Chapter 53
MERYN
Shards of rock fly in every direction. I spot the distinctive opalescent glow of the Tear and stretch my hand toward its path downward. Anassa moves adeptly beneath me, both of us ignoring the sharp pieces of stone that pelt us as we lurch forward.
But Anassa and I are too late. The Mother Priestess’s hand was already outstretched to grab the Tear as it fell, and her fingers close around the gem.
The vicious shards of rock rain down on her arm, opening up cuts that stream blood. But the pain doesn’t seem to register for the priestess; her face is radiant with victory.
In another moment, Anassa slams into her. The weight of my wolf throws the priestess down onto the cobblestones, both hands cupped reverently around the Tear, which she clutches to her chest.
Anassa and I growl in tandem as she extends a powerful foreleg to pin the woman to the ground.
I’ve dropped the rift completely in the scramble, and Cratos and Stark become fully visible. They circle behind the priestess so she has nowhere to escape.
Before I can dismount to wrest the prize from her grasp, though, there’s a violent flash from her hands.
The light from the gem has changed. No longer soft and warm, but sharp, harshly piercing the darkness of the night—like the world itself was shattered into light and dark by the priestess’s hammer.
I gaze up at the suddenly illuminated city square, eyes smarting from the sudden blaze.
“Meryn,” Stark calls urgently, and I look down at the old woman again.
The Mother Priestess’s hands have begun to smoke.
My stomach turns as I stare at the priestess. I lean forward, trying to understand what I’m seeing.
Something rocks the world right underneath us, and I’m almost thrown to the ground. Anassa braces herself, and I clench my thighs painfully to keep my seat.
“What on earth—”
Another tremor shakes the square.
It takes a moment before the priestess’s ecstatic joy slips from her face, replaced by confusion, and then something close to panic.
“What is happening?” she cries, and clutches the Tear tighter, even as the skin of her hands starts to steam and smoke.
“I was the bearer of a Tear for so long! Only the worthy can touch the most sacred of the Goddess Tears, this I know. But who could be worthier than the leader of the goddess’s most devoted temple? ”
Her voice rises with every word until the final few emerge as more shriek than speech.
And then the keening sound goes on and on.
Stark and I watch in horrified fascination as her hands begin to melt, fingertips turning into mangled stubs of flesh as her screams grow louder.
Another violent shake nearly unseats me, and my shadows rise in response to my distress and panic. There’s a loud grinding sound and a sharp crack!
For a second, my disoriented brain thinks that Stark and I and our wolves are rising up into the air. And then I realize no, the goddess statue—what’s left of it—is sinking into a twisted, murky darkness that’s appeared in the center of the square.
The priestess herself is quickly slipping into it, still clutching the Tear to herself with stubs of fingers, her screams mangled in her agony.
I try to focus my shadows enough to grasp her and keep her from falling, but they don’t obey, just whipping across the square in frantic waves.
“STARK!” I call urgently through our bond. He’s already responding, tendrils of his own shadebending power wrapping around the woman’s torso and wrenching her high into the air.
“Sorry about this,” I hear him say aloud to Cratos as he hauls the woman over to his direwolf until she’s slung over his back in front of him.
I urge Anassa next to Cratos and reach over to pry the Tear from the priestess’s hands. The shining gem burns hot in my hand. For the brief moment that I touch it, there’s the pull of magic through it, stretching down into the square and causing the storm in the earth beneath us.
Hastily, I wrap the Tear in my sleeve before yanking my pack open and dropping it inside. Hiding it away makes no difference, though.
The land continues to shake and move, the quakes increasing with every breath.
Anassa’s front paws keep slipping forward as more and more cobblestones come loose from their foundation, tumbling down into the endless black pit forming where the statue once stood.
“We need to get out of here!” I cry to Stark and Anassa.
“Do we bring the priestess with us?” Stark sounds steely calm in my mind, reflecting the intense focus he’s using to keep his shadebending steady.
I might not be happy with her right now, but if she’s going to give us any information, she needs to stay on Cratos’s back.
“Yes—in case she knows about Killian’s plans,” I call, bracing myself as our wolves scramble and jump.
Maybe he’s figured out that there are only seven at this point, and that I’ve found one on my own, or maybe he’s still searching for something that doesn’t exist. If she can give us any insight, it would help.
My heart is in my throat as Anassa struggles to stay out of the yawning pit opening up before us, stone after stone falling away under her feet.
We’re jolted back and forth, Anassa and Cratos careening in random directions, avoiding the spreading destruction. It moves faster now, ripples moving through the square and a violent wind starting to pick up.
Finally getting solid purchase beneath her paws, Anassa springs from the melting ground to a patch of solid cobblestone. Cratos is close behind us. We don’t waste another moment before racing away from the square.
The path of destruction follows behind us.
“It isn’t stopping,” I say grimly to Stark. “Even though nobody is wielding the Tear anymore, somehow the magic is still going.”
We pause halfway down the next block, wheeling around to take in the scene of destruction. Nearly the entire city square is now an inky black pit, and it just keeps spreading outward.
“We need to get as many people as we can out of here,” Stark tells me. “Let’s split up. Meryn, call for reinforcements?”
I open up communication with Noemi and Venna. “We have the Tear,” I tell them, “But now we have bigger problems. The magic did something to Linsfall, and it’s collapsing or—I don’t know, but something’s destroying the city. We need to get people out. Can you help us?”
Venna’s response is swift. “Coming now!” I sense them both spring into motion. They must have been waiting on my word in case they were needed.
Now what? I rise up on Anassa’s back to see as far as I can. The ripples of destruction are approaching our resting spot fast. Next to the square, a stone tower of a small temple shakes and leans, then crashes violently into the ground.
Dust rises up from the stones and bricks and wood smashing around us, and for a moment, it’s so thick that we can’t see anything but gray.
I cough, and my eyes stream from the gritty air. “When the air clears—you turn left, I’ll go right?”
I feel Stark’s mental nod and then his farewell, like a brush of ghostly lips against my cheek. “Be safe, my queen.” Our minds separate so that we can focus on our tasks.
I wipe my eyes on my shirt, tears mixing with grit on my face, and then point Anassa down the broad avenue. We skitter around the corner to the right, racing at top speed.
The city is groaning and screaming as if it’s a living being. Patches of ground are thrown into the air as buildings and streets tilt and crack and sink into some dark oblivion.
My heart twists as I contemplate how many people may have already lost their lives to this madness.
The quiet of the hour has been smashed as thoroughly as the city’s heart. Screams and sobs erupt from every corner as Linsfall’s residents flee their beds. Some race toward the gates while others stand in the street staring at the buckling horizon in muted horror.
I somehow find my voice. “Linsfall! Awake and evacuate!” Desperation lends me power, and my words ring out across the rumbling of the earth beneath us.
In the distance, I hear Stark’s booming yell as he does the same. I hold on to that sound, even as the crashing gets too loud and I can no longer make out the sound of his voice.
Anassa adds a bracing howl to the chaos, and more and more people stream out of homes, stumbling in their nightclothes, carrying babies and valuables, blinking and crying and swearing.
“To the gates!” Anassa and I point ourselves along the most direct route to the main gates. Families and guards and barmaids and everyone in between race in terror toward the narrow exits spaced out along Linsfall’s outer walls.
The foot traffic clogs the roads like a bottle with a stopper, panicked pushing and shouting creating utter pandemonium.
“Keep fucking moving!” I yell, my voice cracking.
Anassa and I reach the gates, and this time, my shadebending does what I need it to do, slamming into the broad doors and smashing them off their hinges.
People stream out to the valley beyond, sobbing and yelling.
But it’s not enough—even with the gates wide open, people are jamming the way out. They’re not moving fast enough.
“Stark!” I call for help.
A dark streak hurtles toward us from the other side of the crowd, and I watch in astonishment as Stark and Cratos approach faster than I’ve ever seen them move before. It’s only a heartbeat before they reach the crowded gateway.
Cratos gathers himself on his hind legs for a jump, and then the two of them bound clear over the press of people, the Mother Priestess still slumped on Cratos’s back. They land deftly by my side.
“The gates are creating a bottleneck!” I yell to Stark. “We need to open up the walls!”
It’s instinctive between us now: this mental pull and snap until we are sharing a single mind. My power balloons between us like a dark cloud of lightning.
My brute force and Stark’s skillful focus weave together as shadows race from all around us. More and more of them pull over a spot in the walls without a guard tower, until a whole section of the stone wall is completely wreathed in darkness.