The floor vibrates with the shock of a concussive force. Vize stumbles back, surprise on his face as he looks up. I turn as a sheet of flaming essence sweeps the air. Great wings swirl with red and golden fire. They descend, and I recognize the body signature. Manus ap Eagan alights on the far side of the pool.
“It’s too soon. You aren’t strong enough,” he shouts. He releases a volley of essence, white strikes of lightning burning with power. The essence tangles in the radiation vapor, splinters, and hits Vize. It leaps along his arm like wild static and burns out through the ring.
Vize and I scream as something blossoms in the white haze, something dark and hot, something wrong. The darkness flares out like a claw, knocking me on my back, throwing Vize off his feet, tossing Eagan away into the mist. Vize thrusts his hand in the air, into the darkness, and releases another burst of elf-shot. The darkness swallows it in silence, then descends onto Vize’s hand. A piece of it fractures and hits me in the face. Darkness descends across my vision, then across my mind, like the slow descent of a falling curtain, like the closing of my eye, like my mind blinking.
My mind blinked.
Everything is white. I am running. Everything is white. He looks over his shoulder at me. He looks determined…. or crazed…. I can’t tell. Everything is white. One minute we were facing each other, and now everything is white. He stops. He looks surprised. There is someone lying on the ground. Something about him is familiar. Everything is white, and there is no ground. There is someone lying in the white. Everything….
My mind blinked.
I stand on a plain, white grass waving against a white sky. It’s not winter, pray, what is this new madness? Where have I come? I turn in place, searching, searching across the plain, searching about the standing stones, but Maeve is not there. Was she? What is this place?
The stones shimmer and glow with essence. It is more than Maeve expected, more than she could have suspected. It is too much. She has overstepped.
“Stand aside,” she says.
I face her in the stone circle. Its radiance grows as the essence of the source is released. “It’s too much, Maeve. We can’t do this. It will destroy everything,” I say.
“Everything but Faerie—our Faerie, m’love—the rest matters not,” she says, and raises her arms.
“It matters, my queen. All the realms matter. The Wheel of the World cannot turn without all its creation. You will destroy what you seek to save,” I said.
The stone circle becomes light. Maeve becomes light. “I will not fail my people,” she said.
I raise my own arms, feel the power begin to course through me. “Nor shall I,” I say.
She sings in a high, clear voice. I answer in my own.
My mind blinked.
I burn and fall, tearing through the Wheel of the World, bodiless but not broken. I stopped her, stopped Maeve, but fear I started something more.
I burn with essence, my true essence, my soul. I burn across the Ways, doors flashing by, places and times in the Wheel of the World.
I burn and fall through one of the Ways, caught up in the wake of the Wheel of the World. I burn across the landscape of a new place, a new world beyond the old.
I burn and pull things in my wake, people and places, fragments of minds and realms.
I burn upon the earth, my passage burning through a forest of cold. I burn and the trees lie down and the sky goes white.
I am not in Faerie.
I burn with exhaustion and pain and cannot become myself. I am my own essence, burning white without a body in the dark forest. I pause and rest and prepare to return, to being, to a body.
I burn and they approach, men burning with power, burning with their own essence. I feel their hunger, two men hungry for power. I see their faces and know them. I see their faces and remember them, one a druid, one a shaman. They strive over me, strive for my essence, strive for my power, my soul.
I am weak, too weak, borne along the tide of their struggle, tossed to first one, then the other. They tear at each other, tear at me. They are matched and cannot overcome. They are tearing me apart; they are pulling apart my soul.
I tear and am undone. I feel myself tear away from my self, one part to the druid, one part to the shaman. I am no longer whole.
The druid takes me away, takes his portion of me away with him. I am fading without the missing part of me; part of my soul has gone. I feel it out there, feel it receding in the shaman’s hands.
I reach out for my missing half, feel my missing half reach out for me. We drift apart, the druid and the shaman take us away, away from being whole. The shaman is gone. I am gone.
I am losing myself, losing myself, losing myself. My memory slips away, my mind with it, myself. I am becoming not myself, a blank slate, an empty vessel.
I feel my thoughts fade to nothing, to something new, to something with no memory. Changed.
Like a newborn. And
42
I convulsed in the chair, astounded at the pain of five streams of molten essence boring into my head. Maeve’s hand seared into my face. She stared down at me, her expression suffused with concentration. Anger swept over her face, and she yanked her hand away. I gasped in relief at the sudden absence of pain.
She glared, her wings whirling in the air, deep red flickering among the veining. “What have you done?”
My head fell forward as I caught my breath. The pain was gone. That was all I cared about, the relentless pain of her attack had stopped. I heard her question. I heard it and laughed. What had I done, indeed.
“I survived.” I laughed and heard the edge of madness in the sound. I had survived, that was what I did. She tried to take the stone and…. awareness dawned on me.
I didn’t have the stone.
The cold burn of the faith stone in my head was gone. My mind felt free, the pressure gone, delicious silence filled the space between my ears for the first time in…. I raised my head. I had no pain. The chronic pressure had stopped. The constant drumbeat of sound pounding across my temples had vanished. Silence filled my head, glorious silence.
The dark mass was gone, too.
A flutter rolled through my stomach, a steady building of emotion that rose and spread across my chest. It bubbled up my throat and out in a slowly building sound of laughter. I was myself again. I was free.
Maeve grabbed me by the neck, thrusting me out of the chair and against the wall behind me. “What … have…. you…. done?”
I laughed in her face. Her angry confusion was priceless. In disgust, she threw me aside. I steadied myself against the floor and activated my body shield. “You blew it, Maeve. The stone’s beyond your reach now.”
Maeve’s wings flared, essence spinning through the membranes in blues and reds. Pressure built against my face, and an electric static prickled against my shield. Maeve’s face sharpening with clarity as all else fell away in a haze. My shield was no defense against her probe, her face swimming closer. She slipped inside my mind like a manic thief, rummaging through my thoughts with abandon. Images and memories flashed, people I had known and loved and hated. The stream of memory tossed me about.
I retreated before her onslaught, fled to the inner regions of my mind. I touched a spark of essence within me, a brilliant core of light and power. The darkness was gone, no longer barring me from my inner self, no longer hiding the core of my being from my reach. I found my soul. I wrapped my will around it, bound my mind to it like a mighty fist, and thrust Maeve out.