59. Syneca
Syneca
Never let a demon finish your sentence. It lends you the easy words to claim the dear ones later.
Tavian didn’t come into the cave with us. He stopped at the mouth of it, where the carved entry gave way to dark, and turned to face the path back down with that blade strapped to his forearm like he’d decided this was where he made his stand.
Lucy stopped too. “You sure?”
“I’ve held doorways before.” His handsome face creased. “Go on. See this done. I’m fine.”
Lucy held his eyes one more second.
The light through the entrance behind us was already further along than I wanted, and I knew exactly what the sun meant for her.
She’d have to go back out and unless I stayed behind, there’d be no way Silas or Calder would let me come through with her a second time.
They’d scheme to drop me in the Underworld.
I grabbed her arm. “We literally don’t have all day.”
She went in ahead of me and I followed quickly, though she was clearly the athlete of the two of us, even if she never played publicly, you could tell by the muscle in her stride and the way she hadn’t second guessed her footing in the mountain. I, however, hated the entire trek.
The pull started the moment I cleared the entrance of the most narrow pathway.
Not strong. A draw, low and steady, like a current you don’t notice until you’re already standing in it.
Something in that chamber wanted what I carried and had started helping itself the second I walked through, a thin pressure dragging at the edges of my fire.
I planted my feet and didn’t say anything yet.
I needed to know where it was coming from first.
As we rounded a corner, entering a room that clearly had been warded, I saw the source and stopped second-guessing.
It poured down the far wall. Liquid and luminous, and…
no it was flowing upward, a waterfall running backward, a column of light flowing all the way up to the cavernous opening above us, churning and folding over itself to the high, high ceiling.
It threw no heat. It made no sound. It just climbed endlessly and the closer my gaze tracked it the more my skin crawled.
I threw my arm out before Lucy could drift toward it. “Whatever that is, don’t touch it.”
Slowly, I moved closer. Each step tightened something in my chest, a warning that seemed to pulse with my own heart, assuring me that thing would kill me.
And, as if Silas could feel my trepidation, a wave of worry flooded me.
A very new part of me needed to assure him that I was okay, but staring at this thing, I just didn’t think I could hide the fear.
Three feet away and the air became thick. My ears rang. The pull on my power sharpened the nearer I got, and I took it as confirmation, this was the heart of the wards and all I had to do was break the flow.
Except there was nothing to break.
No runestone holding it. No vessel. No seam, no anchor, no carved line I could split or corrupt or unweave.
It poured out of the bare rock and into the air, sourceless, and you can’t unpick a knot that has no thread.
I held my hand near it and the draw on me yawned wider, hungrier.
I pulled back fast before it could decide to take more than I was offering.
“Anything?” Lucy’s voice was tight from behind me.
“It’s not a spell.” I backed off. We didn’t have the hours I’d need to even begin trying to figure this out. I turned, dragging both hands through my hair, and that was when I really looked at the altar.
It sat in the center of the chamber where I’d half-dismissed it on the way in because it was quite clear where the power was coming from.
It was black stone, hip height, broad as a cart, and ringed on the floor by a spell circle scored deep into the rock.
Carved over every surface with runes stacked on runes.
I circled it, reading the marks and the pull on my power moved with me.
I stopped. Took a step left. The draw leaned left.
I stepped right and it followed. The thing I’d felt the second I walked in wasn’t radiating off the waterfall at all.
It was running toward the altar. Through me.
Through the stone under my feet. The spell circle wasn’t a barrier to protect it, it was a mouth, and it was drinking everything in this room with a flicker of power in it and feeding it up into the altar.
“It’s not the weird waterfall.” I pressed both palms flat to the top of the stone and the jolt of it slammed up my arms and rang in my teeth, the same draw I’d felt at the entrance, all of it, sourced right here.
“This is what’s pulling on me. This thing is leeching every scrap of power in the mountain and pouring it into the wards outside.
I’m sure of it.” Cold crawled up my forearms in answer to whatever lived in the rock, and I didn’t love how glad it seemed I’d touched it.
“We don’t break the flow. We break the altar. ”
“Okay,” Lucy said, already moving to the other side of it. No argument. No questions I didn’t have time to answer. She just set her hands on the stone across from mine and looked at me steadily. “Tell me what you need.”
I almost smiled at her for it.
What I needed was Silas.
The want arrived before I could stop it, sharp and incredibly inconvenient.
He should have been here. Standing at my shoulder with that infuriating calm he wore into every disaster, the one that made the worst rooms feel survivable just because he’d decided they were.
He would have leaned against the wall with his arms crossed and told me I already knew the answer, and he’d have been right, and I’d have pretended to hate him for it.
I closed my eyes for one second. Just one.
Long enough to put him there, the shadow of him beside me, the low certainty of his voice, the weight of him that meant I wasn’t the only thing holding the room together.
He was the fixed point I kept finding even when I didn’t want to. The thing that didn’t move.
Then I opened my eyes, because he wasn’t here, and the altar was, and the sun outside wasn’t going to wait for me to miss someone I refused to need.
“Incindiflux,” I said, and fire moved from my fingers in thin lines, hunting the seams between the runes for the gaps the old weaver had left.
The lines reached and almost caught.
Then died. The stone swallowed them whole. I tried again. Nothing. On the third time, I was faster, because being told no was unacceptable, but the light under the carvings didn’t flicker once.
“Dammit.” I shook my hands out. Every gap I found was already sealed somewhere else. Not like a lock but rather a knot, and I didn’t have the time to pick it apart strand by strand. I turned on Lucy. “We’re done being delicate. We need to break this fucking thing.”
“Done.” One second a woman, the next the chamber was full of dragon cloaked in shadow, horns scraping carved rock as she reared up and brought all of it down on the altar. Claws, weight, the whole mass of her.
It rang like a bell and the floor jumped under my boots. The stone didn’t chip. She hit it again. And again.
The slab just sat there, patient and pulsing, taking it, and the nerve of the thing almost made me laugh.
Not her though. She pulled back, and a low frustrated sound dragged out of her.
“Okay.” I scrubbed a hand down my face. Brute force was out. Fine. I backed off to give her room and felt the better idea show up, mean and simple. “So we don’t break it… Let’s melt this motherfucker down.”
The dragon dropped her head once.
I set my feet and threw both hands out. “Ignis.”
Fire poured off me, gold run through with purple, and hit the altar in a building roar. I pushed and pushed, until my boots slid back on the stone and the strain of it screamed up through my shoulders. The runes lit. They held and burned brighter.
But not enough. The altar was drinking my fire the same way the circle drank everything else.
Then more fire came in beside mine.
Lucy’d tipped her great head back and roared until grit rained from the ceiling, and then she breathed, a long furious column of it down onto the stone, and the wash of heat off it nearly knocked me sideways.
Except it wasn’t orange.
It was purple.
Violet flame, brighter than mine, brighter than anything I’d ever pulled out of myself, pouring out of her in a flood.
Erelith fire. I’d never seen a dragon make that color, never heard of one that could, and from the way her eyes had blown wide mid-breath, neither had she.
Her flame found mine and slid into it like it had been cut to fit, like the two had been one fire pulled apart a long time ago and were only now remembering they matched.
For one breath, I wasn’t pushing alone. The strain came off my shoulders. Whatever she was, poured straight into whatever I was and the two ran together as easily as breathing, and the strangeness of that pricked at the back of my mind.
The stone screamed.
The light under it turned white, split, and the whole slab came apart.
Not cracking. Coming undone, every rune unraveling at once.
It threw us both backward. I landed flat and lost the air in my lungs, already shoving up onto my elbows to stare at the bare floor where the altar had been.
Lucy hit the far wall and slid down, the shift peeling backward through her until she was a gasping woman again.
I felt it go. Out past the mountain, faint and huge, the wards dropping. The whole range shuddered.
I crawled to Lucy through the full weight of Silas’s worry coating me. I got my hands on the collar. “Hold still. Incindiflux.”
It clicked and fell to the floor.
We cleared the entrance into a gray morning and my eyes shot across the city. Past the rooftops to a shape already cutting across the dark of the far slope, to a griffin tearing toward me. Silas. The bond pulled taut the second I caught sight of him, and everything in me leaned toward him.
Lucy’s gasp tore my attention sideways.
Tavian was on the ground.