CHAPTER 24 #2
Thunder roared, seemingly directly above us. The sound made my teeth clench. Lightning skittered overhead, and I stared up at the night sky. Felt the building current.
“RUN!” I yelled.
We scattered, even though there was nowhere to go. Just endless, snowy mountain and bare bones from candidates past.
Rayna shrieked as lightning struck down a few feet ahead of her, singeing the ground. Snow fizzled and melted, and a strong electric current permeated the air. Everything felt hazy, the pungent scent of scorched rock and chlorine in the air.
Lighting flashed across the sky in lashes of purple, dancing across the summits.
I didn’t know if it was me screaming, or if it was Lana or the others.
I skidded across the snow, dodging strike after strike and trying to keep my balance.
Lightning slashed down in a great surge, and I was knocked backward.
From the periphery of my vision, I saw Caleb come to an abrupt halt, as lighting speared through him.
The scent of burning flesh seared my nostrils, and I dry heaved, my stomach empty.
There was nowhere to hide. I crouched into a ball, tucking my head between my shoulders, covering my neck with my arms, and muttering a fevered prayer that I could hardly hear over the screams. With each strike, the air vibrated with electricity and the ground rocked.
I coughed against the acrid fumes, my lungs burning with smoke and something else. Something powerful.
And then it stopped.
I blinked through the smog, slowly lifting my head.
“Lirah?” Lana called.
I sagged in relief. “I’m fine. Moric?”
“Alive,” his voice came.
As the smoke cleared, Caleb’s charred body became visible on the ground. Lana, who was closest, dropped beside him. “No, no, no!” she cried. Her fingers skated across his neck. “There’s no pulse.”
I stared down at Caleb, at a loss. I hadn’t known him well, but our time in Cosanus had bonded us. Seeing his body reduced to nothing but burned flesh and bone was unbearable.
I turned away, scanning the others. “Is everyone else okay?”
Rayna’s face was dirt-streaked, and Moric and Lana looked thoroughly shaken, but they were still alive.
Moric didn’t answer. Instead he said, “Is it over?”
Lana licked her lips, her gaze darting nervously across the sky. “I don’t know. I don’t feel any different. Do you?”
I assessed my body. “No.” The ground trembled, vibrating softly. “Do you feel that?”
Moric dropped to one knee, his hand skimming the snowy surface. “Something’s happening.”
Electricity thrummed, throbbing like a living, breathing thing, as if the earlier lightning shower had somehow charged the ground.
I felt it then, a soft pinprick starting from my toes and inching along my calves.
It tickled gently as it skimmed my skin in a warm wave.
Smoke rose around us, wreathing me in an opaque cloud, and I couldn’t see anyone else, but the others had become deathly silent; they must have felt something too.
I stared down at my hands. Dazzling purple light skipped across my fingers, a light current stinging with each contact made.
It hadn’t felt uncomfortable at first, but the stinging was slowly becoming painful.
Each zap seemed to strike a nerve, and I gasped as a particularly strong one knocked the breath out of me.
This was it. It was starting.
I fell to my knees and rocked back, staring up at a sliver of dark sky as the charge slithered from the snow and into my body.
Lightning fizzled along my veins, cooking me from the inside out.
Different to Kilian’s. Harsher, vicious.
Something thumped outside the scope of my vision, but I was frozen in place, my limbs locked.
A tear slid down my cheek but even that sizzled and dried in a flash.
The air was cold, but I was so hot, my skin flushed and boiling.
It felt like the geysers all over again.
Raw, blistering pain sliced through me. Everything itched, and my bones cried out, begging for mercy, but none came.
My organs felt like they were collapsing in real time.
My lungs couldn’t expand fast enough to breathe the vital air that my body needed.
The current was too much.
I was dying.
There was something I was supposed to remember. Something I was supposed to do.
I keeled over, retching for air, but still the electricity radiated through me, throbbing and shoving its way through every atom, every molecule that made me who I was. I was crying, calling out for Umma, for Kilian, for anyone that would make the pain go away.
No one was coming.
I had to do it myself. I breathed through the pain, sucking in rattling gasps of whatever air I could find, and reached for the spool of magic inside of me.
I could sense it, feel it like a glass of water just out of reach, my fingers scraping at the edges. There were only dregs left.
I needed to get rid of the excess current before it burned me alive.
Energy thrummed through me, singing a mournful, terrifying tune. I scrunched my eyes, but I could not expel it. The current had taken up residence inside my body and refused to be evicted. There was nothing in the world beyond the agony.
Still, I reached. The magic was so close, I just needed one, tiny push.
A voice slithered in my ear, dark velvet. Looking for me?
“Yes,” I panted aloud. “Help – help… me. Please.” I needed it to smother the current. I poured every last bit of my willpower into that singular thought, directing it. Shaping it.
My chest split and the slumbering creature inside me cracked one eye open. It greeted me like an old friend, its wrath pouring out to dull the stream lashing across my skin. The current subsided, inch by inch. I whimpered in relief, my limbs sagging with the respite.
It was short-lived. Images flashed through my head, like a slide show on hyper speed.
I struggled to press pause on a single one of them.
It was all a blurry mess of faces I did not recognize and places I had never been.
As quickly as the pictures came, they filtered out in a dazzling stream of light, leaving me clutching at my temples with a pounding headache.
Colors floated in my vision, crystalline and incandescent, as the pain dwindled and my other senses returned.
My sight was crisp through the smog left behind by the lightning.
I rose on shaky limbs like a new fawn and stretched my hands out before me, marveling at how similar yet different they looked.
My fingers were slightly longer, my legs heavier, and when I ran my hands along my head, they caught on the tips of my ears.
The pointed tips. Inside, my chest whirred with a power so vibrant, so fluorescent that it felt like it might rip through me at any second, demolishing everything in its path.
I breathed through the transition, focusing on my lungs expanding and contracting. Even the air smelled better, the night brisk and fresh. Something rustled behind me. I whirled around, my senses on overdrive, only to find… Lana.
She clutched at her chest, eyes wide with panic. I dropped to my knees before her as she wheezed for breath.
“Focus. Fight through it, Lana,” I urged, “Breathe and think of home.”