Mzatal reached and grabbed my right wrist, calling deeply to me, touching me through our shared connection.
I sucked in a breath as my blade responded to his. Vsuhl emanated a tone that soared through me, lifting, potent. Not audible, but felt in my essence. Mzatal’s Khatur answered in a harmony that unified the energies, wound them together, and I heard them, knew them, expanded into the new joining. Everything vibrantly translucent.
Mzatal called to me, and I answered: “Here. Here. Here.” I turned my head to look at him, looked into him. A pinpoint of blinding light in vast darkness. “Mzatal,” I breathed. “So lonely.”
He froze, hand on my wrist, eyes locked on mine, acknowledging. Rhyzkahl stepped forward with a scowl. My gaze shifted to him. I saw him. All of him. Crystalline leaves adrift on swirling water, far from the tree. Pushed by inexorable winds into foul depths. “Dear one,” I whispered. “So lost.”
He straightened, face going liquid for a brief flash before returning to the mask of determination. Vsuhl extended to Rhyzkahl’s blade, to Xhan, and then recoiled violently sending a crashing wave of discord through the entwined melody of Vsuhl and Khatur. I trembled with the discordance, grateful that Vsuhl withdrew. The blade song wrapped around me, wrapped around us. Vsuhl, Khatur, Mzatal, me. I expanded. Xhan sought to join, but the rakkuhr dominated it, smothered it.
“All of you, so lost,” I whispered. The wind ripped my words away, yet I knew they carried to all corners of the courtyard. “Foolish dear one.”
A syraza appeared behind Mzatal, laid a hand on his shoulder. Ilana. Not the one I wanted. Needed. Not my syraza. “Eilahn!” My voice carried through the universe, unstoppable.
Mzatal shifted his grip so that it covered my hand over the hilt of the blade. I returned my burning gaze to him. “Take it from me.”
Mzatal’s mouth pressed into a hard line as he gripped Vsuhl’s hilt and tried to wrest it away, backing it with potency when he found it immovable. “Ah, zharkat,” he murmured such that it touched my very essence with its sorrow. Ilana stepped back, vanished.
My expanded awareness flared an instant too late as Jesral threw his dagger at my exposed back. I jerked hard as the steel buried deep, piercing my heart. Rhyzkahl gave a cry of rage and cast a powerful strike at Jesral, sending him into a tumbled heap. Pain seared through me even as deep memory stirred. Time swirled and slowed. I slid between the moments.
The gate, so perfect, has become a wild maelstrom. How? What did I do wrong? Now the ritual tears at me, tears at the world. I cannot stop it! Lord Szerain’s face is cast in alternate mottled patterns of light and dark as the patterns flicker and fail. Help me. My lord, help me! He will stop this. He will save me. He steps close and wraps his arm around my waist from behind, murmurs something in demon against my ear. I don’t understand what he means, but I trust him. He has me now. He will save me. Pain blossoms in my chest.
My entire body convulsed as the memory collapsed into darkness, the Elinor aspect recoiling. “No!” I screamed at everything, needing to see beyond this moment, recognizing in Elinor of then an echo of what raged within me now. Vsuhl vibrated against my palm, whispering just beyond my understanding, its tone shifting and winding through the grove energy. Whispering. Rakkuhr churned within me and over my skin. Molten metal dripped to the stone as the seething potencies in my body expelled Jesral’s knife, healed the tissue in its wake. For all Jesral’s many and terrible faults, he’d known the way to stop the breaking of the world, but had not the means.
I knew who had the answer. Knew who’d stood at the center of the destruction of the world. Knew who wouldn’t look at what came with the pain. Burning, I felt Mzatal and Khatur calling to me, through me, Mzatal’s hand wrapped around mine, around Vsuhl, around us. I willed time to slow. Slid between. Called up the pain, called to Elinor.
Pain blossoms in my chest, and I look down. Lord Szerain’s fist is wrapped around the hilt of his blade. No. No! I don’t understand. I don’t understand! He bears me to the floor. Cold face. Cold stone. Cold inside. Pain. More pain. Only pain. Giovanni’s face. Save me. Elinor Elinor Elinor…Elinor Elinor Elinor…forever. Pain.
I sank to my knees, this pain eclipsing the roiling power. Vsuhl whispered. Held within. Entrapped. Rakkuhr. Pain for all. Rakkuhr entangled. Elinor. And more that came through from the blade, beyond words. And then the pain receded to be replaced by the burning of the three potencies. Wind, cracking thunder, and shaking ground greeted my return from the time slide, and I breathed heavily.
I understood so much more, yet I had no time now to process it. I bared my teeth and climbed to my feet. Mzatal and Rhyzkahl stood before me, small, but not insignificant.
I spoke to Vsuhl. You stopped this before. How do I do it now?
Vsuhl whispered, its meaning flowing through me. Two blades. I will open the way. I will hold you. Not them. I am here. Waiting.
My gaze touched the two lords. “Both. You both must end this. Strike me with both blades. It’s the only way.” I understood. No normal blade could take me down now, no strike of a lord’s potency. Nor could a single essence blade. Too much was in motion. Too much boiled within me. I shuddered, or perhaps it was yet another quake. The tremors grew more severe. Chaotic dances of lightning lit the near black sky. “I won’t be the cause of another breaking of the world.”
Mzatal touched me deeply through our connection, sharing with me his stricken resignation.
My tears burned away before they could fall. “Do it. Do what you must.”
A syraza appeared two paces beyond the lords, and my heart leaped with a fierce relief and joy. Eilahn, aroused from stasis by the potency of my call and the sheer fucked-up-ness of my situation. She stretched her wings and placed her right hand on Rhyzkahl’s shoulder and her left on Mzatal’s. She wasn’t here to save me, I knew. No one could do that. But she would be with me here, now, at the end of it all.
Rhyzkahl’s free hand tightened into a fist. “There is no other way,” he said through clenched teeth. As I watched, I felt him detach, his face taking on that icy look I knew so well.
Mzatal’s eyes were deep wells of pain as he shifted his grip on his blade. I felt their blades, knew their blades. Like the first ignition of the columns, the Three should have resonated in harmony. But the rakkuhr spiked the melody, fractured it, punctuating it with bone shuddering disharmonies a hundred times worse than fingernails on a chalkboard.
Eilahn left the lords and moved behind me, took hold of my shoulders. I leaned back against her, deeply grateful for her support. I tipped my head back and looked up at the roiling sky. I never got the chance to say goodbye to so many people. “Please find a way to let my aunt and the others know,” I said to Eilahn. Let them have closure at least. The wind screamed around us, but her chiming came to me even through the noise and discordance, and I knew she’d heard and would do as I asked.
She slid her arms around my shoulders, holding me close to her.
<<Are you sure it’s the right time?>>
A cold touch wound around me, a razor coil of ice.
The two lords exchanged looks that said everything from I fucking hate this to Do it now.