Chapter 385: Coach Kael Calls An Audible

Ryker squinted at the ring. "So let me get this straight. Guinevere put the Dragon King in a bubble. He banged on the walls. Nothing. He used his words and she let him out instantly."

Kael shrugged. "Pretty much."

Two kings. One wife. Zero communication about strategy. They were winging this the way they winged everything in this arrangement: aggressively and without a plan.

White poured from their palms in matching streams, colliding with Emma’s dark magic at the center of the ring. The white light didn’t touch Emma.

She did a windshield wipe with her arms, like she was gathering the energy, then sent it in a column towards Guinevere.

CRACK.

Guinevere’s magic hit it head on, sending a shockwave in the ring that pushed Nicholas and Maddox back. The collision point sparked. The two streams pressed together, light chewing on dark, dark refusing to die, the boundary vibrating so hard it rattled teeth.

Outside the ring, Ryker shielded Griffin’s face with one hand. Blair watched through squinted eyes, her frozen legs still planted on the stone, her jaw set with the fury of a woman who had started this operation and was being forced to watch someone else finish it.

"Both of you touch her back or her arms," Kael yelled over the noise, graduating from bench to coach.

Nicholas and Maddox both moved to touch her arm. Both felt the sensation of energy being pulled from them into her.

The white side doubled in size and pushed forward.

"Contact," Ryker observed. "That was the trick. Touch her and the light doubles. Communicate and get out of the bubble. What was all this shit?"

"A metaphor I’m stuck inside of," Kael replied flatly.

"She just...How did...Did everyone see that?" Griffin sputtered.

"We all saw it, Griffin," Ryker said.

"And now they’re touching her arms. Both of them. At the same time. And the light just doubled."

"We can see, Griffin."

"I’m narrating because I can’t participate and this is how I cope."

"Cope quieter."

The white light pushed forward one inch. Two. The dark magic buckled at the contact point, fraying at the edges like rope under too much tension.

"The light’s pushing. It’s pushing! Three inches. Four. She’s sliding. She’s actually sliding. EMMA IS SLIDING."

"GRIFFIN."

"Sorry. Sorry. I’ll whisper." He leaned toward Ryker. "She’s sliding," he whispered. ℯ

Ryker didn’t look at him. "I know."

"It’s very exciting."

"Christ, please stop."

Emma’s boots slid backward a fraction. Her teeth bared. The effort was visible now. The woman who had taken dragon flame without flinching was struggling. For the first time all evening, Emma looked like someone who was in a fight instead of someone who was watching one.

"SHUT THE FUCK UP," Emma roared.

Griffin jumped like he had been caught in a threesome.

"You can hear me?"

"Obviously I can fucking hear you," she snapped. Her arms shook. Her dark magic pulsed harder, fighting the advance, and the fighting was costing her something visible. Sweat was at her temples.

"My bad. Sorry about that, lady," Griffin called out.

"DO NOT APOLOGIZE TO THE ENEMY," Kael snapped from the floor. "Act like you’ve been in battle before."

"She’s scary."

"She’s LOSING. Read the room, Griffin."

Emma screamed. The sound wasn’t pain. It was fury. The sound of a woman who had walked into every room she’d ever entered knowing she was the most dangerous thing in it and was discovering, in real time, that this room disagreed.

✦✦✦

SOLVEIL - KINGDOM OF LIGHT

Far away, in chambers made of white stone and silence, Landon Solveil was in a coma.

The healers had moved through the stages of grief about their king’s condition and had arrived at "administrative acceptance," which was the medical term for "we stopped expecting changes hours ago."

The light in the room was steady, low, the ambient glow of a kingdom that ran on radiance the way other kingdoms ran on coal.

The King of Light lay in his bed like a saint in a painting, still, golden, and refusing to wake up on anyone’s schedule.

His body ignited.

White light erupted from his skin with a force that blew every torch in the chamber out simultaneously. The radiance was blinding, nuclear, filling the room from floor to ceiling in a flash so intense the stone walls threw shadows that looked like fleeing ghosts.

The healer on afternoon rotation burst through the doors at a sprint. The shift nobody wanted. The shift where nothing happened. The shift that had just become the most important medical event in Solveil’s recent history while the senior healers were home asleep.

His hands were already raised, diagnostic magic sparking at his fingertips. He made it three steps inside before the light hit him in the chest and stopped him cold.

It was fading. Already pulling back. Receding into Landon’s body like a tide that had surged without warning and was retreating before anyone could measure the waterline.

The healer’s hands moved fast, scanning, reading, chasing the signature before it disappeared entirely. His brow furrowed. Then furrowed deeper.

The energy didn’t match Landon’s. The resonance was wrong. The frequency was wrong. The warmth profile was wrong. Landon Solveil’s light was steady, solar, the burn of a sun that never flickered. Whatever had just ripped through this room was powerful and mirrored his, but was not his.

Wrong. Three wrongs that were adding up to a very specific thing that the healer was not happy about.

It was gone before he could lock the identification.

He stood in the dark chamber, chest heaving, hands still raised over a comatose king whose vitals had spiked and were already settling back into the calm of a man who was somewhere else entirely.

Landon’s vitals had treated the most significant magical event of the day like a hiccup and had gone right back to sleep. The healer’s vitals were doing considerably worse.

"Get me the Kingsguard Commander. Now." His voice cut through the corridor before the door finished opening.