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  When Edric raised his arm and brought down lightning from the clear sky above to strike the hydra and slam it to the ground far below, he really did expect that to be the end of it. He certainly did not expect the hydra to not even flinch when the lightning struck true then arced into a cascade of sparks and smaller bolts all along the creature's scales. It looked almost like Edric had doused the beast with a bucket of water with the way the lightning ran down and off of its form.

  "That's going to be a problem," Simend muttered.

  "Dextrals!" Kamissa called. "Polarity to inversion! Lightning is ineffective!"

  Edric tried to take cover behind Simend while he struggled with the crystals at his elbow that would invert the flow of radiance through his arm, but he was much larger than his partner. The jackal held his left arm up with his right, pointing at the hydra in case it decided to attack. But it continued to hang in the sky, its six heads snaking through the air seemingly at random. "This is meaningless," it said, its words still passing seamlessly from head to head. "Just as everything else you do. You see us, the omen of your inevitable elimination, and you resist. You fight, you wail, and you gnash your teeth, but what are these things to ones such as us? Your resistance can stop us as little as it can stop the coming of death, the shining of the sun, the ebbing of the sea, or the blowing of the winds." As soon as Gallius said the words, the wind stopped. The air was still and stagnant and oppressive in the heat of the Daran autumn. "We command these things. You can only break before them."

  "I'll break you!" Simend screeched, and he shot a cascade of fire straight at the hydra. It reached maybe halfway up to where the beast was flying before it petered out to nothing. Simend lowered his arm. "Okay, maybe not my best work."

  "And now you die," Gallius's heads said. "Just as you always must." Gallius rose up slightly, then swooped low over their heads, all six of his mouths gaping wide. From each mouth spewed a roiling cloud of green fog that trailed behind the soaring hydra and began to spread across the market plaza.

  "Get clear!" Kamissa shouted, sprinting away from the fog. The city guards followed her lead, each breaking off in a different direction. "Don't let that cloud touch you!"

  "I can hit him at that height!" Simend called, leveling his arm at the hydra again. He waited until Gallius was nearly on top of him before shooting flames straight into the hydra's faces. But as soon as the first spark of his attack struck the sickly fog, the entire cloud ignited and exploded. Gallius was blown far into the sky, tumbling head over heels as he flew. Simend also flew, thrown away by the massive fireball. He sailed clear across the market plaza, cracked the clay bricks of a nearby building when he slammed into it, then fell to the ground. He did not stir.

  "Sim!" Edric screamed. He sprinted towards where the jackal fell.

  "Sinistrals! Polarity to inversion! No more fire!" Kamissa was shouting, but Edric wasn't listening. He only heard his own heart pounding in his ears. Simend couldn't die. He wouldn't let him. He skidded to a halt beside his friend, feeling the slide burn the skin off his bare feet. It was nothing compared to the heat that Simend had experienced. When Edric rolled Simend onto his back, he saw that nearly all the fur had been scorched from the jackal's front, and his shendyt had burned off entirely. Edric spun his hand in the air above him, condensing water from the air into a chilling rain that would soothe the burns that covered every inch of Simend's exposed flesh. His fur had insulated his dark skin from most of the blast, but much of his left side was badly burned. The instant the rain was independently stable, Edric put his augmented hand on Simend's chest and let his symbiote reach out its counterpart, letting the two Astral serpents work together to ensure the dextral's winds and lightning could effectively keep Simend's breath flowing and heart beating.

  "He's making another pass!" Kamissa shouted.

  Edric ignored her. He had to mend Simend. There was nothing else as important. At least, that's what he thought until he heard Dalibor shouting, "Sara! No!" Then his stomach lurched, and he realized that there was something at least as important to him. He tore his eyes from Simend and saw Sara sprinting towards him, straight into the path where Gallius was flying across the plaza, streaming more flammable fog in his wake. Dalibor raced behind her, but he was too far. He would not be able to reach her before Gallius did.

  Edric despaired. There was nothing he could do. His symbiote's focus was tied up with Simend's. Interrupting it would almost certainly leave the jackal to die. So if he got up to tackle Sara out of the way, Simend would die. But if he stayed to save Simend, Sara would die. How could he choose between them? How cruel was that choice?

  But failing to choose meant choosing Simend, and Edric had delayed too long. Sara had made it in front of the hydra. She stopped running, turned to face the oncoming beast, and spread her arms wide. Gallius saw her, and all six serpentine mouths closed in unison. It swooped low to try and grab her, but she dropped to the ground, and it soared over her head. She pushed herself up onto her elbows and watched it soar away, looping wide for another pass. "You still can't kill me," she said with a vicious grim.

  "Dextrals!" Kamissa shouted. "Clear this fog!"

  "We can't!" one shouted from somewhere behind the green cloud. "The wind is stagnant! We can't break through!"

  "Why do I only have six luminaries to work with when I'm in a city that has thirty-eight?" Kamissa roared. "I'm going to have to have a talk with some people about their employment contracts."

  Sara crawled to Edric's side while Kamissa was shouting. "How is he?" she asked.

  "Bad," Edric said. Dalibor stood over the two of them watching Gallius's flight, his curved sword drawn. "I've stabilized him and patched the bleeding in his skull, but there's a lot more internal bleeds to patch. Not to mention the burns and the fact that most of his bones are broken."

  "He'll live, right?" she asked. "You can save him?"

  Edric asked the symbiotes and shook his head. "I don't know," he relayed. Then he shouted to Kamissa. "I need a medic! I can't fight if I have to keep support running on Sim!"

  "Yunus! Ping the hospital and tell them I'm repossessing their symbiotes if they are not here in two minutes!" Kamissa yelled.

  "On it!" a guard replied.

  "He's coming back!" Dalibor called. "We have to protect Sara. If that thing gets a hold of her, it can just fly off, and the battle's lost."

  Edric growled and bared his teeth. That was directed at him, he could tell. Not because he was Sara's boyfriend now, but because he was the only one here who could guarantee that the hydra wouldn't be able to find Sara. "I'm sorry, Sim," he whispered as he disentangled their symbiotes. "Just hold out for the medics, okay? Please." Then he grabbed Sara by the wrist.

  Sara jerked her hand from his grasp. "I can take care of myself," she insisted.

  "I understand that," Edric said, grabbing her wrist again. "But some things will always be easier for me." With a thought and a cascade of lights on his arm, he and Sara both blinked out of view. Edric adjusted his grip down from her wrist and into her hand and interlaced his invisible fingers with hers. "Don't let go of me."

  "Just carry me," she said. She punched him as she tried to find his neck to wrap her arms around him. "It'll be faster if we're not tugging on each other."

  Gallius swooped low over them just as Edric pulled Sara close to his chest and rolled away, cradling her in his arms. Dalibor too leapt out of the way. The hydra grabbed at the space Edric and Sara had just been, but its talons closed on nothing. All six heads shrieked as the beast flew away empty-handed. Edric pushed himself to his feet, still holding Sara close, and jogged away from the site. "We need to find a place to take cover," he whispered.

  "Get her inside," Dalibor growled from behind them. Edric glanced back. Dalibor was still tracking Gallius's flight through the sky. "I don't know where you are, but get her inside. I need to think."

  "You cannot hide from us, Princess!" the hydra boomed from overhead. "Your song rings clearly! We can find you anywhere!"

  "Shite," Edric swore. He stopped running. The shielding relic was still back at Simend's house.

  "Why does it keep saying we?" Dalibor asked himself. "And why does that bother me so much?"

  "If you are still considering retreat," Gallius went on, "we would be happy to smash this city into dust to change your mind."

  "There's not a single chance on either side of death that you will touch a single stone of any building within Meleko," Kamissa shouted. "I'll burn my city to the ground myself before I let you do it any harm."

  "I hate planning around magic. It doesn't make sense," Dalibor growled. He grabbed his ears. "Start with facts. What do I know?"

  Gallius paused in his swooping and hovered above Kamissa. "How could you begin to stop us, insect?" he asked. "You are nothing, and we are the final omen of your end."

  Kamissa, with a toothy grin spread across her face, pulled a boxy relic from her toolbelt and waved it at the hydra. The beast drew its heads back, and all six of them turned to look at a large, dish-shaped relic mounted atop the leopardess's workshop.

  One head turned back to Kamissa. "You wouldn't," it said alone. "The targeting clamps on that thing are shattered, we can see it from here. You can't control it."

  "But neither can you," Kamissa retorted, and she squeezed her thumb against the crystal on the side of the box in her hand. Its partnered relic sprung to life immediately, spraying forth a blazing beam of vermillion light. The force of the light was too much for the relic to control, and it flopped wildly around on its spherical socket, slashing the sky in random arcs with its burning radiance. Gallius dropped to the ground barely in time to avoid getting cleaved in two by one of its stray passes. Dalibor darted under the cover of a nearby building, and Edric carried Sara to another. Though the beam of fire destroyed everything it touched, not a single building was harmed. The beam carved through trees, boiled the sea, and burned the ground, but every building was inside the circle that marked the bounds of what the relic's fire could reach, and Edric knew that Kamissa had intentionally planned the city that way.

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  The same Kamissa who, at that exact moment, was condensing a javelin of pure ice out of the air while her relic spewed fire through the sky above her. "Now we fight as equals," she said, leveling her javelin at Gallius.

  Dalibor huddled behind the corner of a building, still clutching his ears. "Kamissa said she felt six extra symbiotes with this thing, but there are no supporting luminaries," he muttered. "Where are its reinforcements?" Edric's stomach dropped. He'd forgotten about the luminaries. He tried to reach out to find them without dropping the invisibility on himself and Sara.

  "You are not our equal," Gallius's heads said. Their necks towered a dozen feet or more over Kamissa. "You are nothing but a wayward clump of dust that has convinced itself that it is alive."

  "I am Ingwe!" Kamissa roared, beating her spotted chest with her free hand. "And we are warriors all!" She hurled the javelin at Gallius and was already forming another when the hydra batted the first out of the air. The javelin shattered and released a stinging cloud of biting frost, and Gallius roared in pain as it yanked its hand free of the fog. Ice crystals clung to his scales and claws. Then Kamissa was beneath him, stabbing at his legs with another frozen javelin, while the beast tried to stomp on her or smash her with his tail.

  "The horns, Dalibor!" Edric called. "The symbiotes are in the heads' horns. There are no luminaries coming!"

  But thankfully there were medics coming, a pair of them finally creeping into the plaza away from where Kamissa and the city guards who had managed to join her fought the hydra. "Over here!" Sara called to the medics. "Simend needs help over here!" Edric tried not to listen to the screams when one of the hydra's heads caught a dextral guard and bit straight through him. Another of the heads whipped about, trying to locate where Sara's voice had come from. The medics hurried away from the melee to where Simend lay and quickly got to work.

  "In the horns?" Dalibor repeated. "Is each head a separate entity? But then who's controlling the body?"

  The canine warlord crouched low and watched the fight. Edric wondered what he saw. To his own eyes, the fight was going poorly. The remaining dextral guard hung back, both his wind and his lightning useless against the massive beast. Kamissa and the sinistral guard were fighting with their icy javelins, trying desperately to freeze one of the hydra's limbs or heads. They had to stay impossibly close, though, or the snapping heads would be able to grab them. More than once, Gallius had managed to slash or catch them with his claws, but so far they'd managed to freeze their way loose. Kamissa's unaugmented arm was covered in blood from a gash on her shoulder. One head breathed out more of the flammable fog, and all the combatants, both human and bestial, scrambled to get away from it. Another of the heads snaked over to smack the one that had loosed the fog, and the two hissed at each other.

  "There's no order, no coordination. No warlord. Where are you, Gallius?" Dalibor muttered to himself, tapping his knuckles against the flagstones. Edric hadn't heard him think aloud before, and the unbroken stream of words flowed almost faster than he could keep up. "Opponent vastly outstrips us in numbers and capability. Two against a superior six. No, seven. And yet they're barely holding their own. They could not possibly be doing worse without—" The flow of words paused, and Dalibor tilted his head to the side. "Oh. I see you, Gallius. You're doing it to me this time."

  Edric couldn't follow the rapid course of Dalibor's thoughts, but he could see that Gallius was about to win the fight. He'd managed to pin the remaining sinistral guard with one of his wild stomps, and a head quickly darted down to snap him in two. Kamissa swore from where she was trapped on the wrong side of the noxious fog and hurled another frost javelin. Gallius's heads reared back, and the wind finally began again. The dextral guard tried desperately to keep the sudden breeze from blowing the cloud into himself, but he could not command the wind nearly as well as the hydra. His eyes melted almost as soon as the cloud touched him, and he had no breath to scream as he died.

  "I'm trusting you, Gallius," Dalibor said. "Edric, drop the invisibility."

  "What?" Sara hissed.

  "No!" Edric yelled.

  "We don't have time for this!" Dalibor insisted. "Either I'm right or we're all dead."

  "No!" Edric shouted again, hugging Sara close. "I'll die before I let him have her!"

  Dalibor glared at where their voices had come from even as the hydra inhaled again to breathe death onto the wind. Kamissa formed a dome of ice in front of herself to try and keep the fog at bay. "Then I'll do it myself," Dalibor growled. He picked his sword up from the ground and took a deep breath. "Goodbye, my sister," he said then charged at Gallius.

  And Sara panicked. "Dalya, no!" she screeched. The hydra's heads closed their mouths and turned as one towards her voice.

  "Sara, hush!" Edric hissed. He tried to move away from the spot, but Sara struggled in his grasp. "Stop squirming!"

  "No!" she shouted. "Dalya, stop!"

  Dalibor did not stop. He charged towards Gallius's flank, and not a single head turned to look at him. Each snake was fixed directly on Sara's voice. He remained almost eerily silent as he rounded to the creature's back, leapt into the air with his winged blade held high in both hands, brought it down still silently, and lodged his weapon deep in the hyrda's tail, nearly cleaving it clean off. The body fell to its knees, its arms flailing to try and find what had hurt it, but not a single head turned away from Sara's continued yelling. They lunged forward as one, their momentum almost dragging the body along behind them as it struggled to get to its feet to follow with their movements. It wasn't until one head realized that the body was struggling that Dalibor's attack was discovered. The head, being dragged along with its fellows, was in no position to make a solid strike, but Dalibor, who'd failed to keep up with the body when it began to move, was in no position to evade either. The snake lunged at the jackal, trying to bite, even as Dalibor leapt away. And Dalibor was nearly successful. The hydra did not manage to bite down on him as it had the guards earlier. It only managed to graze his leg with one of its fangs. The warlord screamed and fell, clutching at the wound on his leg.

  "Dalibor!" Sara shrieked, and in her flailing to get loose, managed to punch Edric right in the eye. He yelped and reflexively brought his arms up to block his face, which was all it took for him to drop her. "Dalibor!" Sara screamed again, and Edric could hear her footsteps sprinting towards the fallen jackal.

  Which meant Gallius could hear it as well. "Sara, no!" Edric cried, but it was too late. The hydra's heads encircled the still-unseen princess, and she cried out when the body's arms managed to catch hold of her. "Let her go!" Edric bellowed. He let the invisibility drop at last and called lightning into his arm to lash out at the beast, but then he could see Sara in Gallius's embrace, and he knew that he could not strike without harming her.

  "At last, we have you!" the heads chanted, whipping around jubilantly. "At last, we can reclaim our selves and cleanse this pitiful planet. We go now, and you must prepare for your end!"

  The heads jerked skyward, but the body didn't follow. They remained on land, even when they tried again to take flight. The body seemed to ignore them, clutching the princess close to its chest. "What are you doing?" one of the snakes bellowed. It tried to tug the body skyward without effect. "Get us out of here!" The other heads reached down to try and tug the princess loose or to smack sense into their shared body, but it ignored them all.

  "You're still in there, aren't you, Gallius?" Sara asked in a drowsy voice, and a pale, golden glow peeked out from between them. The body's arms clutched her tighter. "You remember now. Because that's what I am, aren't I? Or rather, the thing that my father's after. It remembers, and it can share those memories. It made you remember yourself. Even after everything my father did to you. After what these monsters attached to you made you do. You still remember caring about me. You thought bringing me back was the right thing to do. That it would save the world somehow. What do you know now? Tell me. It can hear you."

  "You will tell her nothing!" said one of the snakes. It brought its head down and sank its fangs into Gallius's leg. The body recoiled in pain and dropped the princess.

  "What are you doing!" shrieked another head. It pounded its head against the other's neck, but the first did not let go of its grip. "We're not immune to our own venom, you idiot! You're going to kill us all!"

  Edric darted towards the writhing mass of scales and fangs and scooped up the princess. "I've got you, Sara!"

  "No…" she murmured, almost seeming to be in a daze. The glow from her chest shone even through her tunic. "I could hear him. I almost understood."

  Edric glanced over at Gallius. The body struggled to pull the snake's head from his leg. "We'll keep her safe," he told the hydra, not knowing if the warlord could hear him or not. Then he backed away, not trusting any of the snakes not to try and bite him if he turned his back. But the snakes were occupied only with themselves, hissing and striking and snapping at each other.

  Whether the man who was once Gallius heard Edric or not, the shark would never know. Once Sara was clear of the hydra's heads, once her glow began to fade, a huge, bloody spike of ice erupted from the beast's chest. The body twitched, and the heads all gasped. Behind them, from where she had thrown the javelin, Kamissa raised a fist. Every light on her arm flared, and the ice spike grew its own spikes, piercing out from and back through the hydra in a thousand directions and a spray of viscera. The Sage of Meleko snarled, and the body itself began to freeze, frost creeping up from the shoulders and into the necks of the serpents, who began to panic. Two tried breathing poison, but Edric managed to siphon it safely away with a vortex of wind.

  The hydra fell to the ground, its heads twitching and flailing as they slowly froze. Kamissa stalked towards it, fangs bared. "I am going to tear each one of you apart, scale by scale," she growled. "I will figure out how you installed multiple symbiotes in a single body, harvest those symbiotes, and scour them for every secret they hold. And if you are very, very lucky, you will be dead before I start." One head, already sluggish from the ice, struck at her, and she knocked it skyward with an augmented uppercut. Before it had any chance to recover, Kamissa had conjured another spear of ice, which she drove straight up into its jaw and out the top of its skull. Then she jerked the spear back down and slammed it into the ground, leaving the serpentine head impaled on a spike of ice as if on display. "Congratulations. You get to be the only lucky one."

  "You will learn nothing from us," the heads said, their words passing again freely between them. "Our thoughts are locked. Sealed beyond your feeble means to reach."

  "Open," whispered Sara, and the golden light that flared from within her chest also spread to the eyes of each still-living serpent.

  "Well shit," one of the heads said once the glow in its eyes had returned to green.

  "Abort!" shouted another. "Abandon host!"

  "Destroy the link!" ordered a third, and its eyes flared red.

  "No!" yelled Kamissa, but the eyes of each of the five living heads flared red just before they all exploded in a violent mass of flame, metal, and brains. Kamissa, still yelling, scooped up a handful of shattered bits of blood-soaked symbiote. "No!"

  Edric stood silent, watching Sara as the light faded from her chest and she came back to herself. Soon the light vanished, and the princess blinked. "Edric," she said, still groggy. "Is Gallius…?"

  "Dead," Edric told her.

  "And Dalya?" she asked groggily. Edric grimaced and looked to where the warlord lay, still whining as he clutched his bitten leg. Sara too heard his whines, and instantly came to her senses with a gasp. "Dalya!" She rolled out of Edric's arms, landed on her hands and knees, and sprinted to the jackal's side.

  Edric let her go. Another one of the medics had already left Simend's side and was hurrying to join Sara at Dalibor's. Edric knew he would only be in the way if he joined them. He was a combat medic, but he'd heard the snakes talk about their venom and he knew next to nothing about treating that. So he surveyed the battlefield instead. Simend still lay unconscious, and the medic attending him leaned close over his body, the fingers of his augmented hand interlaced with Simend's. Kamissa glared up at the impaled snake, arms crossed and foot tapping. A few remaining clouds of the toxic fog drifted lazily on the renewed winds and out to sea. Dalibor kept still while the medic worked on his leg, one hand weakly stroking the head of Sara, who had buried her face in his chest while sobs shook her shoulders. Vermillion beams still swept wildly through the sky.

  "Kamissa?" Edric called, staring to the west. "I think the jungle's on fire."

  With a wordless growl of frustration, Kamissa slammed a fist against the activator crystal on the relic that again hung from her waist. The relic atop the workshop went immediately back to sleep. "Yunus!" she called, but there came no response. "Ugh, you died, I forgot. Now I need to find a new assistant. I picked you for a reason, Yunus! You were the best, but you had to go and get your face melted." She glared up again at the impaled head. "I'm going to enjoy ripping you open and tearing every last secret out of your platinum inlays, you Star-cursed, scale-faced prick. Who's less than equal now?" She kicked the javelin loose, causing the head to slam to the ground before she turned away.

  Edric watched the leopardess stalk out of the plaza. He felt rooted to his spot. They had won. Three luminaries had died, and Dalibor and Simend might yet join them, but they had won. He had won enough fights in his life to recognize the hollowness that followed. He felt his knees begin to give out, and he quickly lowered himself to sit on the ground. They had won. The great beast was dead, Edric had survived, and Sara was safe. His heart yet pounded, his hands yet trembled, his breath yet raced. He needed to swim. He was going to throw up. He couldn't move.

  They had won. He had survived. Sara was safe.

  They had won. He had survived. Sara was safe.

  They had won.