99. Lily
LILY
It took her too long to realize what Seb was doing.
The entire stadium sat silent as he began pulling power out of the air.
No one moved, not even Danielson. No one used spontaneous magic in Cantrèa; there was no point.
But Seb used it now. She could see light, or maybe it was AEther, flocking to him like a second skin.
Lily’s breath hitched as webs of golden light began to spread across the ground beneath Sebastian’s feet, drying the quagmire, turning it back to sand.
A breeze that hadn’t previously existed in the stale air began to whisper around him, whipping the sand, running its fingers through the lock of sweat-damp hair that stuck up over his helmet.
The light began to spin itself together in a spherical net of golden filaments around him.
The pattern of it was both geometric and organic in a way Lily could almost understand if she stopped thinking entirely.
Watching it form, she was reminded of a movie her algebra teacher had put on in middle school one day, about the math of nature—its patterns and paths that followed a design humanity couldn’t quite find the rules for.
Whatever was forming the design of this net, it wasn’t Seb.
It was the geometry, she realized, of AEther.
It knit itself together, layer by layer, encasing him in a golden shroud.
It looked kind of like Vexiliar’s Geodesic, only vastly more intricate.
As it was nearly finished, Danielson came to his senses and hurled another attack at it.
The net finished assembling itself a millisecond before Nimue’s Tears—a cloud of glinting, dagger-sharp ice shards—shattered against its surface in a shower of prismatic sparks.
Seb stood below his creation for a few long moments, his entire body vivisected by brilliant light.
With a twitch of his fingers, the net disassembled like a line of code eating itself over and over, and he redrew his foil.
Danielson watched momentarily, and then he began to move, his footwork erratic to try and throw Seb off guard.
He looked a little scared. Lily didn’t blame him; Seb looked a little scary, lit with an Apollonian glow that seemed to be coming from beneath his skin, his body impossibly quiet.
When Seb finally moved, making for Danielson in a swirl of light, he seemed to skate across the surface of the sand.
Lily had never seen any human so beautiful.
If Sebastian had beamed like the sun that first time she saw him, now he was the shape of Magic itself.
The air around him rippled hazily, like the heat off a bonfire.
He collided with Danielson in a blaze of scintillating light.
He moved even faster, smoother, than normal—not inhumanely fast, but as if he knew everything that was about to happen, and all of it was just a dance his body had already committed to memory.
Enveloped in gold, his foil hissing through the air, his eyes dark and hooded, he looked not unlike a god, or at least something more than human.
Achilles, revenge screaming in his blood, as he streaked toward Hektor, must have looked something like this.
Danielson threw his final spell at Seb, and he brushed it away with his foil like it was nothing, which was impossible. The only way to block a spell with the foil was if you had a defensive spell prepared, and Seb didn’t. Sparks trailed behind his weapon. He scored a touch, then another.
Lily could literally see Magic pouring through him. She had never seen anyone use magic like this. He wasn’t even casting spells, just wielding raw AEther, calling to all of Magic itself moment to moment, and it was listening. She could see how it loved him. She could see how he loved it.
When he took off his helmet, victorious, his joy was its own universe, bursting into radiant life.