Chapter 18 Skye
Skye
The darkness continued to scream and swirl around us until it became nothing, shadows slowly disappearing.
We stood there for several seconds, in disbelief that that’s all it took for Dmitri to fall apart but I wasn’t going to continue standing there, waiting for something else to happen.
We climb out of the tunnels and into daylight and for thirty seconds I let myself believe it's over.
The corruption is gone from the courtyard walls.
The shadows that clung to every surface when we descended have evaporated, leaving clean stone and clear air, and the students gathered in the courtyard stare at us with expressions caught between terror and desperate hope.
Dante is standing at the center with his staff planted, his aura burning steady for the first time in weeks, and when he sees us emerge he closes his eyes with a relief so profound it makes him look like a different person.
We’re all exhausted from what that took from us and I'm standing through willpower alone, my bonds stretched so thin between my mates that they feel like they might snap if someone breathes too hard.
But we're alive. Dmitri is gone. The pool is empty. The souls are free. Except… it just feels too easy. I open my mouth to say something to Dante, something about the tunnels, about what we found, about what it cost, and that's when the ground beneath us shudders.
The tremor starts deep and rolls upward through the stone like something clawing its way to the surface. A crack splits the courtyard flagstones from the tunnel entrance to the eastern wall, and from the crack, darkness pours out.
Not the slow creeping corruption that Dmitri grew through the sanctuary's foundations.
These are fragments, pieces of the darkness we absorbed in the chamber that didn't stay absorbed.
Splinters of Dmitri's essence that broke free during the detonation and found the cracks in the tunnel system and raced upward while we were climbing out.
They move with a different kind of purpose than before, with the last vestiges of the intelligence that animated them, scattering across the courtyard and surging toward the dormitories where the rest of the students are gathered.
"No," I say, the word coming out hoarse. "No, we ended this."
"It's not him," Harlow says, his death-sight already tracking the fragments. "It must be residual. Pieces that broke loose. But they're still dangerous and they're heading for the students."
The fragments hit the barrier contracts Ambrose built around the dormitories, the impact sending a crack through the closest one.
Ambrose flinches like he's been struck, his hand pressing against his chest where the contract is anchored.
"I can't reinforce them," he says. "I don't have anything left. "
Students scream behind the barriers. Faculty members throw themselves between the darkness and the dormitory entrances, their essences flaring with whatever they have left.
Dante's divine pulse slams outward and catches the nearest fragments, dissolving them, but there are too many and they're spreading too fast and he can't be everywhere.
I reach for the bonds between my mates and try to pull us back into formation, trying to find the combination we held in the chamber, but there's nothing to grab.
We're depleted. The combination took everything we had and what Dmitri's absorption didn't drain, the climb out finished.
We're six exhausted people standing in a courtyard watching the remnants of the thing we killed tear toward the people we swore to protect.
This is what Dmitri meant. If I burn, you burn with me. He didn't need to fully survive the chamber. He just needed to leave enough of himself behind to finish what he started while we were too spent to stop it.
"Anyone who can fight, get to the barriers!" I shout, my voice carrying across the courtyard with an authority I don't feel. "Anyone with combat ability, we need you now!"
Students and faculty move. Some of them are barely functional themselves, drained by days of corruption, but they throw what they have at the fragments pouring through the cracks.
A water-type channels a wall of pressure that slows a cluster of shadows long enough for Dante to dissolve them.
Two earth-types raise stone barriers across the courtyard entrance.
A fire-type, the girl whose sparks Stellan taught to control, steps forward with her hands shaking and her jaw set and burns a fragment out of the air six inches from a younger student's face.
It's not enough. The fragments keep coming, flowing up through the crack in the flagstones, and for every one we destroy another two emerge. They're drawn to the students, to the fear and the essence, exactly the way Dmitri's corruption was drawn to vulnerability.
"I can help."
A voice comes from behind us, Liz standing at the edge of the courtyard with soot on her face and burns on her arms and fire steadily burning in her hands.
I’m not sure when she left her room but it looks like she’s been through hell and back, though I don’t feel sorry for her. Not after everything she’s done.
"I've been fighting the corruption on the surface since you went below," she says. "My fire burns it. My blood connection to my father means the shadows can't hide from me. I can feel where they are."
I look at her and I see Dmitri's daughter offering to help fight the remnants of her father's power, and every instinct I have says to be careful, be wary, and remember what she was and what she did.
But the fragments are cracking the barriers and students are screaming and I don't have the luxury of caution.
"Help hold back the shadows," I state, hoping and praying this isn’t one last trick she has up her sleeve.
Liz moves without hesitation. Her fire tears through the nearest cluster of fragments with a ferocity that makes several students flinch away from her as much as from the darkness.
She burns a path across the courtyard toward the weakest barrier, and the shadows recoil from her in a way they don't recoil from anyone else.
Her blood calls to them and they hesitate, confused, caught between the instinct to attack and the recognition of Dmitri's lineage.
She uses that hesitation to destroy them. Students watch her fight with expressions I recognize from the early days of the revolution: confusion, fear, the tentative beginning of something that isn't trust but might become tolerance if given enough time and enough proof.
With everyone’s help, we hold. Barely, desperately, with everything the sanctuary has left. Dante anchors the center. Liz covers the eastern approach. Students and faculty fill the gaps. My mates contribute what little they can, each moment costing us energy and essence we don’t have.
And then the fragments stop scattering. The individual pieces of Dmitri's darkness that have been racing across the courtyard slow, then reverse, pulling back toward the crack in the flagstones, reconvening into something larger.
"That's not residual," Harlow says, the fear in his voice sending ice through my bonds. "That's coordinated. Something is pulling them together."
The darkness gathers above the crack, his hunger pooling together, the pure essence of three centuries of consumption, the driving force that animated everything he built, coalescing into something that doesn't think but feeds.
A shadow of a shadow, mindless and vast and aimed at the largest concentration of essence it can find.
The students.
"We can't fight this separately," I scream out, and I feel the truth of it in my depleted bonds, in the exhaustion of every person standing in this courtyard.
Individual efforts won't stop what's forming.
Dante alone can't stop it. Liz's fire alone can't stop it.
Even the six of us, if we had anything left, couldn't stop it as separate forces.
"We have to work together. All of us. As one. "
"We don't have the strength for the combination," Ambrose says.
"Not just us." I look at the courtyard full of people. "Everyone. The network, the students, everyone who can contribute. We channel it together. One push."
"That's never been done," Rumi says.
"Then we do it for the first and hopefully the last time."
I reach for the bonds. Not just the ones between my mates, not just the combination. I reach for every connection I can find, every thread in the network through Ambrose’s contracts, every bond between every person in this courtyard and every ally who pledged their power to our cause.
My aura stretches outward until I can feel the mountain valley community and the underground settlement and the coastal sanctuaries and the hundreds of small groups scattered across the territories who chose to believe that the world could be different.
"Help us," I send through the network, the request carrying with it everything we are and everything we've done and everything we're trying to protect. "One more time. Help us hold."
The response comes like a wave. Essence floods into the network from every direction.
The barriers around the dormitories flare with renewed power.
Dante's aura blazes so bright the courtyard fills with golden light.
Students feel the collective strength pouring through them and stand straighter, their essences brightening, their fear receding.
Even Stellan's fire sparks back to life in his palms, fed by the network's collective will.
The reconvened darkness surges toward the students but meets a wall of combined power that it cannot breach.
Not six forces. Thousands. Every Magila who joined the network, every student who found their strength at Phoenix Sanctuary, every person who decided that protecting strangers was worth the cost.
The darkness smashes against it, ramming itself against the barrier, hitting the combined will of every person we've built connections with, because the thing Dmitri never understood is that power built from consumption will always lose to power built from choice.
Dmitri’s echoed voice, full of frustration surges forward, a voice meant only for the six of us.
“You stupid fools," he snarls as the darkness surges forward again for another attack.
"You think you've won? You've taken me into yourselves.
Every shadow I ever cast, every life I ever consumed, every piece of darkness I built over three centuries, it lives in you now.
You haven't destroyed me. You've become me. "
I pray a little harder, tugging at the essence from everyone through the network, hoping it’ll be enough.
Instead of just a wall, it pulses with the energy of our auras, pushing the darkness back.
It pulses again and again and again until the last strike from the darkness seems to shatter, our aura striking through it rather than just against it.
My vision tunnels as something like electricity zips through the darkness, attacking it from the inside but it doesn’t erase Dmitri’s words.
You’ve become me.
That can’t be true, right? We fought hard and worked together just like that entity wanted us to. Just like Mother Nature pushed us toward. And now we’re just…
The last fragment of darkness evaporates and then the courtyard goes quiet.
I stand in the silence with my bonds stretched across thousands of people and I feel every single one of them breathing. Then my legs give out and Jade catches me before I hit the stone, the world narrowing to the sound of my own heartbeat and the warmth of arms holding me up.
"Is it over?" Stellan asks.
I can’t find the energy to say anything, but some part of me desperately hopes so. The other part wonders if we’ve just started something else.