Page 138 of Renegade Kingdom
The Autumn legacy burned in my veins. The storms answered my call. And the battlefield spread beneath me like a map drawn in blood and lightning.
I would make them look twice today.
I stood on the ridge above the western flank where Maddox had just sealed the valley with his wall of burning thorns. The wind obeyed me here. Not the gentle breezes of a calm day but the deep, wild forces that drove weather systems across continents. The Autumn Court magic lived in the space between states. The turning of seasons. The moment when warm air met cold and the sky decided whether to rain or rage.
I chose rage.
The first storm hit the northern line where Arik’s dark creatures were thickest. Not a natural storm, with its gradual build and its warning pressure drops. There was no polite rumbling before the lightning arrived. This was immediate. Onesecond the air was still. The next, a wall of wind slammed into the creatures’ ranks with enough force to fling them backward like insects.
Lightning followed. Targeted bolts that found the largest creatures and burned through them. I could feel each one. The storm was an extension of me and my rage, every gust of wind and every crackling discharge flowing from my fingers to the sky and back again. Where I looked, lightning struck. Where I pointed, the wind hammered.
The second storm I sent east, against the dark creatures flanking the Endless. I had to be careful here. The controlled fae couldn’t be touched. But the creatures that herded them, the handlers, the things with too many legs that kept the puppet lines taut, those were fair targets.
Wind separated them from their charges. Lightning burned the ones that resisted. A targeted gust caught a winged creature mid-dive and flipped it end over end before slamming it into the ground with a wet crack that I felt through the soles of my boots.
The wolf was alive inside me in a way it had never been before. Not anxious. Not alert. Exhilarated. The wolf had spent its entire existence as the lesser predator, the support animal, the pack member that deferred to the alpha. Now it ran through a storm of its own making and didn’t bow to anyone.
I called a third storm. A fourth. The sky above the Spring Court was a churning mass of cloud and wind and electrical discharge, the Autumn magic turning the poisoned purple of Arik’s sky into something angrier and more alive. His corruption was winter and stagnation. My storms were change. Movement. The relentless, driving force of a season that stripped trees bare, scattering seeds and destroying the old world to make way for what came next.
I’d spent my whole life watching other people take the lead. Not because I couldn’t. Because it was easier to let them. Easierto observe from the margins, to map the terrain while everyone else charged forward, to be the one who saw the whole board because nobody thought to block his view.
That perspective was serving me now. From the ridge, I could see what the fighters on the ground couldn’t. Patterns in the creatures’ movements. Weaknesses in their formations. The way Arik’s forces clustered more densely on the eastern side, protecting something, maybe a retreat route or a position he considered vital. Information that I fed to Alyssa through the bond, wordless flashes of tactical awareness that she incorporated into her commands without needing to ask where it came from.
She knew. She’d always known. Alyssa had never once looked at me and seen “just the beta.” She’d seen the man behind the smile, and she’d waited for him to stop hiding with an unshakeable love in her eyes.
A cluster of flying creatures broke from the main battle and came for me. Of course they did. I was the high ground. The easy target. The lone figure on a ridge, exposed and apparently vulnerable.
They never looked twice at me before. That was always their mistake.
The wolf shifted behind my eyes, sharpening my reflexes, and the wind answered before the creatures were halfway to my position. It caught them like a fist closing around a handful of moths. The gust compressed, tightened, spun. The creatures were pulled into a vortex that whipped them around at increasing speed until their wings tore and their bodies shattered against each other. When I released them it was as debris that rained down on the battlefield below.
I didn’t flinch. Didn’t smile. Didn’t crack a joke about the weather.
The man who stood on this ridge wasn’t the funny one. He was the one the Autumn Guardian had judged. The one who’d shown an ancient creature what lived behind the humour. Not a beta. Not a support character. Something darker and more dangerous and more patient than any of them had ever given him credit for.
Below me, the battle shifted.
I could feel Alyssa through the bond like a star lodged beneath my ribs. The unified magic of five courts channelling through her body with a force that should have torn her apart. She was building toward something. The liberation. The mass severance that would cut every Endless free from Arik’s control. I’d been briefed on the plan. I understood the mechanics, as much as anyone could understand the mechanics of something that had never been attempted before.
What she needed from me was time.
And weather.
I widened the storms. Let them bleed into each other until the entire sky above the battlefield was mine. Rain wouldn’t help. Rain would blind our fighters as much as the enemy. But wind, carefully directed. Lightning, precisely targeted. The constant, battering pressure of atmosphere itself turned hostile to anything that served Arik. To the betrayer who had played us all while wearing his Holden mask.
The dark creatures faltered. They were things of shadow and deep places, and the storms disrupted whatever sense they used to navigate. Wind scattered them. Lightning illuminated them. The constant change in pressure and temperature confused their movements, turning their coordinated advance into a stumbling mess.
Our fighters pushed forward. Ezra’s freed Endless on the west, emboldened by Maddox’s fire wall at their backs. Rhidian’s infantry in the centre, the former king leading from the front with a sword that had no magic in it and a voice that commandedanyway. The guardians on the flanks, Fizzle’s massive form diving and climbing through the storm as if the wind were his natural element. Which, I supposed, it was. Autumn was his court in ways it could never be for anyone else.
I felt a swell of something I couldn’t name watching Fizzle fight. Pride, maybe. Or gratitude. The ancient creature who had tested me and found me worthy was now fighting beside me, in a storm I’d called, and neither of us needed to prove anything to the other.
“Alyssandra has told us not to die,” Fizzle had said before the battle, in his small form, perched on my shoulder with his feathers ruffled against the morning cold. “I intend to obey. You should too.”
“Planning on it.”
“You plan nothing. You improvise. It’s one of your more irritating qualities.” A pause that might have been affection from anyone less insufferable. “It’s also why you’re still alive. Don’t stop.”
The Endless were the problem right now though.
