Emphasis on try.
It had been a short life, as far as Vanir were concerned, and a bad one, but there had been moments of joy. Moments that she now gathered and held close to her heart: cradling her newborn sons, smelling their baby-sweet scents. Talking with Ruhn for hours, when she knew him only as Night. Lying in his arms.
So few happy memories, but she wouldn’t have traded them for anything.
Would have done it all again, just for those memories.
Lidia dove deep, all the way into the simmering dregs of her power.
The war-machines loomed, black and blazing with power. Ready for her. Launch barrels stared her down, brimstone missiles glowing golden in their throats.
Lidia unleashed her own fire, ready for her final incineration.
But before her flame could touch those war-machines, before the brimstone missiles could fire, the launch barrels melted. Iron dripped away, sizzling on the dry earth.
And those brimstone missiles, caught in the melting machinery …
The explosions shook the very world as the missiles ruptured, turning the war-machines into death traps for the soldiers within. They melted into nothing. The heat of it singed Lidia’s face, and amid the burning and billowing smoke—
Three tiny white lights burned bright.
Fire sprites. Simmering with power.
Through the fire and smoke and drifting embers, Lidia recognized them. Sasa. Rithi. Malana. Blazing, raging with fire. They must have crept up unseen from behind enemy lines. Too small to be noticed, to ever be counted by arrogant Vanir.
Another war-machine rumbled forward, rolling over the ruins of the front line.
A stupid mistake. The metal treads melted, too, pinning the machine in place. Trapping the soldiers and pilots within it.
They tried to fire their missiles at Lidia, at the three sprites now coming to her side, but they never got the chance. One moment, the war-machine was there, missile launchers primed with their payload. The next, the metal of the machine flared white, and then melted.
Where the machine had been, a fourth sprite glowed, a hot, intense blue.
Irithys.
She lifted a small hand in greeting.
Lidia raised one back.
“We found her,” Sasa said to Lidia, breathless with adrenaline or hope or fear or all of them at once. “We told her what you and Bryce said.”
Malana added as Irithys zoomed for them, leaving a trail of blue embers in her wake, “But it did not take much convincing to get her here.”
“How did you know to come today?” Lidia asked as Irithys joined them, a blue star in the midst of the three shimmering lights of the others.
Irithys grinned, the first true smile Lidia had seen from the Sprite Queen. “We didn’t. They reached me yesterday, and we talked long into the night.” A fond smile at the three sprites, who turned raspberry pink with pleasure. “We were still awake when Bryce Quinlan and Hunt Athalar’s video went out. We raced down from Ravilis, hoping to help in any way we could.”
“We arrived in the nick of time, it seems,” Sasa said, nodding to the smoldering ruins.
“We wouldn’t have wanted to miss all the fun,” Rithi added with a wicked smile.
Irithys’s smile was more subdued as she studied Lidia. The queen’s flame set Lidia’s own sparking in answer. Dancing over her fingertips, her hair, in joyful recognition. “I sensed the fire in you the moment we met,” the queen said. “I didn’t think yours would manifest so brilliantly, though.”
Lidia sketched a bow, but refrained from telling the queen about the antidote just yet, how it would make Irithys’s flame even more lethal. Later—if they survived. But right now … Lidia smirked at the queen, at their gathering enemies. “Let’s burn it all down.”
Because ahead of them, dozens strong, an entire line of war-machines headed their way. Missile launchers groaned into position. All aiming for where they stood.
“With pleasure,” Irithys said, and even from a few feet away, Lidia’s skin seared with the heat of the queen’s flame. “We shall build a new world atop their ashes.”
Rithi, Sasa, and Malana turned blue, matching their queen’s fire with their own. The four fire sprites unleashed their power on the war-machines and the Vanir powering them. Lidia’s white-hot flames joined theirs, twining and dancing around it, as if every moment of recognition until now had built toward this, as if her flames had known theirs for millennia.
And as one flame, one unified people, as Bryce Quinlan had promised, their fire struck the enemy line.
Machines ruptured. Lidia staggered back, back, back with the force of it, still unfamiliar with the fire in her veins, after it had been so long suppressed.