Rocher was given no time to understand it.

  One moment the Demon Lord had been in front of him, all muscle and smoke and bck blood. The next, it was moving.

  It unched itself sideways with a terrible scream, and the inner wall of the castle met it like a shield.

  Stone did not break so much as explode.

  Blocks the size of cattle ripped free and spun out into the air. A spray of dust and mortar burst outward. The Demon Lord crashed through the wall as if the fortress were wet cy, carving a jagged tunnel with its own body.

  Rocher went with it.

  His sword was still buried in the creature's back, sunk to the hilt between ptes that had once been hard as iron. He had no clean way to let go. The Demon Lord's momentum yanked him forward, and his instinct did the rest. He locked both hands on the hilt and fttened himself to the creature's spine as the world became stone, dust, and noise.

  Heat licked at his face. The Demon Lord was charred along both shoulders, skin split and bckened, smoke rolling from its wound in dirty coils. It screamed again, and the vibration traveled through flesh and steel into Rocher's forearms. The creature's body shook with it, thrashing hard enough that Rocher's teeth clicked.

  He tried to pull his bde free, but it was useless.

  The Demon Lord smmed through another section of wall and into open air.

  The sudden change made Rocher's stomach twist. Wind hit him like a sp, tearing the breath from his lungs. His eyes watered instantly. Dust from the ruined interior stung his face and stuck to the wetness at the corners of his eyes.

  Below him, the castle's inner spaces fell away into height and distance.

  The Demon Lord was climbing.

  Its wings beat in uneven, furious strikes. Each one was a shove that jolted Rocher's arms. He clung harder, knuckles white against the sword hilt.

  Then the tail came.

  It whipped up from below and snapped over its own back with a speed that his eyes barely tracked. The bde at the tail's tip caught him across the back, tearing deep into him. Pain fred, sharp and immediate, hot enough to steal the next breath. His mouth opened on a raw sound he could not swallow back.

  He should be dead, he thought.

  Instead, the tail's bde had shattered against him.

  It was cracked along its edges, fractured like burned cy, and broke into jagged chunks that spun away into open air. The remaining stump of the tail spasmed, useless for a beat, then recoiled.

  Rocher sucked in air through his teeth and forced himself not to loosen his grip. The pain was still real. Warmth spread beneath his armor, slick against his skin. But he was still holding on, afraid of what would happen if he let go.

  Wind screamed past him. His cloak snapped and tried to tear free. It felt like the air itself was conspiring to pry his fingers open, one by one.

  He tried to angle his face down, to see where they were, to judge height, to find anything solid to hold in his mind.

  The courtyard was shrinking.

  People became dots below. Shapes moved in tight clusters, indistinct at this distance. Smoke smeared the air near the ground, and the ruined castle walls bracketed the scene like broken teeth.

  The Demon Lord rose above it all.

  Rocher's arms started to shake. He could feel the wrongness in his body again, that disconnect he had noticed when he first charged. It was as if his muscles did not belong to him, as if his mind had to issue each command twice before his limbs obeyed.

  Do not panic.

  His chest strained against his ribs. Every breath came hard and thin. The wind stole half of it.

  The Demon Lord jerked, banking sharply.

  Rocher's body swung with it, yanked sideways by force. His stomach lurched. The world tilted, and the horizon turned into a spinning smear of stone and sky.

  In a tight circle, it flew.

  The acceleration crushed Rocher against the creature's back. His vision tunneled. His ears filled with a dull roaring that was not only wind. His arms, already burning, felt suddenly weightless, then heavy, then numb.

  The Demon Lord screamed again. The sound came as if through water.

  Rocher's fingers slipped.

  For a heartbeat he tried to adjust. He tightened his grip and found nothing. The sword hilt was suddenly too far away, as if it had moved without him.

  There was no longer any pressure under his chest. No contact.

  Just air.

  His body had peeled away from the Demon Lord's back like a rag snapped loose.

  He had one instant of bnk, distant surprise, and then he was falling.

  Wind tore at him. His stomach rose into his throat. His limbs filed for bance that didn't exist. He forced his eyes open and saw, far above, the Demon Lord still flying.

  It veered away, his sword still lodged in its back like a bck spike, and climbed, smoking and screaming into the sky as if it could outrun the pain.

  Rocher's first instinct was to give chase.

  He tried, absurdly, to reach for it.

  He was falling too fast for that to matter.

  The ground was coming up.

  The castle courtyard was no longer distant. It was a hard, expanding shape, details snapping into view: broken stones, scattered bodies, ranks of padins in disarray, the ragged line of a colpsed wall. He could see movement now, see heads tilting up, see the ripple of arm.

  He forced his mind to work, his body to obey.

  Survive.

  Gold flickered along his arms and shoulders.

  It was not a thought so much as a reflex, the strange power in him answering panic with light. Rune-like arcs crawled over his skin, bright enough that he saw them even against the harsh sky. The glow circled him, trying to shape itself into something that could help.

  A shield. A cushion.

  A miracle.

  The gold fred and stuttered. It didn't know what to become. Rocher didn't know he could tell it.

  The ground kept rising.

  He clenched his jaw until his teeth ached. He braced, instinctively curling, trying to turn his body into something that could take impact without snapping. His wound burned across his back, a line of pain that pulled every time he moved.

  He very nearly squeezed his eyes shut.

  Then a fsh of red cut through his peripheral vision.

  A figure rose into his path, moving fast and clean, climbing into the space beneath him. A sharp blue light followed it.

  Seraphine.

  She lifted one hand, fingers spyed, and her eyes locked on him with a focus so intense it looked like anger.

  Air smmed into Rocher from below.

  It hit him like a wall, a sudden upward force that arrested his fall so quickly his stomach flipped. The rush of wind past his ears changed pitch. The world steadied. His body jerked once, then slowed, then stopped dropping like a stone.

  He hung suspended for a breath, held by something he could not see.

  Then he began to descend again, controlled this time. Guided.

  Seraphine was beneath him and slightly ahead, adjusting her position with gentle shifts, as if she were stepping on invisible stairs. Her hair streamed behind her in a red banner. Pulseweaver hovered at her side, blue runes flickering with each correction.

  She moved so comfortably that, for a second, it looked as natural as walking.

  Rocher stared at her. His lungs struggled for air, and his heart hammered hard enough to shake his ribs.

  He found his voice.

  "I guess I shouldn't be surprised you can fly," he rasped. His throat felt raw. "You are the Sage after all."

  Seraphine's mouth tightened, not quite a smile. Not quite anything.

  "Actually I just learned it today," she said, face taut.

  He blinked.

  There was something in her tone that did not match the words. Something strained.

  Rocher tried to parse it and couldn't. His mind kept slipping off it, dragged back to the simple relief that he wasn't plummeting to his death.

  They drifted lower.

  The courtyard rose to meet them. Details sharpened: cracked fgstones, scattered ash, the dark smear of blood across stone. Padins ran toward the nding point, shouting to each other. Priests clustered near a line of makeshift cots and bnkets, the beginnings of an infirmary set up against a section of wall that still stood.

  Evelyn reached the spot first.

  She looked up with calcution, eyes narrowed against dust and gre, already moving to where she thought Rocher would come down.

  Seraphine lowered him carefully.

  The moment his boots touched stone, his knees buckled.

  Evelyn caught him under one arm, her grip iron through leather and cloth. She shifted his weight without ceremony and kept him upright.

  "Easy," she said, and then, sharper, "Don't you dare die on me."

  Rocher tried to ugh and turned it into a cough. Dust and pain made it ugly.

  Lumiere was there a heartbeat ter, white and gold robes already stained with ash. She had priests behind her, arms full of bandages and bowls and whatever supplies they had managed to gather.

  Her gaze flicked over Rocher in one quick scan: his face, his shaking hands, the fresh blood darkening the back of his armor.

  "Take him in," she ordered.

  They guided him to a cot. It was little more than canvas stretched over a frame, but it held.

  Rocher sat, then folded forward with a groan he couldn't stop. The motion pulled his wound and made his vision spot with white.

  Around him, padins swore. One man clutched a broken arm, face gray with pain. Another y on his side, chest rising in shallow, fast breaths, eyes unfocused.

  The air smelled of sweat, smoke, blood, and crushed herbs.

  Lumiere pulled his armor open at the back with brisk hands. Someone cut straps. Someone else held the edges aside. Cool air hit the wound, and Rocher's whole body tensed.

  "Hold still," Lumiere said, voice hard with concentration.

  Rocher gripped the edge of the cot until his fingers went numb.

  Lumiere cleaned the cut with something that stung like fire. His breath hitched. He bit down so hard his jaw shook.

  He tried to distract himself. His eyes moved over the infirmary space, searching past priests and bandages and bodies.

  He looked for freckles. For chestnut hair.

  For a tiny figure working stubbornly through them.

  His mouth went dry.

  "Where's Cire?" he asked. The words came out rough, too loud in his own ears.

  Lumiere's hands paused for the briefest fraction of a second before resuming their work.

  "I have to apologize," Rocher continued. "For not holding the creature long enough." He let out a bitter breath. "She'll need to clean up my mess again. Come up with another pn."

  Evelyn's jaw flexed.

  Seraphine bit her lip.

  They gnced at each other, faces ashen.

  Rocher's stomach tightened. He didn't know why.

  Lumiere drew in a breath.

  "Rocher..." she began.

  Before she could finish, the castle shook.

  A distant boom rolled through the courtyard, deep enough to rattle loose dust from the shattered stone, heavy enough that Rocher felt it in the cot frame beneath him.

  For a second, everyone froze.

  Seraphine's head snapped toward the sound. Her eyes narrowed, sharp and sudden. Her expression hardened.

  "That sound..." she said through gritted teeth. "I've heard it before."

  Evelyn looked up with concern. "What is it?"

  "Cire's contingency," Lumiere answered quickly. "She had one prepared already. Explosive charges set through Halbrecht's apothecaries, in the event we failed to contain it—to colpse the creature's only way out."

  "The lift?" Evelyn breathed.

  Lumiere nodded grimly.

  "Not forever," she crified. "Not as the First Men did. Just... long enough to figure things out."

  Seraphine exhaled through her nose.

  "Something tells me not all of them went where they were supposed to," she said.

  The others looked at her.

  Her hands curled slowly into fists. Something dark and certain settled into her gaze.

  "Someone has to answer," she said. "For Cire. For—"

  She cut herself off, gncing at Rocher.

  He had shifted upright, bracing against the edge of the cot.

  "For what?" he asked.

  Seraphine's mouth opened, then closed. Even Evelyn seemed speechless.

  Rocher straightened despite the blood soaking his back.

  "Where is Cire?"