Quinlan ran.
He burst north through the sky on a platform of compressed wind reinforced with lightning, body parallel to the ground, arms trailing at his sides as the landscape below blurred into a smear of trampled grass and smoking craters. The wind howled around him and the cold bit at the cracks in his armor where the chain woman's binding had stressed the joints.
Behind him, the pursuit swelled.
Isara's chains lashed out from range, golden streaks that arced across the sky and snapped at his heels every time he dropped below a certain altitude. He climbed to avoid them and a volley of arcane bolts from two generals he hadn't bothered to identify peppered the air around him, tracking his movement with the coordinated precision of officers who had drilled anti-air formations for centuries.
