Who The Fire Favours (ONC2023) gxg

Chapter 6: Rider

Time recoiled.

Rider’s impenetrable shield containing the fire arrow broke under the weight of Aria’s Light Trait. Pure weaponised power detonated under extreme stress and in a tightly condensed space. Aria might’ve been the Throneholder but tonight…she was a fucking idiot.

“Rider!”

The collision of conflicting Traits collapsed in on itself, the room warping into a frozen battlefield slowly waking from its slumber. The protective shell only Rider could control shattered. But the form of the Throneholder began to move rapidly towards her, confusion turned to complete decisiveness. Dagger in her hand, Rider had no choice but to let the shield go. Gripping her cane, she slammed it down a second too late. 

Light met shadow and consumed the fire for itself.

“Run!”

Rider’s voice croaked under the sound of so much noise, her Trait reacting on instinct to try to contain such a volatile mass of swirling elemental magic. Dropping to one knee, the shadows tried to submerge the fire and extinguish it, but the searing light had kept the fire burning long after it should have winked out. 

“Throneholder!”

Rider cursed. She couldn’t just leave it be. Clearly, Aria couldn’t either. She could handle an assassination attempt. She could handle a time stopping powerhouse of a Regent. But what she couldn’t handle, was a reckless Traited using a power she didn’t understand. 

“Damn it all to Hellgrind.”

She was only one Traited. She’d need an army. An army she no longer had. An army Aria had no intention of utilising against anything but the demons. Rider growled in exertion, the shadows erupting from all sides at the sight of Aria’s face twisting into mania mere seconds after the sight of her shadows.

The ache of lost love burned in her chest even as the mask that the Throneholder tore away broke Rider’s fragile longing to return to something more. She grinned a savage grin at the sight of Aria being in pain as much as she was. But when her eyes looked to the spot where Aria had been there was no sign of her. The great Throneholder of Opalis had run away. All to save herself. 

“Captain!”

Rider thought they were talking about someone else.

A hand roughly pulled her out of her trance, her shaky legs felt like stone as the ground became more solid and it took her several minutes to realise what had happened. She looked up at her rescuer and found the dirt strewn face of a young server from the waitress staff dragging her to her feet on an unfamiliar, cobbled street. They weren’t in Scholar’s Keep anymore. They had gotten out. 

“Skyla.”

Her blonde hair was covered in brick dust and pebbles of debris, her black tie uniform dishevelled and ripped at the arm with a shallow cut tied off by part of the end of her shirt. Static electricity rippled around her, her hair fizzing like a mad scientist, but her dirt caked hands were singed badly at the nails and some were even missing from the bed.

“What were you thinking, keeping an entire building up on your own? You’re dumber than Nate on a damn pub crawl and you know it.”

Rider let out a snort, the sharp intake of breath causing a tremor of pain that brought her to her knees. She hissed at the stabbing ache in her back, the familiar inflammation in her arms that came with getting too close to an angry Light Traited. Skyla half dragged her into a nearby alleyway, the familiar streets of Axis winding together again. The Undercity. They were far underneath the city of Opalis.

“People were dying. I could feel it. If I could’ve just bought them some more time-“

Skyla thwacked her on the shoulder.