Chapter 19 #2
"North doesn't have the luxury of time." It came out flat and certain.
"Twister's keeping his body alive with everything he has.
You felt this place know us, Fly. We walked into the font's own forest, and it opened up and let us in.
We're close to understanding what this all means, to opening the font.
You don't break for a mission, none of you, no matter how hard.
" She closed her fingers around the silver owl.
The wooden one was waiting for her back at the estate, and somewhere below them in the deep green dark the font was waiting too.
"After what it's costing him, I can pay anything. We go."
The damp air below the sanctuary was thick with the scent of ancient stone, sweet scents of water and flowers, the leaves rustling softly in the trees with a soothing sound of tranquility. Fly faced her, digging in. “I’m protesting this course of action. Just so you know. This is ill-advised.”
She reached for Flash’s hand, and it was already clenching around hers. She ached at the feel of his calloused palm, the warmth of him seeping into her in a way that no one or nothing ever could.
His apprehension and his feelings mirrored Fly’s.
She didn’t need a magic golden bond to get that information.
“Do I think this will be devastating? Yes. But there’s no way around it.
I understand your protective instincts. You’re a brilliant, remarkable leader, but I can’t rest, not now, not ever, until this is done.
You know he’s running out of time.” Fly’s face contorted, and he looked away.
“We’re running out of time. Chaos is winning by default because Flash and I don’t understand how we fit into this cosmic puzzle.
You need all the information to form some kind of plan that will get us an open Veil.
Until we do, that font will not open. Can we afford to wait one moment more, Visionary? ”
She stared at him, her jaw clenched, her heart aching for North whose absence filled a sanctuary that should have brought her peace, but there would be no peace until he was back, until the font unlocked, and the Veil opened to them.
Where the Shadowguard would be reborn, reinstated, reunited in both oath and duty.
Her bond with the Veil sang such a pure response to her that she knew she was on the right track.
Fly’s mouth tightened, his expression hard, but his eyes were soft. “Do you have a sense of where it is?” he asked, his voice low, testing the quiet of the cloud forest.
Lechuza started to shake her head, the word no forming on her lips, but it died before it reached the air.
A sharp, explosive crack echoed through her consciousness.
The world tilted in a flash of blue light, and she was pulled backward through a vortex of five hundred years to a place of endings.
Images exploded against her eyelids, showing her corpse, stiff and gray, being hauled through the choking mist by a handful of weeping, heartbroken people to a hidden chamber carved into the cliff, a final, niche that overlooked the glade below.
Moss and thick, ropy vines choked the entrance now.
Her fleeing people worked in a furious, terrified haste, dusting her cold skin with gray wood ash, dressing her body in articles of their own clothing, pressing white owl feathers into the wrappings, the echo of that heartbreaking wooden owl.
Then without ceremony or ritual, they sealed her into the wet stone.
Her vision cut between her dead body and her still ancient face, staring back from the wrappings. The abandonment of it, the sheer, lonely cruelty of being left to the wet and the dark while the world she saved forgot her name, twisted her stomach into knots.
Before her lungs could draw a shuddering breath to steady herself, the universe snapped.
The physical world dissolved. Her blue threads coalesced around, binding her.
Her body was physically dragged through the fold of space, answering the sudden, subconscious scream of her own immemorial marrow, losing her skin contact with Flash hurt and wrenched at her heart.
The team’s shocked, frozen faces vanished from her sight, and the fold spat her out in the small niche, looking down at her own bones bound in the dusty, dirty shroud.
She shook so violently that her teeth chattered.
This is where she was laid to rest by her people, and it was here her bones and wrappings would stay. She wouldn’t desecrate her own tomb and dishonor the people who had possibly sacrificed their lives to give her a proper burial.
She took a hard breath, swallowing her fear, deciding that whatever she saw, it would be the truth, and they had to have answers. She reached out, touched the edge of the cloth, and was brutally thrown into the vision, the past and the present colliding so hard the impact felt structural.
Oh, gods, Vilcabamba was burning.
The air was orange and black, thick with the oily stench of torch fire, roasting livestock, and human flesh.
The last redoubt of the Inca Empire was falling apart in screams, terror, and the eradication of her race.
The peace negotiations had been drowned in a mutual, savage slaughter that left no room for mercy.
The world was ending. Her civilization was being erased from the earth, and death was breathing heavy on the back of her neck.
The font, her mind screamed. I have to reach the font.
It stood open in the sacred glade ahead, the final defensive line where the doorway to her sacred duty to maintain the wards to Chaos’s prison stood open.
If the Spanish took it, if they fouled it, the balance of all things would collapse.
They were ignorant, power-hungry men and had no idea what would happen if Chaos was freed.
Their greed ruled them. No one in the universe could control the Material of the Cosmos.
The heavy, rhythmic thud of iron-shod hooves tore through the roar of the fire behind her.
Quri didn't look back, running until her lungs burned, but the beast was too fast. A massive warhorse slammed into her flank like a falling boulder.
The impact detonated pain through her whole body, sent her flying through the air, her limbs flailing before she crashed brutally into the dirt, the breath exploding from her chest in a ragged gasp.
She scrambled to her knees, mud and dead leaves sticking to her face, but a hand locked into her hair before she could stand.
The grip was punishing, twisting her scalp until her neck threatened to snap. She was yanked backward, her spine arching violently as Diego Vargas, the captain of Francisco’s platoon, shoved his bearded, sweat-streaked face inches from her own. His breath reeked of stale wine and iron.
But Quri didn't see a conquistador. Through her Veil-sight, an ability she hadn't possessed in the agony of that original moment but held clearly now, the flesh of Vargas peeled away like cheap wax. Beneath the steel helm and the Spanish beard lurked the cold, shifting void of Severance. Chaos’s ultimate assassin.
“We know who you are,” Vargas sneered, his voice vibrating with a multi-layered, unnatural resonance that scraped against her soul. “Chaos will do our bidding. Your world is already ours. Soon, all worlds will follow. There’s nothing you can do to stop us.”
With a guttural cry of pure defiance, Quri drove her fingers into his eyes, tearing at his flesh, her nails finding purchase until he roared in pain and his grip slackened. She kneed him in the groin, ripping herself free, but as she lunged away, a cold shock of steel drove deep into her side.
The blade bit hard, the tip deflecting off her ribs, a blinding flare of white-hot agony. Death hadn’t been his goal. His strike was precise, designed to terrify her, to drive her into a frantic, dire survival mode.
It galled her that he knew her so well, severed her bond with the Veil so thoroughly, with his poisoned words that she lost all touch with reason.
Bleeding profusely, clutching her wound, she fled through the trees toward the glade.
Her thoughts narrowed to a single, white-hot point of madness.
Destroy the font. Don't let them have it. Destroy it all.
* * *
Below the sanctuary, the world tore apart for the rest of the team.
Flash dropped to his knees, overcome with the intensity of the memory.
Beside him, Fly, Easy, and Twister collapsed into the dirt, their hands clutching their heads, groaning under the sheer, suffocating weight of the psychic backwash.
Flash was utterly paralyzed. The dark violence, the primal, heavy emotions of a dying empire, and the sheer, bleeding desperation of Quri’s flight overwhelmed his nervous system.
Then, the perspective forcefully shifted, throwing him out of the dirt and into the saddle.
Francisco rode hard within the attacking conquistador column.
Sweat stung his eyes, dripped from his brow onto the leather of his jerkin.
The air was thick with the coppery tang of blood and the sharp, acrid smell of fear, a palpable cloud rising from the fleeing people ahead.
His warhorse strained beneath him, his muscles bunching and releasing with every ground-eating stride, his breath coming in great, panicked huffs.
All around him, Spanish steel was cutting down Quri’s countrymen, the slaughter indiscriminate and total.
He was a lieutenant of the conquering army, a scholar-soldier who came believing in a divine mission and watched it curdle into a mortal sin as he marched through a sophisticated world his comrades were dismantling.
In the months he had spent away from her, his loyalties had fundamentally shattered.
Quri was in the city. She would be ground to dust in the jaws of this conquest.