Obsidian Flame by Caris Roane

outcroppings. He’d steadied her and looked around.
    No Patience. No death vampires.
    He recalled closing his eyes and having the strangest sensation that he’d touched something bigger than Second Earth—but what, he couldn’t say. Grace kept repeating, “The Creator, the Creator,” as though she’d been caught in a spiritual event. He hadn’t bought that, not even a little. Something had come, or someone, probably from one of the Upper Dimensions and completely without legal sanction.
    He had left Grace sitting on the deep red rocks. He flew in an ever-enlarging circle, until he found blood, lots and lots of blood on the side of a gully, so much blood, enough from one person, maybe more. But there had been no feathers, no body parts, nothing like a battle, just blood, a torrent of blood.
    He knew then that Patience was gone; taken and probably killed. By whom or by what, or for what reason, he doubted he would ever know.
    He had returned to Grace, dropping to sit down beside her. He told her Patience was gone, her twin, the sibling with whom she had shared a womb. He had held Grace in the same way he was now holding Marguerite. Grace had stared up into the sky as though willing Patience to return to her, to draw her blood back into her body, and to come back to life.
    But through all that time, Grace had remained adamant that Patience had not been killed; she’d been taken from Second Earth.
    Thorne knew the world better. All that blood had spoken the truth to him. He had never argued with Grace. What would the point have been?
    He had rocked her, and petted her cheek, and kissed her forehead as he now did with Marguerite.
    He loathed the war and he felt something deep inside him begin not just a shift but an upheaval, a strong swell of sensation that started with disgust and ended with something close to determination. Something needed to change. Now. Tonight.
    The war had been eating at him for decades, especially since Patience’s death. But this angry sentiment had crystallized a little over a year ago during Alison’s rite of ascension, the night that he’d sat near Endelle in the Tolleson Two arena and watched a frightened, overwhelmed Mortal Earth human woman, Alison, pass through the ropes that divided the black battling mats from the cement floor of the building. He’d watched her, an untried innocent, forced into a battle for which she was in no manner prepared. He had watched Commander Greaves sit so calm, so still, so confident in his plans, the bastard who had orchestrated the event and turned it into a spectacle for all of Second Earth to view. His intention had been for his servant, General Leto, former Warrior of the Blood and supposed traitor, to slay Alison.
    Instead Alison had won the contest with amazing feats of power, all for Greaves’s pleasure.
    Thorne had come to understand so much that night: that Greaves had been toying with Endelle and the Warriors of the Blood for decades, that he enjoyed the sport of war as much as he intended to one day be victorious, that he didn’t care who suffered, that a woman’s suffering meant nothing to him. Mostly, he’d understood that Endelle and her weak administration would lose this war, that defeat had become inevitable.
    When Thorne thought of Endelle, something deep within bucked and raged. He loved her and he respected the sacrifices she had made for millennia. But right now she was part of the problem, a problem that had to be solved or two worlds would fall into slavery. He didn’t have an answer right now, but one thing he knew for certain: Once he got back to Second Earth, once he was assured of Marguerite’s safety, his working relationship with Endelle had to change. He couldn’t go back to the way things were. He’d blocked their shared mind-link and as soon as he was able, he would insist she break it.
    He’d had enough. Change needed to happen now.
    As for Marguerite, she’d been his only comfort. Yet despite the fact that she