Screaming through the pain, Elyria fully thrust her right hand into the blaze and wrapped it around Cedric’s forearm. It hurt. Badly. The flames gnawed at her skin. She bit down hard on the inside of her lip, tasting blood, in an attempt to distract from the pain.
But still, she held on, her fingers digging into him as he tried to pull away, thrashing to dislodge her. With a gasping breath, she summoned her shadows, letting them flow from her hand, wisps of smoke that coiled around him.
Shadows twisted with his fire, wrapping him in a blanket of cooling darkness. One heartbeat or a hundred could have passed as Elyria and Cedric stood there, entwined.
Flame and wild, shadow and sun.
Inch by inch, the raging inferno subsided until only smoldering embers remained, flickering weakly beneath his skin.
Little by little, the shadows—hershadows—smothered the flames.
Elyria’s legs buckled, her power dissipating into the ether. Cedric fell with her, their arms still intertwined, their bodies crumpling together, limp and empty.
For a minute they lay there in the middle of the room, chests heaving, eyes wide with shock. Cedric was pale as a ghost, his clothing in tatters, all color drained from his face. His entire body trembled.
Still shaking herself, Elyria ignored the pain blazing up her right arm and reached for his hand with her uninjured one. “You’re all right. I’ve got you,” she said, deja vu washing through her.
Painstakingly, as if it required every iota of focus and concentration he possessed, Cedric nodded. Together, they got to their feet, each leaning on the other as they staggered to a bench along one side of the chamber. Zephyr and Kit tittered around them, unsure as to how they might best help.
Elyria wished they would all step back, step away. He needed aminute. They just needed a minute.
Cedric’s voice was raw, his head hung low as he rasped, “What am I?”
Elyria didn’t know how to answer that. She was wondering the very same thing herself.
41
SCARS
CEDRIC
Cedric saton the stone bench, elbows on his knees, his hands scrubbing his face. He could feel Elyria at his side, silence stretching between them, a strain in her typically irreverent presence that he knew was only there because of him. She was stretched tighter than a drawn bowstring.
He knew the feeling.
His chest still ached—not from the flames. They were long gone at this point, fizzled out in the time he’d spent sitting here, silent, still, after his...combustion. It ached from the memory, though, of the heat that had consumed him from the inside out, that had burst from him so uncontrollably that he knew he might have very well burned the entire Sanctum down had Elyria not beenable to stop him.
He rubbed at his chest, his fingers bunching the black fabric of his tunic, as though he could sense the fire smoldering just underneath. Absently, he thought about what a shame it would be to ruin yet another set of clothing.
A clang echoed across the chamber, drawing Cedric’s focus to the other four champions. Kit and Zephyr had made a hasty retreat to the other side of the room when Elyria, fed up with their hovering after they’d tended to her wounds, issued a reprimand sharp enough to have taken their heads clean off. Now they sat with Thraigg, who appeared to be in the middle of telling some tale—quite animatedly, from the way he was gesticulating with his hammer.
Half-covered in shadows, Nox sat a few paces away, sipping from a bronze goblet. Brow furrowed, their eyes flitted between Cedric and Elyria, as if the two of them were a puzzle they were trying to piece together.
Thraigg’s story must have ended, because suddenly all Cedric could hear was the soft hum of magic layered with Zephyr and Kit’s hushed voices. His ears pricked at the sound of his name, barely loud enough for him to hear.
“Is Cedric all right?” Kit asked.
He felt like he should be the one to answer the question, to tell her that of course he was. And of course he wasn’t. But both responses stayed stuck in his throat, tangled and muddy.
“There are different kinds of injuries,” Zephyr said after a moment, her voice layered with an emotion Cedric couldn’t place. “Not all of them are so easily healed. Some leave scars long after all signs of the wounds themselves have faded.”
They lapsed back into silence.
Pulling his hands from his face, Cedric stared into his open palms. They looked so...ordinary. He flexed his fingers, half-expecting fire to burst from his hands, but nothing happened. There was just that tingle under his skin, the smoldering embers of magic somehowinhim, a furnace he had no idea how to extinguish.
What was that?
What washe?
