I forgot to be afraid of my magic for a full three seconds.
“What the fuck is it?” I whispered.
Nicco said nothing. He was looking at the column with the expression I'd seen on the ridge, that careful, considered lookthat wasn't surprise. If he'd been told to expect something, he hadn't been told it would look like this.
I took a step toward it.
His hand closed around my arm. Not roughly. Just firmly, the same way he'd stopped me from walking into the tunnel mouth above.
“No,” he said.
“I wasn't going to touch it.”
“You were absolutely going to touch it.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Maybe he wasn't wrong. My hand had already been rising.
“What is it?” I asked again.
He was quiet for a long moment, studying the column, the veins of color, the pulse of light that moved through it in slow, regular waves.
“I don't know exactly,” he said. I believed him because Nicco never admitted he didn’t know things. He simply glossed over them.
“But you do know something,” I said.
He turned his head. Looked at me sideways in the light of the moonstone. “I know it's what we came to find.”
“Whatyoucame to find. You, Larana, and Baxley? Not the soldiers.” He didn’t answer, and I took it as a yes. “And now that you've found it?”
He looked back at the column. The pulse moved through it, outward, and I felt it in my chest like an echo, not pulling anymore, just resonating. Two things vibrating at the same frequency.
“Now,” he said, “I need to think about what to do next.”
He stepped back, and I didn't follow, and we stood in the dark at the edge of that vast space and looked at the thing in the center of it, and I became certain of two things simultaneously.
The first was that whatever this was, it was alive. Not in any way I had words for, but alive. The second was thatit knew I was here.
Not Nicco, or the moonstone.Mespecifically. The way a fire knows when something flammable gets too close. It wasn’t thought, or intention, just theknowledgeof it. The recognition.
I pressed my fingers hard against my sternum.
My magic pressed back.
“Nicco,” I said quietly. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. I certainly didn’t want this man to know, but I was deep underground, and the thing that was down here with us? It’d been waiting. I needed him to know because I didn’t know what was happening.
Or if I could stop it if it decided to do anything.
“I see it,” he said.
I looked at him sharply. His eyes were on my hand, resting against my chest. He looked up and met my gaze, and neither of us said anything.
The column pulsed between us, slow and patient and entirely indifferent to the fact that it could have just changed everything.
“You good?” Nicco asked quietly. He reached for me and pulled me closer, and I didn’t protest as I settled beside him.
“I don't know exactly.” I meant it. “You were told to expect this?” I tried to change the subject.
He was very still for a moment. “No.”
