“Find them! Kill Them! Let them not escape!”

  The distant words thundered inside her skull like a monsoon that had made ndfall. So many times, his orders were insistent but resistable, for it was hard to force water into any shape that it did not choose. For example, the day before when, the voice had demahat she crush that boat. He’d meant the oh the children, of course, but she had resisted, for she hated the sughter of children aed his bloodlust of the boat that had followed it instead.

  Given time, the Lich would have ordered her to destroy the sed skiff too and drown all those i lives, but it had more important matters to focus on and had left her to gather the mangled bodies of the drowned and bring them back to its ir.

  Today, there was nothing to distract it from seeing its will done, and those ands built up with a tidal force that could not be dehey were a lightning bolt into Oroza’s heart. They made her shackles burn with power that made it impossible to resist her owructive impulse. At least for the moment, though, she could face off against warriors that probably deserved it.

  The knight glowed with a light that no longer existed in the world that made her think of cool spring days after the snow melt had started in ear, but the reminisce wasn’t enough to give her the strength to resist the Lich. She would save that strength for the moment it forced her to indiscriminately murder the children who were huddled in fear nearby.

  The knight led with a series of strikes as the white fire corusg across his gilded armor burned even brighter. These weren’t strong enough to do real damage. He was simply testing her mettle and buying time for his friend.

  At first, she thought the other man sought to escape. She hoped he did. Running him down would buy the children valuable time to flee. Some might yet escape with their lives.

  He didn’t do that, though. He did something far stranger. He cast a spell, which was something she’d only seen a few times since she’d been ed to this corpse. Instantly, blue lightning struck her hard. It cooked the flesh where it went up her arm and then down into one of her left legs. It did very little damage, though, and she roared in annoyance more than pain.

  She charged him then, pnning to deal with the mage before he could think of some more effective tactic. He responded with fire.

  The body of the s dragon was impossibly strong, and though the fire was enough to make her shy away for a moment due to her aversion, it could do nothing to the tanned skin or thick scales of her artificial, ic prison.

  As the fmes cleared, though, it was clear that they’d provided just enough distra for the padin to charge through him. The main was clearly insane, but his burns healed even as he moved, and when his glowing sword struck, it gnced off one of her ribs and pierced the heart of the body that tained her in her chest.

  It was a violent, terrible pain that represented more damage than anyone had doo the monstrosity since Oroza herself had savaged it. It wasn’t enough, though, and she batted him harmlessly away into the grass.

  Her blow didn’t keep him down any more than his blow had kept her down, though. her did her tail. He dodged it entirely, though she did succeed in sending the mage sprawling. She doubted that one would rise again, which was just as well because she hated fire.

  He was back like a fsh, charging her again. This time, despite the man’s armor and his wounds, he danced around her cwed swipe, though that was just a feint. He weaved around it, obviously intending to strike her again. He would probably even succeed in that before she mao bite him in half. The main even used some of his holy magic to blind her, making her skin sizzle and smolder for a moment, but it was a foolish decision.

  After all, he’d already jumped before his light had overwhelmed her dead eyes, and he couldn’t ge his trajectory in midair, so she still s him, catg him in her maw and shaking him like a rag doll as her giaal teeth ground against his armor. Several actually punctured it and sank satisfyingly into the flesh beh, letting her feast on his blood.

  It was only while she tasted that warm, coppery draught that she finally felt the wound he’d made as she’d bitten him. With a powerful swipe, he’d severed her right foot just below the calf, and for the first time in a long time, she was no longer fully attached to her bindings. She spat the man free, leaving him a crumpled, bleeding wre the ground, as she suddenly explored her current state of being.

  “The spell…” she murmured, “It’s inplete.” And it was true. Each manacle had borne identical runes, pted it gold when they’d beeed once upon a time, but now so many had failed that there had only been a full set present if you bined all four maogether, and one had just been opened in the most grisly ossible.

  “Three circles is enough to hold a lesser goddess like you,” the darkness spat. “Finish them, and I will have you repairs when this is done.”

  “No,” she said, trying the word on for size and finding that she liked it.

  “No?!” The Lich roared. “Do as you are told, Oroza!”

  She didn’t, though. The corpse couldn’t hold her now, aher could the words that passed through it. Not with only three worn and pitted manacles. All these decades sihe darkness had captured her and turned her into a mockery of her true self, she’d waited for the time and the tides to do their work.

  What ce did the Lich’s efforts have against the forces that ground rocky promontories and breakwaters into nothing but fine beach sand? It was folly to assume that it could cage nature, no matter how much it poisoned her wellspring.

  She smiled then, for the first time since her capture, and strai her manacles, ripping first the left out of the socket where the held it and then the right. The s dragon roared in pain as it reared up, uo strike the final blow as she ripped the still-beati out of it.

  The mage was being dragged back toward the craft by some of the children and an old man, but the knight still y there, just begging to be finished off. It couldn’t strike the final blow, though, because she wouldn’t let it. Any other oppo would already be dead, of course, but she watched the light p out of the bite marks decrease with every sed as the flesh knitted shut again, but she didn’t care.

  Even though she hated Siddrim’s sheep and would have gdly killed him for the slights they had heaped upon her followers, she knew how much more the Lich that had held her leash for so long hated and feared them. So, he would live, but only because of spite.

  The s dragon roared to the skies, spasming as she leaned forward and ripped open the bars of the prison that had held her for so long, and then, with o yank at the sole remaining manacle around her right leg, she was free.

  The bars of the ribcage were coated in ugly, rusted iron, but at their core, they were still bone, and when she crushed them, they fell apart like rotten wood in her rubbery finger. As Oroza jumped to the ground, free of her cage for the first time in ay, she was sorely tempted to immediately drop the corpse she’d been bound to and flee into the water. She didn’t, though. Not yet. She still had things to do.

  Standing there on one foot and oump, she turned her attention to the straining corpse of the s dragon that loomed above her.

  “You ot escape me!” The Lich screamed in her mind, but she ig. Without the s he’d held her with for so long, his orders and pulsions passed through her, leaving only a ripple in their wake.

  “I am no longer yours to and,” she whispered as she engaged with it in a battle of wills over what the s dragon would do .

  Now that she was no lotached to it, she’d lost some of her advantages over the darkhat was trying to make the hodgepodge of reptile borike her down, along with all the other living creatures currently sheltered in her wake.

  They stood like that long enough for the knight to stagger to his feet and make his way toward the fragile boat that everyone else was already aboard. She ighat, though. Instead, she forced the dragon to reach up and crush its own skull between its two monster paws while the Lich raged in her soul at what she was doing.

  That didn’t stop her from f it to grab the structural cvicle that held her cage in pce so long and rip it off of the rest of its body before it colpsed into pieces on the grouo her.

  “I shall rebuild my dragon and devour you once moddess!” the Lich bellowed, but she could hear its fear now.

  “If you are foolish enough to enter my waters again, you shall be the oo pay the price,” she whispered. Already walking to the water.

  The Lich started to respond, but she didn’t hear it. By the time it had started to scream agaioes had touched the water of the river, of her river, and she immediately left the corpse, which colpsed into the shallows like a puppet with the strings cut.

  It was an exhirating feeling. She knew she would ruly feel again thanks to all of the horrific things that the Lich had doo her, to say nothing of the things it had forced her to do. She still allowed herself a moment to just experiehe feeling of being oh the river once more. Her sciousness rippled along the length of her domain, from the still-tainted headwaters to the brackish delta she’d spent so much time i few years. Everything was where she had left it, more or less, and she could now begin again in the endless cycle of nature.

  First, though, she had to finish dealing with the Lich. With a thought, the current rippled, snatg the corpse that had been her for far too long and dragging it down into the depths for the fish and the eels to devour. She had no idea what the darkness might be able to do with something so powerfully associated with her, but she would rather die than find out the hard way.

  Ohat was done, she blended in with the currents, finally unfurling the ghostly, sinuous nature that was a river dragon and using it t the boat back out into the el and upstream against the current before the Lich could une new moo sughter all the children onboard the fragile vessel.