Just then a strange sound soared over the roar of the battle. Voices, a chorus of voices, were rising together from the grove. He didn’t understand the words floating on the air. He didn’t have to. The melody was strange—unearthly and haunting, but no less powerful for the emotion that it carried.
The elves were singing.
The Grendel staggered backward and flinched, as if he had just been struck by a physical blow. Light seemed to return to the battle. It was as if the cloud that had blocked the sun had rolled away. The magic of the fairies, locked in battle with the monsters of the Shadowfields, flared. They gained strength through the power of the song, and the darkness shrank back.
Elric used that moment to slip out from under the Grendel’s sword. He rolled to the side, letting the Grendel’s obsidian blade slice into the ground, and swung his sword at the back of the monster’s leg. He sliced into the smokelike robes until his sword hit something of substance.
The Grendel screamed, and thunder rolled overhead. A bolt of lightning struck the ground nearby.
Elric tried to pull the sword back, but a powerful blow hit the side of his head. Pain erupted in his skull, giving way to a heavy thudding that seemed to block all thought. He had to force himself to open his eyes as he stumbled backward. His sword clattered from his hands, and he fell onto the grass. No. He had to keep fighting. But he couldn’t seem to will his feet back under him. His head felt like it was being stabbed with a dagger from the inside.
“You will pay for that, boy.” The Grendel lifted his obsidian sword high over his head. Elric panted through his pain and willed everything in his body to move at once. He watched the blade slice through the air, straight for his head.
Suddenly a white stag crashed into the side of the Grendel, knocking him off balance. Pure darkness spread out from the wound in the Grendel’s leg. It surrounded the Grendel in a cloak of night. Enraged, the Grendel swung his sword back around and sliced into Elk’s side.
“No!” Elric cried out. Elk was disappearing. “No!” he cried again. He scrambled for his blade.
He reached the handle just as the Grendel swooped down on him. Elric couldn’t see anything. He was surrounded in darkness. He lifted his sword and swung wildly, completely blind in the presence of the Grendel. The clouds of darkness poured out of the evil fairy like smoke billowing from a raging fire. It covered the battlefield. He could not see.
“There’s no one who can save you now.”
The Grendel loomed over him, his sword snapping with deadly energy that did nothing to light the dark. He was going to die.
A roar sounded nearby and Elric felt a sudden wave of heat.
“I can,” a girl’s voice said behind him.
Elric turned around. There stood Flame with Shadow at her side. Blue fire licked over the ground around her, burning back the darkness and illuminating her eyes that now glowed with the fire of burning stars.
“You came back.” Elric couldn’t hide the shock in his voice.
“Wynn asked me to,” she said as she offered him a hand up.
The Grendel stumbled backward. “It can’t be.”
Flame let out a roar of her own as she charged forward into the darkness with her staff at the ready. The shadows didn’t deter her at all. With a powerful blow of her staff, she hit the Grendel across his dark skull, then landed another blow to the bleeding wound on his leg.
The symbol on Flame’s back began to glow with bright white light, and a great shout of triumph came from the fairies as the boar-riders charged against the monsters on the plain.
The Grendel gathered himself, building the shadows around him until he became a towering figure twice the size of a normal man. He swung the obsidian blade at Flame, the lightning sparking off it, crackling in the air.
“Flame! Get down!” Elric shouted, but he didn’t have to. She ducked, but not before the blade hit her staff and cleaved it in two.
Elric ran forward with his sword in his hand. The mark on her back glowed like a star within her, shining through her skin. He touched her shoulder. “I’m here,” he called, reaching down to place the hilt of the sword in her hand.
She grabbed it, her fingers wrapping around the hilt like it was a natural extension of her own arm. Elric could feel the dark energy crackling off the Grendel as he rose. Flame lifted the sword in front of her, and Elric fell back.
The sword had always glowed with a soft blue light, but now it burned with a bright white light as powerful as the sun. It flashed in Elric’s eyes, and he had to look away. When he finally cleared his vision, he saw Flame clothed in a dress of pure starlight. She shone just as brightly as she battled the Grendel with her tigereon pacing behind her.
He didn’t know how she was doing it. Perhaps she could see the darkness of the Grendel in contrast to the light pouring from her, or feel the foul presence of him. Maybe Shadow was telling her how to move, but in the midst of the vicious fight, Flame met the Grendel blow for blow. His darkness could do nothing to deter her.
Elric looked around, hardly aware of the pain in his own body. Swirling colors from the lingering effects of the light of Flame’s new power danced in his vision. As he pulled himself across the battlefield, a monster crawled through the grass toward him. It had the body of a snake, but with insect-like legs and large pincers that protruded from the front of its body. Its hairy mouth-parts clacked as it crept toward Elric.
A high-pitched cry drew the creature’s attention as Hob leaped onto
