She flopped back against the wall and allowed herself to slide down into a sitting position. A wave of fatigue swept over her. Trying to control the Fount had left her exhausted; all she wanted was to close her eyes. There was nothing to stop her doing exactly that. Olivier had no idea where she had gone, and an hour or two of rest wasn’t going to hand the temple over to the Prince Bishop.
Her heavy eyelids slid shut and her mind drifted toward sleep. Her thoughts were manic, as they had been the previous night—jumbled and incessant. It was as though they had a will of their own. She supposed it was because she was so close to such an immensely powerful concentration of the Fount. Still, she drifted toward sleep.
Until a whispering voice jolted her awake.
“In this place, we are one,” it said.
A chill raced over her skin. She looked about the small room, still illuminated by her magical light. There was no one else present. She pressed her ear against the wall through which the draft was coming, but heard nothing but the gentle movement of air.
Back in her home village of Bastelle, on the late-winter evenings, there were always ghost tales told. Even as a child, Solène had never believed them, but now? The thought of the voice sent a chill over her skin. There was nothing human about it.
She got to her feet and went to the rope. Just touching it—her escape route from that dark, damp, and seemingly haunted place—was comforting. She freed the line and took a firm grip of it. As she was about to whistle for the horse to move, she heard the whisper again.
“In this place, we are one.”
“Who are you?” Solène said, turning around in the hope of seeing the speaker.
Silence. She was alone down there. Solène swore, tugged on the rope, and whistled for the horse. Nothing. Whatever her horse was doing was clearly more interesting to it than pulling her out of the hole. She started trying to pull herself up it, hoping that it would resist her and start moving away from the hole.
“In this place, we are one.”
“Shut up!” Solène said. “Come on, stupid horse.” She pulled at the rope again, but it wouldn’t move. “Go back!” she shouted. No response. She felt the clench of fear on her gut, the like of which she had not experienced since she was nearly burned alive in Trelain. She had no idea where the voice had come from, nor what had uttered it. She inched up the rope, straining for all she was worth.
She had covered half the distance to the surface by the time her arms started to burn. She clung to the rope; she simply didn’t have the strength to pull herself up any farther. She was tempted to try magic again, but knew she was too tired, both physically and mentally, to block the surge of energy or hone an untested and dangerous piece of self-directed magic. As though intentionally seeking to compound her problems, her unseen horse walked forward, dropping her back to the chamber’s floor. Perhaps using the horse like that wasn’t such a good idea after all, she thought.
“In this place, we are one.”
Solène pressed her hands to her temples, realising that she hadn’t heard the voice with her ears. It was inside, in her head. The pressure of the Fount all around her was doing something to her, feeding her crazy thoughts and images, and now she was hearing things too.
What in hells did it mean, anyway? In this place we are one. It was cryptic nonsense. Who or what was she one with?
Her hands were shaking. She was stuck down in a hole, terrified to try magic, and something very creepy was happening. That or she was going mad, a thought that was no more comforting. Try as she might, she couldn’t see a solution to her problem. The only positive she could draw from it was that if she couldn’t find anything down there, then the Prince Bishop wouldn’t either.
There was only one way to get out, and that was with magic. She chastised herself for being foolish enough to go down there without a better plan in the first place. She looked up at the opening. It seemed so close, yet it was too far away. She considered giving the rope another try, but knew that would do nothing more than sap away some of the energy she still had.
She took a deep breath and started to focus her mind.
“In this place, we are one.”
“Shut up!” she screamed, halting the process of opening her mind to the Fount before the distraction of the voice caused her to lose control of herself. She settled herself. If the voice was in her mind, then she simply needed to maintain a little more mental discipline. She started the process again, following the slow steps that dal Drezony had taught her to ensure she was relaxed, focussed, and immune to wayward thoughts or distractions. She started to open the mental window and imagined herself rising from the floor, toward the opening above her.
As though hit by a great gale, her mental window slammed open. Solène let out a cry of shock as the Fount rushed in. She tried to close her mind to it, but it was too late—the energy flooded over her. Into her. Through her. She struggled to breathe as the invisible force threatened to drown her. Her head was filled with thoughts and images that passed so quickly she couldn’t make sense of them. Her skin tingled, then burned. Even with her eyes closed, she was blinded by the intense blue light that seemed greater even than the sun. The sound was deafening, roaring like waves thundering against a cliff. The whisper repeated over and over, growing in volume until it was a scream. She screamed herself, trying to block out the alien sound. She felt like her head was going to split asunder. Then everything went dark.
CHAPTER 45
It was dark beyond the hole in the roof when Solène woke. It was dark where she was too, her magical light having faded to oblivion. She sat up, feeling hungover. Her body was tired, her mouth was dry, and her head throbbed, but she was alive, which was more than she was expecting. She didn’t know much about Fount burnout, as it had been called at the Priory, beyond her own glancing brush with it during her early days there. She knew people had been killed by pulling too much of the Fount through them; the passage of so much energy not only drained their own internal reservoirs but consumed every fibre of their body as though they had been burned by an invisible flame. As punishing as what she had experienced was, it had clearly fallen short of that.
She might have lain there for hours or days. It was only the lack of a rumbling in her belly that made her think the former was more likely. The echo of what had happened still reverberated in her head. Remembering the ghostly whisper sent a shiver over her skin. She wiped her red hair, matted with sweat, from her brow. She stood hesitantly, wobbling on her feet. There was nothing near to hold on to to steady herself, and the lack of any focal point made it even worse.
She cast a fresh globe of light. Dizziness gone, she turned slowly, mouth agape. The walls, which had been bare stone on her last inspection, were now anything but. Richly decorated, with carved reliefs and intricate writing in a script that was entirely alien to her, this place was every bit what she had thought an ancient temple might look like, and far, far more. She wandered along the walls again, entranced by the carvings, which looked as fresh as though they had been done only days ago.
The first thing that struck her was how important dragons were to the enlightened. Almost every relief bore the carving of one of the great creatures. The thing that surprised her the most was that they seemed to be existing peacefully with humans.
Everywhere she looked, there was text. Knowledge that had been forgotten for centuries. As exciting a prospect as the Prince Bishop’s archive had been, this was an entirely different proposition. These inscriptions had been carved by the first people to learn how to use magic properly. She wondered what their circumstances had been. People with a natural connection to the Fount, like her? It amazed her to think that she might share an experience with the ones who started it all. She wondered what their lives had been like—the trials, the tribulations, the dangers—when they discovered they were different.