Major Spoilers Ahead

Riwenne and her friends witness something they never expected: a human becoming a demigod. And worse, it’s someone who follows Chysa, the sun goddess, and supports the imperial oppression in her name. They can’t possibly face someone so powerful. They have to flee. See what happens next.

Escape Back to Lyndamon

The words echoed around the cockpit. We stared at one another, unable to speak. A human had become a demigod? How was such a thing even possible? And had it happened before?

Another gust of wind struck the airship, shaking us out of our hiding spot behind the mountain peak. I looked out the window and saw the unnatural glow approaching us again.

“We have to get out of here,” I said, reaching for the side of the airship to create another shield. “Get us back home.”

Deryt nodded and gripped the flight controls. The engines roared. We shot off across the sky, using the energy of the divine wind to propel us faster.

We would have to save our questions for later. Right now, I concentrated on keeping our heading even as the ship was hit with blasts of energy.

In record time, we raced back to Lyndamon. Amena was barking orders over the radio to everyone we knew. Her message was simple: hunker down and prepare to defend against an enemy more powerful than any we’d faced before.

But as we flew farther into our own territory, the attacks died down. I looked back to the south and saw that the empress, or whatever she was now, had stopped chasing us.

The airfield was open for us to land in Lyndamon. We finally slowed our breakneck pace and let the ship drift into a hangar. Fortunately, we had sturdier ladders on hand there so we could climb down more easily. I wasn’t sure that even magic could keep me steady on a swaying rope ladder at this point.

Once the flight crews took over caring for our airship, we all stood on solid ground and stared at each other again.

“What do we do now?” Janera said the thing that we were all thinking.

Amena hugged Uqra to her chest. “Someone will have to report all of this to the Council of Elders. I need to tell our spies to pull back from the borders. We can’t risk anyone getting too close to that… thing.”

I looked at Kyra, who put her arm around my shoulders. “Maybe Eberet and I can find some answers in the library,” she said, although I could sense her uncertainty. After all this time, there wasn’t much they hadn’t already found in the library, and the transformation from human into demigod wasn’t something we’d ever heard about before.

Tika shook her head. “You won’t find anything there,” she confirmed. “We’d better all meet and talk about this together. I don’t want to have to repeat myself multiple times.”

I glanced up at the flight crews. They were all good, hard-working people who had risked everything to support us, like everyone else in the city. If the demigoddess came here, innocent people would die. We’d barely survived our last attack by the empire and that was before they had so much power.