Book One – Chapter 10

Just as he surged forth to strike, Midnight jerked her head towards him, shielding her throat with her own maw, their jaws intertwining and interlocking as they both snapped at each other. The shadebeast clamped onto her upper jaw, or rather, onto the darkness beneath it, while Midnight’s lower jaw embedded itself in his neck.

Were they two beasts of equal strength, Midnight would have had the advantage – the ability to tear into his neck while he could only rip at her face. But the shadebeast’s size, raw strength, and the sheer amount of darkness he had amassed exceeded hers. Even as Midnight used her darkness within to direct forceful strikes with her paws and claws, he remained impervious to her thrashing, simultaneously encasing and restraining her beneath him. The struggle raged on, with Midnight exerting all her darkness to maintain her position, clinging onto his teeth as he attempted to wrench her head upward and tear her jaw apart.

She was vastly inferior, but in this short standstill, Midnight began to grasp at what the sprites had meant by true affinity. The demand triggered a torrent of thoughts that shifted all the overlapping and overwhelming words into a new mess. Everything in Midnight screamed to block the flood of thoughts and just claw and bite and hold on. There had never been so many words within her. It took every ounce of focus to remind herself that the thoughts were her own, that they were her. She needed to learn like her wizard, learn how she could be more.

Until now, Midnight had shifted in and out of the darkness, seeing her pathera form as a default, as if activating and deactivating an ability. She had switched between her natural beast essence and her darkness essence, linking the former to her pathera form and the latter to her darkness gestalt. And while merging with the darkness, she had still retained and carried along her beast essence and all the Rothar tied to it — just like she felt darkness surging underneath her skin right now, even though she remained in her pathera form.