by Ryan Muree
She let out a sob and struggled to get to her knees. She wasn’t able to see the grimoire in the ether any more.
She grunted and clawed her way toward the field, toward Grier.
Why wasn’t the book there in the ethereal plane?
Why wasn’t the paper at least there?
And her fingers, her hands, had lit up. She didn’t even have a quill or a pencil.
Grier’s roar cut her focus as he sliced through an Ingini. “Emeryss!”
They couldn’t do this forever, and they weren’t strong enough. He’d died next—they all would.
Chapter 30
Marana — Revel
Adalai Blinked through an Ingini and stabbed them in the spine with her dagger. Another approached, and she Dispersed between their legs and reformed on the other side, slicing both heels and hamstrings before her pink ether dust floated away.
“Anyone know what that thing on the wall is?” she shouted.
Only Sonora’s sobs came through. Kayson… please don’t leave me…
That ether-grenade looked close to the tent, but they’d better not have gotten Kayson. He was too good to go like that. But her chest tightened, and a lump formed in her throat. She looked back at the smoke and flames at the wedding tent.
Sonora was bent over a mangled body, wailing in the mud.
No, he was okay. He’d be okay.
She dodged a swing to her neck and stabbed another Ingini in his side.
If she didn’t focus, she’d end up worse than Kayson.
As far as the contraption on the wall, rage bubbled through her. It was a game-changer. Ingini had created this monster and, in doing so, upgraded the minor skirmishes and sneaky fights they’d been having to full-scale war.
And they would pay.
She spun and kicked an Ingini in the back of the head just as Vaughn tossed a pebble at the savage, enlarging it to a boulder and crushing him on impact.
The battlefield was clearing out. They were taking care of the army on foot, which wasn’t large to begin with, but she’d managed to get the advisor and his wife and guests to safety—most of them, anyway.
A metallic grind churned on the wall in the distance. She squinted through the fires. The cannon was moving. It was sliding down the wall to target—
Her eyes dropped from the mechanical abomination to the field before her. It was littered with the few Ingini and Revelians still fighting for control. The RCA was winning, but would the Ingini kill their own just to end the battle?
Her heart thudded in her ears.
They all needed to leave—immediately.
“Get out!” she shouted, hoping any RCA would hear her. “Everyone out right now!” She Blinked her way around the field, trying to help the remaining Revelian troops take out Ingini fast enough to escape. “Go!” she screamed at them. “Run!”
All she had to do was point at the wall, and the RCA soldiers would take off.
“Sonora, get you and Kayson out now! Update me on Emeryss and Tully!”
Jahree landed beside her on his feet, a slight breeze around him. His suit had been singed in several places, and dirt had marred his face. “We lost Kayson. Sonora is with him and Mykel, and they’re trying to get his body back to the ship. I can’t find Emeryss or Tully.”
Kayson was dead? Fear pulsed through her, the urge to run overwhelming. “Tell Sonora the ship isn’t far enough. They’re going to shoot that giant beam of light right at us and kill us all—”
An explosion rocked the soil near the last remnants of the wedding tent, nearly hitting Grier and Vaughn. Vaughn had leaped out of the way, and Grier’s shield had protected him from most of the debris, but it was too close.
“Grier!” She waved her hands to get his attention. There wasn’t time. That gun would start beeping again, and it would be over. “Grier!” she screamed.
He glanced up from under his shield.
She Blinked the rest of the way to him and ran past. “Find Emeryss! Get her out, now!”
She Blinked again and again with Grier and Vaughn right behind her. She checked her wrist. She didn’t have much ether left.
Blink - 2.
“Where’s Urla?” Vaughn called up to her.
We’re all at the ship now. Sonora sounded broken. Her voice cracked and felt thick from crying. Urla and Mykel are with us. Do you have everyone else?
“We can’t find Emeryss or Tully.” Adalai pointed back at the wall as they flew past Ingini and other Revelians. “Run! Get out! The thing is gonna destroy all of us!”
Vaughn staggered but kept up, glancing back over his shoulder. “There’s no outrunning that thing!” he shrieked.
Grier charged past her to the left, ramming an Ingini with his shield and jumping over the body of another toward Emeryss. She was on the ground, her dress torn and singed. Her skin was splattered with splatters of blood and dirt as she was trying to stand.
The mechanical whine of the cannon on the wall stopped.
Vaughn screamed, racing faster for the trees. “We’re not going to make it.”
Grier pulled Emeryss up and with him. “Come on, we have to go!”
“Grier!” Emeryss pointed behind them as a stray ether-grenade from a remaining group of Ingini flew toward them.
He spun and brought his shield up in an instant. The grenade exploded on contact, but Grier and his shield held. Vaughn, however, was thrown forward from the blast.
Adalai Blinked forward and caught him before he slammed into the ground.
“Shit, Adalai.” Vaughn’s heart was about ready to tear through his chest under her palm, but she’d kept him upright.
“You okay?”
He nodded.
She turned to check on Grier and Emeryss behind them.
The remaining Ingini forces left on the field charged forward. Those idiotic morons were so stupid. Their own people were going to kill them, and they didn’t even care.
“Don’t fight them, Grier! The wall!” Adalai pointed, but he was already preparing to face the encroaching swarm.
Grier’s shield had fractured after taking the brunt force of the grenade. As the fight went on, as he grew more tired, each materialization of a new weapon was weakened. He waved the shield away with a swing of his arm, and it dissolved into black dust.
He couldn’t run. He couldn’t get Emeryss out of there in time. The minute they’d turn their backs, the Ingini horde would kill them, possibly only seconds before the beam did.
His lungs squeezed tighter and tighter. They’d lose. Every option available meant losing.
It was over.
All he could do was stall, hold them off, and maybe get Adalai to get Emeryss out of there.
Lady Light, protect her one more time. Bracer up, he used the last of his strength to rematerialize a fresh shield from his arm. “Run for Adalai. She’ll Blink you out.”
“No!” Emeryss shouted.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Chills ran down his spine as the weapon counted down the final seconds of his life.
Two daggers flew past either side of his head and struck two Ingini in the face.
“I can’t Blink her out!” Adalai ran past him into the oncoming army. “I’m all out!”
Vaughn ran back into the fray as well. “We’ll hold them off. You both get out.”
A grenade flew through the air at Vaughn, but he managed to shrink it down to a pebble and catch it in his hand. It fizzled in his grip. He flung another pebble that became a boulder in midair into the Ingini. Adalai was using everything she had left, too. Dispersing between them, blinding them with Dazzle, and slicing their throats when they were looking the other way.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
They’d never be fast enough. None of them would get out of there in time.
He turned to Emeryss. “Go.”
She shook her head. “No.”
Something was off about her. Maybe it was because he knew he was going to die. Maybe it was light reflecting fro
m the beam behind him. But her eyes were different, lighter, ethereal.
“Go!” Spittle flew from his mouth as he shouted. “Get out! That thing is going to go off and kill us instantly. Get out of here!”
She held out her hands and moved in front of him.
Emeryss swallowed and lifted her chin.
She wasn’t afraid of death. She hated that she wouldn’t get more time with Grier, that Grier didn’t get everything he wanted and deserved in this life, and that Vaughn and Adalai would have given up their lives, their futures, trying to save everyone else.
Grier spun and deflected an Ingini brute with a grunt and thrust of his shield. He shoved off one Ingini and deflected another pulse.
She needed a shield of her own, an enormous one that could protect everyone she cared about. And like before, the ether moved right there in front of her. The whispers moved too, over the burning field and debris.
Time slowed. Ether slowed so much that it shined brightly in the field, in Grier, in the wall.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The whispers were whispers again. Not screaming. Not shouting. She wasn’t even in the ethereal plane, but she could hear them as clear as day. She was in reality—physical reality and the ethereal. Threads of ether were in everything, everywhere. She’d seen it all before, when it nearly killed her and when she was a child.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Ether was… everywhere. The whispers drew in closer as the fabric of her reality shimmered.
I need a shield.
She held up her left hand, and her fingers were lit like fire.
She hadn’t needed a quill to scribe for that boy. She hadn’t needed to suck up the Air Slice ether to cast it. Because ether was everywhere, and she was the vessel for it, the instrument.
She willed the ether to come to her.
Whorls of bright pink and yellow flew into her fingers, seized the muscles in her hand, her arm, her chest, and filled her like she’d been starving for days. For her whole life.
She was the quill. She was the instrument drawing down the ether. She couldn’t run from scribing, because scribing and casting were connected. Just as Adalai had said.
And her paper? It was just a medium. She’d made Air Slice hover in the air. Could she do it here, too?
Two overlapping circles, five vectors… Two overlapping circles, five vectors…
The whispers were giving her instructions again. She could hear them plain as day.
Two overlapping circles, five vectors… Two overlapping circles, five vectors…
The voices repeated it earnestly.
A pinprick of blue light glistened on the horizon directly in front of her.
She walked forward, weightless but heavy, like walking on the bottom of the ocean. She walked past Grier, past Vaughn and Adalai. Their shouts for her to come back, to retreat behind them, broke through, but the whispers of the universe were louder than they were.
Two overlapping circles, five vectors… Two overlapping circles, five vectors…
With her finger, she began drawing in the air, visualizing the ether adhering to it. And it did.
Anything was her medium because she was the instrument and ether was everywhere.
Two-ring spiral… bottom left dot… bottom right dot…
Her hand worked as fast as it could, keeping up with the whispers.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeepppppp.
Connect the top two hashes… three slashes down the middle. Complete.
The Ingini machine erupted again with its bright-blue beam of ether, bringing with it a rush of impossible heat and turbulent wind.
But a wave of lavender crystalline ether bloomed from her sigil, forming a shield before them. Several feet across and several stories high, the shield stopped the beam pounding against it.
She winced and squeezed her eyes shut, and her shield—her casted shield—held. It didn’t budge. It didn’t crack. It held.
The beam split around her, heat rippling through, stinging her eyes and nose and incinerating everything else in its path to ash—all the bodies of the other Ingini included.
When the beam had finally stopped, early dawn and rain returned, and her shield crumbled away.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
“Emeryss…” Grier’s face had ash in the concerned creases of his forehead.
Vaughn and Adalai were staring at her with eyes as wide as Grier’s.
Grier reached his hand out for hers.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
“Let’s go, Emeryss.” Grier took a cautious step forward.
But she had to stop whatever that gun was. Going wasn’t an option. “I can do this.”
There was a brief pause, a blip where he was a blank slate, and she couldn’t tell if he was in shock or in fear of her. He merely swallowed. “Okay.”
Standing quietly beside her, Grier dissolved his shield, and they stared out across the battlefield at the smoking crater dug out between them and the wall.
“I think I can do this again,” she said softly.
This time he smiled at her. “I know you can.”
She took a deep breath as the beeping slowly counted down. Her heart had grown calmer, her nerves steadier. She’d seen the ether in the world around her, and as she remembered it, she began to see it again in the grass, in the rain, in the fires, in Grier and Adalai and Vaughn beside her. It moved through all things and glittered with energy.
She needed something to reflect the beam.
I need a shield to bounce the ether back.
She lifted her hand again, drawing the ether from around her and down into her fingers. It was just as before. It was filling her with something she didn’t know she’d needed, giving her a thirst for more from the world.
The pinprick of blue light from the wall burned again as the whispers began their orders.
Quickly, she followed their instructions, adhering sigils of ether to the air.
It was taking longer than the previous, despite her moving with precision and as fast as she could.
“Emeryss…” Grier’s nerves were evident in the corner of her eye beyond the veil of ether, but she continued.
Three rays up… Teardrops crowning the top… Crossroads with a dot in each angle.
The highly detailed sigil shimmered before her eyes.
“Emeryss!”
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeepppppp.
Point 20 degrees from the middle. Complete.
She pushed her palm toward the sigil and a brilliant, thick, lavender shield sprang to life before her hand again.
The beam collided with it at once, and her feet slid back.
Grier got behind her, bracing her up in the push against the beam.
But it wasn’t enough. The shield was absorbing it, slowly breaking it down into a flurry of inky dust.
She had to control it, direct it. This was her ether.
She visualized the cannon exploding and shoved the shield toward the wall with a grunt.
It rippled, like rolling waves, and the ether-beam from Ingini bounced back, searing the battlefield, the wall, the cannon, and the clouds in the sky beyond it.
Her shield fell, and the ether danced on the early morning air.
Remaining pieces of the cannon broke off, metal grating against metal and stone, and crashed into the ground. Black smoke rose in the predawn glow.
She could barely catch her breath.
Grier’s arms wrapped all the way around her. “You did it. Spirits, Emeryss, you did it!”
“Emeryss, what are you?” Vaughn laughed.
“She’s a scribing Caster. She’s something in between, just like I said.” Adalai wrapped her arms around her, too.
“You did it,” Grier repeated against her neck, still not letting her go.
She’d saved those she cared about. She’d stopped the Ingini. She’d casted—actually casted. She’d changed her destiny.
But she hadn’t been fast enough for Kayson and Tully, for all the other RCA who’d lost
their lives, for the citizens of Marana, for Revel… She could’ve stopped it all had she accepted sooner she couldn’t run from scribing.
And Adalai was right. She’d become something in between. Someone who didn’t need grimoires to cast.
Chapter 31
Somewhere — Ingini
Clove’s left hip and legs ached, but the pain was dwarfed by a burning at her temple. She reached up to touch it and found a thundering pang across her skull.
She sucked in a breath and whined.
Everything hurt. Everything. Her toes, her fingers, her ankles, her wrists… Her ribs hurt on both sides.
A faint smell of fuel and burning metal filled her nose, but a breeze soon took it away.
A breeze.
She peeled her eyes open to get her bearings. Sideways in her seat, she was hanging by the belt she’d snapped together before Pigyll hit the ground. There were trees through her windshield and dark droplets of blood on her cracked and smoking dash. Hers? Probably.
She checked her hands and arms for cuts and bruises, but something warm and wet dripped from her nose and whatever had happened to the side of her head. A quick run over her teeth with her tongue, and it seemed she’d miraculously kept them all in. She strained to reach up to her head for any other wounds but didn’t find any. Just frizzy hair with globs of blood matted in it by her ear.
Wrestling with the seatbelt straps, she managed to separate them, and she dropped to the floor as a result—or the wall, technically. She groaned and squinted at her new sideways surroundings.
“Cayn?” It came out too throaty and garbled to sound like his name.
She mustered the strength to sit upright against Pigyll’s ceiling.
There were gaping holes throughout her whole airship, massive chunks missing, and no sign of her brother.
“Cayn!” she called out again.
No response. Not even a groan or a sarcastic remark about being almost dead.
As tears stung her eyes, she slid her body along the floor, relying on her right arm to hold much of her weight. The gunnery basket was all the way across the ship, but she had to see. If his head was busted open, or he’d been knocked unconscious, he wouldn’t have responded, and he’d need her help.
