Chapter 24 #2
Time did not stop, but struggled sluggishly, as mired as Ezra in the swell and eddy of Morana’s power. Through the mental invasion he felt Saemund and Raum as distant points in a storm.
Saemund’s eyes glowed brighter, a blue so vibrant it was nearly white, lightning in a snowstorm.
“Morana, let us go,” Ezra gasped out, swaying in the chair.
He felt and heard both Raum and Saemund through the bonds they’d forged between them, and the way Morana was straining the connections.
None of them were enduring well and he feared for them all if Morana kept ahold of Saemund. “We’re here to help! Let them go!”
“You are who I need!” she hissed, and the light went out of Saemund’s eyes, the grip on Ezra’s wrist falling away, his flesh throbbing in pain.
Saemund and Raum fell out of their chairs, landing on the floor. Saemund groaned, while Raum shuddered and threw up. Ezra tried to move, to go to them, but he was frozen in his chair.
He felt a growing pressure on his mental shields, his vision swamped by blue, icy tendrils creeping over his flesh.
She wanted in. She wanted something from him.
But even as she tried to enter his mind as she had Saemund’s, he felt her power wavering.
Saemund had been the bridge out of the reliquary, and she released him.
Heal me, death mage.
Her words echoed in his head.
Heal me now.
A snap echoed through the hangar, as sharp and sudden as a gunshot.
Ezra fought to reinforce his mental shields even as he turned his head a fraction, and what he saw was enough to make his concentration waver.
A thin crack in the front of the reliquary glittered in blue and white, light escaping.
Morana was awake. Her power was immense, even dying, and her demand for healing meant their quest to get her to fade was for naught.
The reliquary was breaking.
He didn’t think they were meant to hold a deity to begin with, and he knew they had seconds left before it broke completely, as snow began to fall in the hangar.
Ezra pushed himself out of the chair even as he pushed mentally against Morana, and he stumbled to the reliquary.
If it failed, the blizzard would explode free from the reliquary and Morana might kill everyone in the room in an attempt to harvest enough power to heal herself, as she had tried to do with Monica Blevins and the other graduate students at the dig site.
Her mental presence was fading from his mind, but the glow within the crack grew brighter, and more snaps echoed through the hangar as the marble and bronze broke and warped.
“Redmayne, get out of there!” Grendel shouted, running toward him.
Ezra landed on the reliquary and pushed out with his mind, erecting a shield around the reliquary, crimson and black swirls of energy coalescing in a half sphere over the top. He poured as much power into the shield as he could.
“Get them out of here!” Ezra shouted, pointing to Saemund and Raum. “Get them out and get under cover! Get out of the hangar!”
Harlan and Chase were right beside Grendel, but they listened to him and went for the two men on the floor.
They were moving, and seemed to be okay, but Ezra couldn’t tell.
He worried for Raum, and he was thankful that Harlan scooped Raum off the floor and carried the other man toward the exit at a jog.
Grendel and Chase grabbed Saemund under his arms and lifted him off the floor, dragging him to the exit as well.
Lilith jumped from Chase’s other arm and ran to Ezra, meowing loudly.
“Dammit, Lilith, go back to Chase!” Ezra ordered, but she ignored him, winding around his ankles, her meows climbing to demanding yowls.
He sank to his knees in front of the reliquary, and reached for the latch.
He poured more power into the shield even as he reached through it, knowing he would need to stop Morana from exploding free.
If he opened the reliquary, he might be able to divert the death magics into the core of the earth again, where the primordial death magics dwelt.
Now that she was awake she might listen to reason, but first he needed to stop her from bringing down a blizzard on Edmonton.
He flipped the latch and lifted the lid.
Incandescent power flashed so bright it nearly blinded him, leaving spots swimming in his eyes, and he cried out, arm over his face.
Wind howled through the hangar, tugging at his hair, stinging his face, icy cold tendrils seeping into his flesh.
Lilith cowered beneath him where he crouched, yowling with the wind, and he knelt with his knees on the ground, pulling her between his legs and covering her with a small shield as she huddled in fear.
Ezra leaned forward and reached into the reliquary, dismissing the shield on it as he did. Cobalt fire danced over the skull of Morana, the long gash in the forehead his focus.
She was awake. The second his hands touched the skull he sensed her presence within it, thrumming through his skin and bones.
“Heal me, death mage!” Her words came from everywhere and nowhere. Demanding, desperate.
Death magic swelled within the skull, the ouroboros of life and death blazing before his eyes. The amount of death magic was almost incomprehensible.
He knew that the paradox of her existence lay in the wound across her brow.
Cut down by a weapon that never failed to kill, striking an immortal being never meant to die.
Life and death were fighting, forever trapped in a nightmarish cycle.
To resolve the paradox, the wound itself needed to be healed.
He could heal a mortal wound. That much he knew. But how to restore a bare skull to flesh and muscle, organs and skin? Mortal necromancy had its limits. He could not regrow limbs lost to injury, only heal the great wound left by the loss of a limb.
The hangar shook, metal groaning. It was darker outside, and within the hangar the lights overhead swung precariously, threatening to fall.
“Heal me! Now!” She demanded again, voice like the howling wind, the blue flames around the skull growing larger, whipping about in the wind.
“I don’t know how!” he screamed back, hunching over Lilith as a burst of cold wind lashed at his back.
Morana was going to destroy the hangar and the base, and probably bury Edmonton in a massive blizzard if he didn’t figure out a solution.
A light overhead finally fell from the ceiling, crashing to the hard floor, shattering in sparks and glass, bits of flying metal.
Ezra turned his face away. “Fuck! Hecate’s spine, that was close! ”
He froze.
Mind growing still, he huddled over Lilith, cradling the skull. There was enough death magic around him to rival the veil, and he opened his inner vision to the chaos around him.
Morana glowed to his inner vision, almost impossibly bright, brighter than she had when she slept.
She was a goddess, after all.
She wasn’t the only goddess, though. And thanks to another goddess, he already knew how to heal a mortal wound, and maybe that was enough.
He had no idea how to restore a living body to a nearly dead goddess, but he knew how to heal mortal wounds. Maybe all he needed to do was heal the gash in the bone from the sword, and Morana could restore herself.
End the paradox.
He could do that.
Mentally batting aside the rivers of cobalt-blue energy that circled the skull, Ezra reached out and seized a rivulet of death magic, peeling it off from the ouroboros and pulling it to himself.
He then sent his awareness into the skull, to the gash in the bone, struggling to maintain his focus, body shivering.
He was suddenly colder than he ever had been before, and he trembled but made himself keep going.
Exactly as he had with Lilith and Monica, he focused on the cause of death, the mortal wounding, and he saw in the edges of the sword strike, a baleful glimmer of magic that did not belong to Morana.
It was faint to his senses, and yet it was as stubborn as glitter as he tried to remove it from the bone.
If it was the Dainsleif that struck Morana, the sword was crafted by Dain, a god himself, one of the dwarves of Norse legend. A divine relic made the wound. It might be beyond him to heal it.
The walls of the hangar shook, hard enough to make the hard floor under Ezra’s knees shake with the force of the winds.
He mentally pried at the glittering residue, sweat beading on his brow and hairline, and he gasped at the effort.
There was enough death magic around him to restore a million dying humans, but the problem was that he was mortal—he had limits. Powerful he may be, but perhaps breaking the paradox was something beyond his personal ability to manage.
The ground shook, and a part of him felt the gathering snow on his hair, his shoulders, coating the reliquary.
Morana’s voice was now a constant scream that echoed off the ceiling and walls, full of desperation and what he thought might be terror.
He understood that, he truly did. To be trapped as she was was a nightmare.
She might be about to destroy a large city in her attempt to live, but he could sympathize.
He tried again to remove the mark left by the sword, and a tiny corner of the foreign magic peeled up, but clung stubbornly to the bone. He gasped for air, and tried again. And again.
He wasn’t strong enough. He should have waited longer to recover from burnout.
Ezra clutched the skull in fingers gone numb from the cold, and decided that trying again would merely drain his stamina for naught. It took power to wield power and he was running to the end of his. There had to be a solution.
“You are too stubborn, my necromancer,” a voice cut through the cacophony of the nascent storm, and it was one he knew. Years since he heard it last, but he knew that voice.
“Hecate,” he whispered.
Time stopped.
Quiet reigned supreme and he shook, cold and covered in melting snow. He looked up, blinking water and sweat from his eyes.
She stood beside him, clothed in shadow and hellfire-green flame.
Tall and lithe, with a lean build and grace in every movement.
She took a final step, Her sandaled feet covered by the hem of Her rough-spun black robe.
Her hair was long, reaching past Her bare shoulders to Her waist, an ashy brown that held flecks of hellfire as it moved across Her body.
Her skin was grave-pale but shadowed, as if She stood in the depths of a cave and firelight barely defined Her edges.
She held a long dagger in Her left hand, and around Her waist coiled a dark serpent, which She wore like a belt, the serpent’s tongue flickering as it tasted the air. Around Her neck hung a simple leather cord, and a large silver key was tied to the end.
Darkness moved behind Her, and he tried to make sense of what he saw as shadows dripped and fell to the floor when She moved.
He thought he saw figures behind Her, but they shifted too quickly for him to see details.
One second the silhouettes of two more people stood behind Her, and the next, huge black dogs with hellfire-green eyes.
He tore his gaze away and looked Her in the eyes.
She smiled at him, a small twitch of Her full lips that spoke of good humor and patience. Her eyes were a rich, vibrant hazel, green and brown in distinct hues that blended together into hellfire-green pupils that glittered like emeralds.
“My necromancer,” She said, and he froze as She reached out, brushing hair off his forehead and out of his eyes. “You’ve come such a long way, from healing a kitten to healing a goddess. What stops you now?”
“I don’t have the strength to heal her.” Ezra gasped out. “Forgive me, I did not mean to call you.”
She waved that away with a graceful flick of her wrist. “I felt the awakening of Morana and when I turned my eye to her, I sensed you in her shadows. She dares to threaten one of mine.” She reached out and ran her fingers over the gash in the skull.
“Such a mess. End the paradox and set her free, young one.”
“I’m still recovering from burnout. I should have waited longer, but the outside world wants the skull as a weapon, and that can’t happen,” he said, hands aching from holding the skull, soaked through by the melting snow. “My reserves are too low, I don’t have the power to heal her.”
She tsked at him. “You may not, but I do.”