Chapter Six Light #3
She did not want to die here, did not want this to be her legacy—the thief who died in an alley. She wanted to survive, to live. She wanted to meet the men her brothers had become. To return to the Etellinian Mountains one last time. To make things right.
Damn it all to hell, she thought. Clasping the chain at her neck, she hesitated only long enough to whisper a prayer before she yanked the Kellstone necklace from around her throat.
The world slowed as the pendant hit the cobblestones on its side and spun three times before falling flat.
Then the ringing started. Loud and unyielding, it drowned out everything else. Heat and adrenaline flew through her bloodstream like a thousand tiny needles as the magic, at long last unbound, burrowed through her veins.
Marks snaked down the sides of her torso, arms, and legs, and violet light cascaded down her figure in the path they made on her skin.
Reya inhaled, leaning into the senses she’d spent a lifetime trying to hide.
She scented every odor the city had to offer in painstaking clarity.
Felt every touch of the wind that carried the scent of the north down the Etellinian Mountains.
Saw every varying shade of yellow in the creature’s eyes.
Heard every thud of her racing immortal heart.
With eyes like emerald fire, Reya bared her teeth at the snarling beasts.
There was no room to be terrified of the white light that burst from her palms like raging starfire, enveloping the mist-shrouded alley.
Her magic had always manifested that way, like the All-Gods had plucked a comet from the sky and placed it in her heart—glittering and terrible and utterly without end.
This was her truth. Her curse.
Most assumed the Kellstone pendant was just a defense to ward off magic-born. Little did they know, its purpose was to protect everyone from her. And the two hell spawns before her were about to learn why it was necessary.
The creatures turned and ran, and the light swelled as it chased them down the alley, gleeful in its newfound freedom. When it hit them, their bodies combusted, turning to glittering black dust gusting in the fog. As if they had been unmade.
This was what she could do without so much as a blade—the only thing she had ever done with her magic: annihilate.
That light swallowed the alley, the street, the sky like a beacon in the darkness.
Blinding to all but her. And then it began to fade as exhaustion swept over her so thoroughly she fell to her knees.
Shoulder burning, Reya watched as the light retracted, dimming down to her fingertips until only a faint glow remained, like she had pressed all ten of them against the warm glass pane of a lantern.
For long minutes, she just stared at the clumps of black powder dusting up from the road, at the growing puddle of red beneath her knees.
She needed to find a surgeon, someone who could stop the bleeding.
Voices drifted down the alley, no doubt drawn by the commotion.
A patrol of Silver Guardsmen appeared in the fog. Saw her standing before them, violet marks glowing on her battered body. They began shouting, but her ears were still ringing too loudly to make out the words. They weren’t hard to guess.
The glow under her nails vanished, and she knew there was no use trying to call it back.
The magic fed on her. And she was fading.
Everything has a cost, her father told her once.
Nature demanded balance from all things, human and magic-born.
She had never been able to hold on to the light for longer than a minute, the limitations of her body an inherent counterweight to her magic, a failsafe that she’d always been grateful for. Until now.
Reya Connery was her own annihilation.
She drew her sword and shoved onto her feet with a sob, molding her grip to the imprint of her father’s hand.
It didn’t matter what she had been born.
She was still a daughter of Old Etellina, and she would die a Steelborn death.
Whatever came next, Reya would leave this world with a sword in her hands.
Red light flared in her periphery, and the ground shuddered beneath her, like something was rising from the depths.
The patrol stopped in its tracks, and one of the men shouted a warning, but not at her. They were yelling at something behind her.
Before Reya could turn around, orange and cobalt flame shot out of the darkness, searing the ends of her cloak. Screams echoed down the alley as, one by one, the men went up in a maelstrom of fire. She’d never seen such madness.
Unable to tear her eyes away, she watched their armored suits betray them, warping in the flames against their skin, a deep red metal ripe for the forging.
The acrid scent of burning leather and flesh tainted the air, and she keeled over, coughing up blood and bile.
One of the men ran flailing down the alley toward her, wailing for his god as he tried to outrun the death that had already claimed him, and slammed into a brick wall.
Reya turned to see a figure step out of the shadows, clad in all black. Fire seemed to dance in his golden eyes.
He took a step closer.
Around them, the world burned and burned, and then it all went black.