The three Covenant figures stood together. The magic building around them. They were combining. Weaving their power into a single spell.
Bathsheda raised her wand. Xul'al stepped up on her left. The remaining Keeper, a middle-aged woman named Citlali who'd been fighting on the eastern flank and had a burn across her collarbone that she was ignoring through sheer stubbornness, came up on the right.
The combined casting launched. It came out as a single wave, a wall of compressed dark force rolling across the ground and air simultaneously, no gap above or below, nowhere to dodge to. Bathsheda threw everything she had into a shield. Xul'al's snapped up beside it. Citlali added her own.
The three shields held for one second. Then broke.
Bathsheda was thrown backward into the pyramid base. The stone hit her spine and she slid down it and sat for a moment unable to breathe, every nerve in her body screaming from the impact. Xul'al had been knocked sideways and was on her knees, one hand pressed to the earth, the other still somehow holding her staff. Citlali was flat on her back and not moving.
Ash screamed and dove. She hit the ground between Bathsheda and the advancing three, wings spread, standing over her like a wall. The figures slowed. One of them raised a wand. Ash turned her head toward him.
The spell hit Ash in the chest and she staggered, one wing dropping, a sound coming out of her that Bathsheda felt in her own ribs. She didn't fall, only lowering her head.
"Ash," Bathsheda said, spitting blood. "Go. Fly away."
Ash didn't move. For the first time ever she disobeyed her.
The three figures spread slightly, preparing to go around her. The one on the right was moving toward the pyramid steps. The anchor point. The north face. The one Bathsheda had been working on when they'd arrived.
Bathsheda pushed herself upright against the stone and raised her wand. Her arm didn't want to cooperate. She forced it anyway. She had enough left for one more. Maybe two.
Her eyes drifted to the rune on her ring finger.
He was fighting too. She could feel it. Cassian's distress bled through the bond. He must have been battling at the Greece Temple too. Two fronts. Same war. But she knew that his distress had nothing to do with whatever he was facing in Greece Temple. He could feel her... her blood loss, her slowing, her body beginning to betray her... and that was what was breaking him.
She forced a smile. Let the panic down, until her heartbeat evened out. 'Don't feel it,' she told herself. 'Don't let him feel it.'
She forced herself upright.
This was the last stance. She knew it. Her wand arm shook. She huffed a laugh just as the jungle exploded.
The canopy on the western side of the clearing simply came apart, trees bending away from something moving through them. The sound arrived half a second later, sounding like a roar and a bell.
Master Ji walked out of the treeline. He came into the clearing and the three Covenant figures turned toward him and the one who'd been heading for the pyramid steps stopped walking. Whatever they were, whatever centuries of accumulated power they carried, they recognised what they were looking at.
Ji raised one hand. A wave of force rolled outward from him, expanding in every direction from the point where he stood, and every loose object in the clearing, stones, dirt, the scattered remains of conjured shapes, all of it lifted and hung in the air.
Then it came back down forcing the three figures to struggle to keep their footing.
"I apologise for the delay," Ji said, looking regretful as he took the scene and saw Bathsheda's injuries.
One of them fired at him. Ji tilted his body only slightly and it passed him and hit a tree and the tree died very quickly. He glanced at it briefly, then back at the figure who'd cast.
"Get lost," he said.
What followed wasn't something Bathsheda could fully track. Ji moved through the space between himself and the three Covenant figures. The first figure's wand was gone before the man fully understood Ji had reached him. The second threw up a shield that would have stopped a small army. Ji walked through it as if opening a door, and it came apart behind him.
The third was the clever one. She turned and ran for the pyramid steps. She made it four steps up before Madame Maxime came around the corner of the eastern face. She looked at the Covenant witch on the steps, looked at Bathsheda against the pyramid base, looked at Ash standing wounded in the clearing, and her expression went very still.
"Non," she said.
The Covenant witch fired at her.
Maxime's shield absorbed it, returning the spell that hit the woman like a physical blow, lifting her off the steps entirely and slamming her on the ground ten feet away where she lay making no attempt to get up.
Then Hagrid arrived riding a great white dragon, enormous and scarred from snout to tail, scales the colour of old bone, both eyes filmed over with white. It moved through the treeline, tracking by heat and sound and whatever older sense dragons ran on underneath those. It swung its head toward the clearing and the two remaining mobile Covenant figures.
The figure Ji had disarmed bolted left. The other bolted right. They ran into Hagrid's other company. He'd brought the forest with him. A pack of Hippogriffs burst through the treeline, wings half-spread. Shapes followed in their wake.
One Hippogriff caught the first figure across the shoulders with a wing and he went down. A Thestral stepped over him and bent to investigate. He didn't move.
The second figure managed three curses at the Graphorns, all three of which the Graphorns absorbed with indifference, before another Hippogriff landed directly in front of her forcing her to a stop. They looked at each other. The Hippogriff looked deeply unimpressed.
Hagrid looked around at the scene, at the bodies on the ground, at Bathsheda against the pyramid, at Ash with her damaged flank.
He crossed the clearing without any of the hesitation and crouched next to the dragon, enormous hands gentle.
"Easy now," he murmured. "Easy, girl. Let's have a look at yeh."
Ash, who had been radiating murderous intent for the last ten minutes, let him look. She turned her head and watched him with one amber eye and growled.
Bathsheda pushed herself upright, using the pyramid wall. Every part of her hurt.
Xul'al appeared beside her, one hand going under her arm.
"The seal," Bathsheda said.
"Intact," Xul'al said. "I checked the moment the fighting stopped."
Bathsheda let out a breath.
Ji reached her a moment later.
"I'm sorry, Bathsheda," he said. "We're delayed."
"You made it just in time," she said, huffing.
He didn't look entirely convinced but accepted it for now. He turned to look at the three captured figures, then at the two the Hippogriffs had handled, then at the one Ash had clipped in the first seconds of the battle, who was now sitting against a tree looking like a man profoundly reconsidering his choices.
All six were down.
Citlali was still on the ground. Two of Xul'al's warders were crouched beside her, one casting something rapidly. She was breathing. Whether she'd wake up easily was a different question.
Teo was being moved to the shade by the third warder. He was alive. His left side was badly burned and his right arm was bent, but he was alive.
Ji folded his hands behind his back and looked at the pyramid.
"They weren't trying to win," he said.
Bathsheda looked at him.
"They were trying to hold your attention," he said. "Long enough for the one on the steps to reach the anchor point."
"They knew where the anchor was," she said, guessing as much.
"Yes." Ji nodded.
Maxime walked up. She looked at the captured figures, then at Ji, then at Bathsheda.
"They'll need to be contained properly," she said.
Xul'al stepped forward. "We'll hold them. The outer ward line has a containment chamber. It was built for this."
Bathsheda sighed in relief. Ji and others save them. But why did she feel dread? Her eyes scanned the surroundings. Then something caught her eyes.
One moment the steps were empty, the next, a figure stood at the anchor point with one hand flat to the stone face Bathsheda was going to reinforce.
Every wand came up.
Ash shrugged Hagrid off and planted herself between the figure and Bathsheda. Ji's hand moved. Maxime raised her wand. Xul'al her staff. The warders spread on instinct.
The figure grinned.
Bathsheda's stomach dropped.
"Down," she said. "Everyone down now-"
The figure pressed both palms flat to the stone. The anchor point detonated. The explosion burst outward in raw magical force so concentrated it displaced the air. The sound arrived a half-second after the impact.
The pyramid face split open, the carved runic lines she'd laid fracturing outward from the anchor point in white cracks that spread like ice under pressure, and then she hit the ground and the world went sideways and dark for a moment.
When it came back the clearing was chaos. The blast had taken everyone down. Ji was already getting to his feet, hair loose, robes torn at the collar. Maxime was on one knee, one hand pressed to the earth, the other shielding her face from the debris still raining. Hagrid was flat on his back, which was saying something given his mass. The warders were scattered.
Ash had taken the full force of it head-on trying to protect Bathsheda. She was down on her side, wings splayed, the damaged flank from earlier now worse, the scales cracked and dark. Her chest moved. Barely.
The anchor point was gone. The stone where Bathsheda planned to do foundation work was simply absent. Gone. Reduced to powder that was still settling through the air.
The pyramid groaned. The sound came from inside the stone, like a ship taking water. The seal above it, the spiral formation she'd anchored two years ago, was fractured. The foundation beneath it had just lost a quarter of its load-bearing support.
She pushed herself upright.
Her vision swam. She ignored it.
The figure was gone. What was left of the body was nothing useful, a scatter of dark material across the steps that the blast had already half-dispersed. He'd come here entirely to be the explosion.
"The seal," she said.
The pyramid groaned again.
Ji appeared beside her. There was a cut above his eye.
The pressure hit before the groan finished. It came from everywhere at once, top of the skull, behind the eyes, pressing down through the shoulders and into the chest and through the soles of the feet into the ground. Heavier than pain.
Bathsheda's knees buckled. She caught herself on one hand, palm flat to the earth, and felt the pressure running through the stone too. Through everything.
Ash was trying to reach her. She could hear the scrape of damaged scales against the ground, the struggling sound of a creature that wouldn't stop moving even when it should. Ash's nose connected with her shoulder and the dragon's breath came in hot across the side of her face.
"T-this," Bathsheda managed.
She looked at the pyramid.
The fractures in the runic lines were spreading. The pale stone of the north face had gone grey at the edges of each break, the colour of magic draining out of old work.
Ji's hands were shaking. Bathsheda had never seen him like that before.
"It's awake," he said. The words came out shaky. "We need to leave."
Bathsheda bit her lip and nodded. Her teeth were chattering slightly and she wasn't cold. "We need to evacuate this place." She pushed the words out through the pressure. "No. Everywhere. Warn everyone."
The weight was on her soul... that was the only word for it. Not body but something deeper, something fundamental, pinned under impossible pressure.
Xul'al was on her knees nearby, staff planted in the earth beside her, both hands wrapped around it. Her eyes were fixed on the temple, full of dread.
"Citlali," Xul'al called, voice strained. "Get up."
Citlali, who was still on the ground, turned her head. She couldn't even lift her head.
Maxime had one hand braced against the pyramid steps and was pulling herself upright by sheer stubbornness. Her other arm she held against her chest.
Bathsheda saw something at the treeline. For a single second, she hoped it was help.
They were white. Almost translucent, the colour somewhere between pearl and ice. They came out of the trees slowly. More than a dozen. Bathsheda froze on the ground.
She knew those creatures. Except for the colour, the shape was exactly the same.
The ones in Australia were dark. Deep dark, the kind of dark that drank the light. These were the opposite. She'd never seen this colour on these creatures. She didn't even know it was possible. Cassian said he'd seen two versions, suspecting a third. But...
"Bathsheda." Ji hissed, beside her.
"I see them."
Her wand was already up. Half the warders had theirs raised.
Crawlers...
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Every age has its defining shame. Rome had corruption. Wizarding Britain had blood purity. This generation...
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