Hi guys! I'm so sorry it's taken months to get back to this story, but I took a bit of a break from the Internet. I'm back now though, so:
Dimitri
Guardians were trained to rise early and at the slightest suggestion of danger. When the first shouts of alarm pierced the air at the Court, therefore, Rose and I were up like bullets.
We pulled on our clothes frantically, already hearing racing footsteps outside our door as the guardians of the Court went to war. Rose raced to her station, while I hurried to my post at the head of the guardian regiments.
Janine was already there, barking orders at the first groups of guardians who'd assembled, silver stakes in hand. As I came to meet her, her eyes met mine, and she dipped her head in a quiet gesture of acknowledgement. This was war – there was no time to waste on words. I joined her in assigning various squadrons of guardians to different areas of the Court, to defend the quarters of royal Moroi and to ensure the integrity of our overall defence plans.
Suddenly, a yell rose above the clamour of assembling dhampirs. "The first line of defences has been breached!"
Janine's head whipped around in disbelief. "What?" she hissed. I knew what she was thinking – it was too soon. The Moroi had spent hours in the sunlit day augmenting and amplifying existing anti-Strigoi magical defences surrounding the entire Court complex, users of all five elements coming together to fortify our wards. With magic of that extent, even with help from humans, we should've had much more time before the Strigoi managed to break through.
Rapidly, Janine began issuing orders to guardians as fast as she could think of them. When the yell came, five minutes later, that the second line of defences had been breached, my heart sank. We hadn't bought ourselves enough time. That could only mean one thing:
"Numbers," I breathed. Janine nodded grimly, knowing what I knew. The only explanation for the rapid failures of our defences was that the Strigoi had come in even bigger numbers than we had anticipated. The presence of so many Strigoi would weaken wards as it was. We had no idea what kind of force we were about to face, but it was going to be an enormous army.
"This may be it," Janine breathed to me. "It was an honour to serve beside you."
"Likewise," I murmured.
The air around us somehow contracted briefly – we all felt it. It contracted once, twice, and I realized what it was as I turned to stare at the invisible wards, our third and last line of magical defence, immediately surrounding the Court. The wards pulsed one more time – and then they broke. We all felt the inward implosion of defensive magic. Within seconds, dark figures were scrambling over the walls, and with a roar, the Moroi world went to war as the undead came flooding into our Court.
~~Page Break~~
It was bizarre, but battle filled me with a serenity that few other things did. I was filled with calm as I blocked, and stabbed, and repeated. Monster after monster hurled itself at me, face open in a snarl, and my silver stake rose to meet them. With each Strigoi I dispatched, I felt a little calmer. It was in battle as a guardian that I found myself.
Later estimates would put the number of attacking Strigoi at five to seven hundred, an unprecedented number of Strigoi in one place. I had no way of knowing that at the time, but looking around at the chaos, I saw the sheer numbers the Grand Master had amassed against us. This was a battle to destroy the Moroi civilization.
Guardians grappled with shrieking Strigoi. I saw silver stakes flash, and vampire after evil vampire fell under the terrible vengeance of the Court. Guardians were more than a match for Strigoi, one on one. Still, though, the Strigoi numbers were themselves an advantage. There were just too many of them. With a sinking heart, I realized that for every Strigoi I saw fall, another guardian or two succumbed as well. The guardians were impossibly, inconceivably, losing the battle.
It was lucky for us we weren't the only ones fighting.
A flash of fire caught my eye. I saw Christian advancing on a howling group of undead. His eyes burned with savage anger as he unleashed a ball of fire from between his hands. The Strigoi before him went up like kindling, but Christian didn't stop there – angry red flames poured from his palms, completely incinerating the threat. To his credit, Christian barely paused, simply turning his hard gaze onto the next threat.
I saw other fire users similarly burning up their foes. It made sense, given that fire was one of the only ways to kill a Strigoi, but that didn't mean other Moroi were defenceless. In a flash of shock, I noticed Mia Rinaldi, former student at St. Vladimir's Academy, turning her water powers onto an unwary Strigoi woman. Water coalesced out of the air and formed a ball around the Strigoi's head. She screamed and clawed at the water around her face, suffocating. It wouldn't kill her, but it was enough of a distraction for a guardian's silver stake to bury itself in her chest. With a grim smile, Mia dispatched another threat by shooting a water jet at him, sending him crashing right into the path of some guardians and fire users.
Air users were using the air to propel the Strigoi against walls, stunning them. Some air and fire users were working together, using their magic to create miniature firestorms around the Strigoi that burned their forms away. Meanwhile, many of the enemy were falling into the booby traps set for them by earth users, carefully set to ensure only the undead could fall into them. A Strigoi man came lunging at me, his fangs snapping, when suddenly the earth beneath him turned to quicksand. Howling in surprise and fear, he sank into the ground, where he suddenly caught flame. He only thrashed a few times before he stopped moving.
I looked around in amazement at the battle scene unfolding before me. The Moroi, showing me how terrible the elements could truly be. Guardians, working together with their Moroi masters. History was in the making here – this had never happened before, and I had never dreamed of anything like this happening in my lifetime.
My thoughts were cut short when a Strigoi man landed in front of me. Given his short stature, he'd probably been human before being turned – unusual, that.
"What's the matter, Dimitri Belikov?" he snarled. "Afraid?"
Red tinged my vision as I came at him. We grappled in a fight, his gnashing fangs never far from my throat.
"You think you've won, haven't you?" the Strigoi jeered in my ear. "You think you're winning, but you're not. Where do you think the Grand Master is?"
"Hopefully about to join you in hell!" I lunged at him, stake raised, but he jerked away.
"Wrong!" the Strigoi purred. "Wrong, wrong! Where do you think your damn queen is, too? I hope you haven't left her defenceless."
My silver stake made contact with his stomach, and he howled as it burned his flesh. Within seconds, I had him pressed up against a wall, the stake to his heart.
"What do you mean?" I growled.
The Strigoi spat in my face. "Foolish dhampir, to think this was anything but a diversion. Even now, the Grand Master seeks your queen, to make her one of us. And once that happens, we will raze this Court to the ground and claim the vampire world for ourselves."
"Robert's looking for Queen Vasilisa? To turn her Strigoi?"
The Strigoi sneered. "As I said, foolish dhampir."
His words ended in a scream of pain as I drove the stake into his heart. I didn't even stop to watch him topple to the ground – I whipped around, searching frantically.
There. I spotted Rose, her dark hair swirling around her like a cloud. Her bottom lip was split and she had a fierce snarl on her face as she laid waste to the Strigoi around her. She looked like an avenging angel, gracefully beautiful as she whirled, spinning, stake in hand.
I made my way to her. "Rose!" I called as I cut through the Strigoi standing before me.
She blinked. "Dimitri! What – ?"
"We don't have time," I shouted back at her. "Robert's gone looking for Lissa."
Rose's face paled – she understood the gravity of the threat. The loss of the Moroi queen to the Strigoi would bring the already-unstable Moroi world to the brink of collapse. The Strigoi would prey on panicking Moroi in huge numbers. It could spell the end of our society.
She turned. "Where are –?"
"We're here." Janine and Christian stepped forward – I'd pulled them with me and explained hurriedly what was happening. Rose didn't even need to ask – from their expressions, she could tell that they were with us, to the end.
Rose's eyes hardened. "Then what're we waiting for? Let's go kick some Grand Master ass."
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