struck the Ember’s wooden haft before the man could stop his swing, and just like that, the blade vanished. Sucked up into the torch’s flames. Lhogan’s eyes widened in surprise, and then even further as El slammed her fist straight into his nose.

  He staggered back, nose gushing blood, and El charged in. How was she even hurting him through his flame armor? Was it the Ember? Was her body permanently changed from the Spark, even though she no longer had one? Was it something else?

  It didn’t matter, and El slammed a kick between the man’s legs, staggering him back again and twisting his face in pain. He turned, as if to fly off, and El swung the Ember at his wings. Like the ravenous flame it was, it consumed the fiery wings in a blink, and when Lhogan jumped to escape, he instead merely slapped face-first into the ground.

  El could feel it though, the Ember had tried not to pull too hard on the man’s Spark. His wings would return, and soon. So, she kicked him in the side of the head for good measure. That should slow him down.

  “Bitch!” Oril roared behind her, and El spun, bringing the Ember up in a wide arc.

  Oril’s sword vanished on contact, but he still barreled into her with the full force of his flight, knocking the wind out of her and crushing her to the ground.

  El scrambled with her back on the parched earth to get out from underneath the larger man, but a right hook across her jaw had her spitting blood. No flame armor to soften the blow, stars spun in front of her face.

  “How do you like that?” Oril screamed, grabbing her leather Firestorm coat in one hand and backhanding her with the other.

  She spit blood onto the dry ground, her eyes watering, and looked toward the storm.

  “Not so tough now,” he shouted, then lifted her and slammed her back down into the ground. Once, twice, three times. Everything spun. “How’s that feel? Huh? How’s… that… feel?”

  “Better than this will,” El mumbled through cracked and swollen lips. Then she stabbed the Ember up into the side of his face.

  The flame armor did nothing to slow the hungry flame, and even the Ember itself couldn’t truly change its nature. Flames washed over Oril’s head like a wave, consuming hair and flesh with abandon.

  Oril tumbled off her, screaming and clutching his still-burning face.

  El, meanwhile, rolled in the other direction and pushed herself to her feet. She fell almost immediately, but couldn’t, wouldn’t stay down. Even with the world spinning around her like a top, she stumbled toward the falling snow on shaky legs.

  She needed to get to the storm, to the cabin, before those two recovered.

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  Each step brought returning strength to her, and a hundred feet from the storm, she risked a glance back. Lhogan had gotten to his feet, and the flames around Oril’s head were gone. They both looked in her direction, their eyes burning like bonfires.

  Then their bodies began to twist, their shoulders widening, their knees breaking and snapping backward, the bones in their arms bursting out of their flesh.

  They screamed, oh how they screamed, and El couldn’t watch anymore. Something terrible was happening to them. No, that wasn’t quite right. The Pyre was doing something terrible to them. And it would be so much worse for her if they caught her.

  El focused on the distance to the storm, on every step so she didn’t fall, while the two things that were once men howled somewhere behind her. Whatever was happening to them wasn’t quick though, and El made the storm wall, plowing into snow up to her knees. It slowed her run, but she kept pushing onward. There… through the trees. The cabin. It was so close! She could…

  Reality cut in front of her, like a sword through paper, with the bottom half of the storm and one of the great trees falling away. The Pycrin golem roared at her through the crack, flames billowing in its fist, ready to throw her way, but Sol slammed it to the side, and the falling snow fell like a curtain over the space. The cabin once again stood in front of her, but the massive tree that’d been cut toppled toward her.

  Unbelievably tall, it almost looked like it was falling in slow motion, but it definitely was not.

  El loped forward, bringing her legs as high as she could to get over the snow and out of the way of the falling titan.

  “Move, move, move,” she told her legs, the shadow growing around her, then dove forward.

  She hadn’t even fully landed in the snow before the impact of the tree hitting the ground threw her back up into the air. El rolled, reaching to ignite her wings and guide her flight, but of course they didn’t respond, and the avalanche of snow carried her forward.

  Through some miracle of luck, she landed on top of the mountainous pile of snow, instead of under it, and she was only feet away from the cabin.

  Struggling, she got her legs under her, but they instantly sunk to her knees in the snow, and she flopped back down on her belly. Better to crawl along the top than risk sinking up to her neck. It wouldn’t be fast, but it would get her where she needed to go.

  Twin howls echoed through the trees somewhere behind her, suggesting that, perhaps, speed might be useful, and El belly-crawled forward as quickly as she could, Ember held tight in her left hand.

  Something made the hair on the back of her neck stand, and El rolled to the left. The tip of a flaming sword, as wide as she was tall, cut a vertical slash through the air, and the golem’s flaming fingers burst into the In-Between and pushed against the tear between realms.

  “You need to hurry!” the Stormbearer’s voice yelled through the hole. Ice covered the flaming claw and it recoiled, the falling snow once again filling the gap.

  El glanced at the cleaved ground beside her—the golem could somehow still reach her with a lucky strike—then pulled herself forward and rolled down the snowdrift’s side. The short tumble brought her within an arm’s length of the front door, and she reached out to turn the handle.

  Force slammed into her from behind, and El didn’t open the door, but she did go through it. Splinters cut her face and rained through the room, and then she was on the floor, gasping for breath. Sol’s wife and son sat frozen in front of her, just like last time, with the blue fire between them.

  In her hand, the Ember recoiled in terror, like it was trying to burn away from the blue flame, but it couldn’t truly move from where it sat on the end of the torch.

  If she could just…

  Pain lanced through her leg as something grabbed her calf and hauled her back with impossible strength. She clawed at the ground, but there was nothing to hold onto, so she rolled onto her back to look at her attacker.

  Leathery wings, like a bat’s, with fire where the bones should be, extended over spiked shoulders. Arms long enough to drag their knuckles on the ground ended with knife-like claws, while its emaciated chest showed glowing ribs through stretched skin. A bony tail ending in flame balanced it on reverse-jointed legs as it leaned in and opened its multi-jointed maw. The fist-size eyes on the sides of its bone-plated head swiveled to look at El, and a tongue of flame snaked out from between serrated teeth and coal-like lips.

  “Hello, pig,” the thing wheezed.

  El swung the Ember at its face as it lifted her effortlessly into the air. Sparks flew from the impact, but the monster that was Lhogan didn’t even flinch.

  “That wasn’t nice,” it wheezed, then casually flicked its wrist and hurled her into the opposite wall.

  Unlike the door, the wall held, and El flattened against it before falling to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.

  No air in her lungs, and warmth running down the back of her head, El rolled on her side and looked at the double-image of Lhogan looming in the door. The twinned monstrosity stepped inside, glanced down at the firepit, then carefully walked around it, once again solidifying into a single image as it reached down and wrapped its long fingers around El’s neck.

  One careless move would lop her head off, but Lhogan was cautious with his claws and lifted her from the ground.

  “You almost made it,” he wheezed. “But it’s too late now.”

  WHOOOSH. Flames cleaved through the top of the cabin, cutting through the walls and flinging the roof off like a child’s plaything. The Pycrin golem, wrapped in flames and so familiar next to Lhogan’s new form, reached one claw on top of the wall and leaned in, its eyes locking on the Ember in El’s hand.

  “I’ve done your bidding,” Lhogan wheezed, his bulbous eyes turning up toward the incarnation of his god.

  The golem’s hand lifted from the wall and opened, but a spear of ice came down faster, cutting between El and Lhogan, and sheared Lhogan’s arm off at the elbow.

  El dropped to the ground, gasping for air as the arm holding her flashed and sparked out of existence, only the burns on her throat evidence it had been there at all.

  Lhogan roared in pain and the golem vanished behind the falling snow. This was her chance!

  From her knees, El pushed up, holding the Ember close to her chest as Lhogan’s eyes turned toward her, and she dove into the firepit.

  The Ember screamed in her mind. All its defiance. Its anger. Its terror.

  El simply smiled as she landed in the blue flame.

  Then the cabin exploded.

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