With a shock I realized that it was my gift. My gift was gone. The magic that had been mine to command was gone.
I risked a glance back over my shoulder as we passed through the thick, hazy air of the Sink. I saw Greystone riding as fast as he could along the outer rim of the white sand that marked the Sink’s boundary. Many of the Shadows had wheeled away to pursue him, but by far the greater part of their number was following us. I watched them enter the Sink, many of them reeling and beginning to cry out and claw at their faces.
But this was not the great barrier. Despite the pain and disorientation, they kept coming. Their feet pounded across the white-stoned road with alarming speed. They were losing ground, but not by much.
I turned to Nora beside me and shouted, “How much farther?”
She shouted back at me in an unintelligible gibberish.
“What?” I shouted.
She pointed at her mouth. Oh, right, I realized. We couldn’t understand them any more.
Instead I looked ahead, trying to peer around the riders before me to see if I could spy the other side of the Sink. Fortunately, it was easy to spot. A mile ahead of us now, green grass suddenly sprung up again from the sand as though the different types of ground were sharply divided by a knife. We were careening toward it at a breakneck pace. In the center of the green grass within stood the temple: an unassuming building of white-grey stone that stretched skyward like grasping hands seeking to brush the face of the sun.
I turned to Blade, who rode right behind me. “Greystone said not to enter all at once!” I shouted.
“Little late for that now!” he called back.
We burst through the other side of the Sink and into the green grass, the blue sky, the thin air of the land around the temple.
I felt something.
What the —
Is this —
How am I —
Shadows —
I reeled in my saddle, my mind awash with sensation. I couldn’t tell which way was down. Was there a down? Or was I floating? I was being pulled in too many different directions for there to be a down. Or an up.
One of the myriad of sensations pouring through my mind felt the slam of hard-packed ground into my back. Into a back. I had too many backs.
What is this? I thought. Did I?
One of the sensations, one of the ones that seemed more insistent than the others, was that my head was being cracked open like a walnut. The pounding in my ears drowned out the sound of everything around me.
I looked up and caught sight of Blade. He was still on top of his horse, but he was no longer running. He was sitting atop his horse, looking at his hands. His face was bewildered.
Then I was looking down at myself, and my hand was in front of my face. Blade’s hand. Blade’s face.
It feels so…so weird, I thought, Blade thought, someone. I feel so…so powerful. It’s like the fire is in my veins. Someone turned my hand, turned Blade’s hand over to inspect every side of it.
Am I FLYING?
The new shout hit me like a ton of bricks and tore my mind away from Blade’s. I looked down at thin Realm Keeper’s robes with a white belt.
My boots, Calvin’s boots, were six feet off the ground.
Okay, hold on, let’s not jump to conclusions, let’s just check. I’m definitely in the air. But am I flying, or just floating? Is anyone else floating? No, no one else is floating. Just me. Not even my horse. So that’s a good sign. But can I control it? If I reach out like thisOH MY GOD I’M FLYING I’M SO TOTALLY FLYING. Wait. One more test before I say anything, I just want to beI’M FREAKING FLYING! HOLY NUTS!
“I’m freaking flying!” screamed my mouth, Calvin’s mouth dozens of feet away. “Holy nuts!”
I heard a tiny shout, like someone yelling at the back of a crowd and trying to get my attention. I listened, and as I focused on it I felt myself slide from Calvin’s mind. I was still there. I still saw what he saw, but my consciousness moved elsewhere.
Out of Calvin’s head, it was easier to hear the shout.
Are you all right?
I’m all right. Am I all right? I responded. No, that’s not correct. Are you all right?
Pull your muddling, infantile thoughts together and focus!
Oh, I thought. It’s you, Greystone.
Well, who else would it be, you dim-witted jackanape of a child? Greystone’s voice in my head was now as loud as a shout, now that I was focused on him. You are unfortunately my only link to within the Sink, and so I need you to raise your lazy bones and tell me what is happening!
I didn’t even know. Then I thought about it, and suddenly I did. The others were my eyes and ears. I didn’t even need to get up off the grass. I could see every action, every movement on the field from a dozen pairs of eyes.
And the Shadows had nearly reached our side of the Sink.
Oh, I said idly. It looks like the Shadows are almost here.
What? roared Greystone. Do something! Stop them!
What should I do? I wondered, genuinely perplexed.
What have I been teaching you since the moment your cursed hides arrived in this realm? Despite a distinct lack of spittle in telepathy, Greystone managed to spit the words. You must rally the others, now!
Well, if he was going to be so rude about it. Slowly I pushed my body to my feet — my body, I was pretty sure, since I hadn’t reached out and moved any of the others yet — and turned to Sarah.
“Hey, so, the Shadows,” I said, pointing in the direction of the Sink.
Sarah’s head snapped up from where she’d gleefully been holding her hands up, twisting the ground beneath her for a dozen yards. She, like most of the others, had dismounted, and was marveling at the power that we all felt coursing through our minds. Now she looked at me like someone who’d woken her from an amazing dream.
Then she looked up, and her eyes grew hard.
Cara rode up behind her. All the Runegard had kept riding for a few dozen yards, stopping once they realized that we were no longer fleeing behind them.
“Runegard!” cried Cara. “Spread out and surround the Realm Keepers!”
“No!” said Sarah. “Get back!”
Cara’s head whipped toward her, not used to being countermanded.
“Back up,” Sarah said. “It’s…our power here. Trust me. You’ll only get in the way.”
I could see the clench in Cara’s jaw as she forced herself to nod and step backward. But she did not sheathe her sword.
Sarah looked at me. I looked at me, looking at Sarah, looked at Blade, Miles, Calvin, looked at all of us looking at each other.
“You guys feel it, right?” Sarah asked. “You’re ready?”
“Oh my God, you have no idea,” said Blade, turning to the Sink.
“That goes double for me,” said Miles.
Greystone’s fine, by the way, I said.
Sarah’s head snapped to me. “What did you — ”
The Shadows emerged from the Sink.
The others told me later that in a weird, objective way, it was actually kind of hilarious. Like, they shouldn’t have found it funny, but thinking about watching it from above, it was hard not to see it that way.
Apparently as soon as they emerged, Blade raised a wall of fire that stretched thirty feet high and was so hot it singed Calvin’s eyebrows clean off, even though he was only about five feet closer to the wall than the rest of us. Miles drew water from nothing out of the air, turning it into ice and crushing the Shadows, turning it into steam and searing the Shadows, turning it into tidal waves and sweeping them away. Calvin summoned tornadoes and gale force storms. Raven rained sheets of lightning upon them from the sky. Sarah opened great rents and canyons in the earth, and the Shadows were swallowed up within them with wails and gnashing fangs.
Apparently the Shadows retreated back within the Sink. Blade sent a fireball at them to chase them away, but once it reached the white sand it vanished into nothingness. No flash, no puff of steam,
it just wasn’t any more.
Apparently the others stood there in a sort of uneasy standoff, waiting for the Shadows to emerge. Apparently the Shadows waited for the others to retreat so they could swarm forward from the Sink once more.
Apparently Sarah simply ripped up a great chunk of the earth, something about half the size of a football field, and flung it through the air at them. Apparently the Shadows barely had time to scream in hatred before the massive plate of earth and stone crushed them all into oblivion.
But I say apparently, because as soon as the Shadows emerged from the Sink for the first time, my world threatened to end.
Minds.
Barely minds. They barely had minds. They had vague shadows of thoughts. What they had a lot of was emotion. But no pleasant emotions, no happiness, no love, no excitement. They hungered. They hated. They hunted. They fought and scratched and bit and wanted to tear me apart limb from limb.
And suddenly I was in all of their heads, in all of their heads, feeling it. I saw what they saw. I saw my own body standing there and I wanted to tear it apart with my teeth. I wanted to hack it apart with my rusted blade.
I saw the body fall to the ground, clutching its eyes and screaming.
But the tiny sliver of myself that was still in there, the part of me that was still Tess, saw something else. It saw the Shadows’ thoughts. And those thoughts were reaching to the North and to the West.
It was hard, but I tried to focus on why. I tried to see why so many of them were thinking in that direction — not even looking, just thinking.
Slowly I remembered my training. Slowly I brought my thoughts into focus. I thought harder and harder about nothing, about the endless nothingness in the center of my mind, of the point that existed in space and had no size and the size of the entire universe within it.
Slowly my thoughts became my own again. And as soon as they did, everything clicked into place. Rather than a thousand loudspeakers screaming into my mind, the Shadows and the Runegard and the others became a background buzz. No, more than a background buzz. It was like they were plugged into me. It was like I was still seeing everything they were seeing, feeling everything they were feeling, but now it was feeding my mind rather than cluttering it.
Time seemed to slow to a crawl. My every thought was processed by a thousand minds and snapped back at me faster than I could handle it.
I stood and I opened my eyes. The world was bathed in white fog, and in the fog I could see the bright lights that were my friends. I also saw the sea of blackness that yet threatened to overwhelm them.
But the light was overcoming the dark. The light was driving the darkness back. They were slowly fading away, fading into the Sink where I could no longer see them.
And so I tried again to find out why so many of the Shadows were thinking of the Northwest.
That’s when I found the army. The real army, the bulk of the Shadows that had attacked Linsfell.
I slowly rose off the ground, not forcefully but fluidly. My arms stretched out to my sides as I hovered ten feet off the ground and turned to the Northwest.
The army was sweeping in at us from over the hills. Together, my friends were driving back an army of a thousand. But the army that was now emerging from the other side of the Sink stood at three times that number.
As they came from the Sink, I felt their minds connect with my own, strengthening it. I looked through their eyes. I saw them crest the hills overlooking our battle. I saw five hundred archers enter from the Sink and stop, each of them drawing an arrow and nocking them. I saw the other Shadows begin to charge across the hundreds of yards of grass toward me and my friends, silent as sharks, coming upon them unawares. The others were too distracted by the threat before them to notice the threat sneaking up from behind.
In the excruciating slowness of the world around me, I processed all of it. I saw everything, and I knew what would happen next. The Shadows would sweep in. They would overwhelm us. They would be too close to fight. And once they had killed us, the rest of Terrence’s army would march on Morrowdust like a vengeful storm. The great barrier would fall, Midrealm soon after, then Earth, my family, mama, papa, and Kellyn and Nikki.
I was back in my own head.
A cloud of silent arrows cut the air above us. I felt them arcing down, preparing to lance down among our bodies.
I screamed a wordless scream of raw power. I know there were words in it, but I couldn’t have told you what they were. The slowness of the world came to a near stop.
My mind reached for the arrows. Normally when I moved an object with my mind, it was like reaching out with a mental hand. But not this time. I stopped picturing a hand. I just grabbed them. Stopped them all in midair.
I could see every part of them, every molecule, every atom, every fiber holding them together. With a blink of my eyes I turned them to dust and scattered their substance to the winds; it drifted away on a faint breeze.
Time was still of minuscule movement. The Shadows were all but frozen in their charge, legs mid-stride, arms mid-swing. The hatred on their black faces was easy to see. The archers were frozen, reaching for arrows for their second volley. A volley to kill my friends.
White-hot rage erupted within me, and I screamed again.
The world sped back up. And just as Sarah flung a mass of rock into the Shadows cowering within the Sink, and Blade had turned and seen the army flanking us, I clapped my hands in the air before my face.
A shockwave ripped out of me, accompanied by a deep resonating BOOM! It punched through the air like a massive fist, nearly bowling my friends from their feet.
But when the shockwave hit the shadows, it was like a million blades. It rippled through them like a scythe through chaff, and where they had been, only black smoked existed. The shockwave rippled up the hill, and in seconds the army disappeared.
I closed my eyes and let out a calming breath. Slowly, I floated back toward the ground.
“Wha…what was that?” Blade asked. He looked up the empty hill where just a second ago, thousands of Shadows had stood ready to kill us all. Behind him, Raven landed on Ella’s back and dismounted.
Calvin was staring at me with wide eyes. More than awe, I saw fear in them. I felt it in his mind as well. I heard his terrified thoughts.
What happened?
I turned off to look into the distance. “It’s done,” I said. “We’re safe.”
There was some grumbling, then I heard Greystone’s relieved voice. When I heard your mind, I grew worried.
“We’re safe,” I repeated. Then I turned back to the others.
Miles turned to look in the direction I’d been looking. “Who were you talking to?” he asked.
“Greystone.”
Miles did a double-take.
“You can speak to him from this far away?” Calvin said.
I shrugged. It must be something with the space around the temple. But it’s over now. Everyone froze. Let’s just get this over with. I turned and began to walk toward the temple, still looming over us, unmoved and uncaring.
“What…? Um…” stammered Calvin.
I stopped and turned, looking at all of them. “What?”
“Tess…” said Sarah cautiously. “I just heard you.”
“I just spoke to you,” I said.
“No,” said Blade. He was the only one who wasn’t staring at me with something like fear on his face. Blade was smirking instead, arms folded like a proud coach. “We heard you up here.” He tapped his temple.
“Oh,” I said in a small voice. Then, Oh.
“Yeah, like that,” he said. Can you hear me?
I laughed suddenly. “Yes, I can! Wow!”
He chuckled.
Calvin’s head was whipping back and forth so fast, I thought it was going to snap off. “What? What’s happening?”
“Nothing, we’re just out-geeking you,” Blade said.
“Never mind,” I said. “Come on. We’ve got a job to do.”
“And then we’ve got to get home,” Sarah said, suddenly coming to her senses. She strode to the front of us. The horses had long since scattered, what with all the fire, lightning and other magic being thrown around. “Come on.”
The Temple of Garidon was an unassuming place. It was shaped vaguely like a pyramid with four sides, but that resemblance ended with the tapering point. There were wide stairways leading up each of its sides, each of them disappearing into an alcove. Despite looking quite imposing, it wasn’t actually that big. Sarah led the way up thirty steps, then waited at the entrance for the rest of us to catch up.
At the top of the steps, a massive stone doorway blocked further progress. It looked designed to slide out of the way, but there was no way we could push it.
“Can you move that, cuz?” asked Calvin, pointing at the door. He was still flying in the air, about three feet off the ground.
Sarah looked at him. “Calvin, get back on the ground.”
“To be totally honest, I don’t know how,” he said. “I could probably figure it out, but there is nothing I want to do less in all the world right now.”
Sarah rolled her eyes and reached out a hand toward the stone. It didn’t move. She frowned and tried harder, her brow twisting in concentration. Still nothing.
Sarah shrugged. “No dice. Tess, you want to give it a shot?”
I looked at her in shock. “Me? Why?”
Sarah shrugged. “You can move anything you want to.”
“Yeah, plus, apparently you’re like some kind of freaking demi-god,” said Miles in a quiet tone of voice.
I looked at him nervously. “What? No I’m not. It’s just…this place. It makes me feel…powerful.”
Miles’ mouth twisted. “Tess, I feel powerful. I feel like I could lift a lake right now. What you did…that’s more than powerful. That was nuts.”
Sarah cut him off with a wave. “Come on, guys. We’re on a timetable here. Tess, give it a try.”
I felt with my mind. It was funny: I was so in tune with my gift that I didn’t even feel the need to reach out with my hand.
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