Chapter Twenty
Isla tried to move, but the world had shrunk to the width of her own body—unyielding, crushing, suffocating.
Her shoulders scraped against something rough.
Cold crystal pressed into her cheek. When she tried to take a deep breath, the scent of earth and minerals was overpowering, like the inside of a freshly broken geode, but amplified.
The Terra Summoner had laughed when she had cried out in fear. He had trapped her in a cage of stone and crystal, growing it tighter and tighter until she could hardly move.
Though she was no longer blindfolded, shadows pressed in on Isla from all sides. Dust caught in her throat and she choked out a cough.
She strained to move her arms, which ached in their current position, but shards scraped at her body, and she froze as pain bit into her skin.
A thousand glittering edges caught the faintest traces of light, gleaming like teeth.
Her heart thundered. The harder she tried to still herself, the more the crystalline prison seemed to press in, closing the last inches of air around her.
Then a faint grinding hum surrounded her, the sound of minerals shifting, getting comfortable. The space around her shivered for a moment as if breathing in sync with her panic. Then the minerals paused right before crushing her, but leaving no room to move unless she wanted to be skewered.
Then came the flash. A blinding pulse of white light seared through the cracks—bouncing off crystals, amplifying her fear.
A child’s past scream or her own rang out, muffled under dust. The thunderclap that followed shook the walls of her mind, and she was back there just as they’d planned, just as her memories had shown—beneath the broken cot, the orphanage collapsing around her.
The air thick with smoke and grit. Lightning crawling across the sky outside the single jagged hole she could see through, each strike a white monster slashing toward her from the skies.
She’d screamed until her throat tore, but no one came.
And now, decades later, the same light flashed through the crystal prison, flickering like a heartbeat, and she was that terrified child again—small, unseen, and utterly alone.