“Ronan!”
I’m flying forward, my feet off the ground, my arms grasping at nothing, when Ronan reaches me with the new power, the light and shadow tendrils pulling me back to him.
“We’ve got to get Seth and Quinn,” I say once I’m back on solid ground. I reach out to them, finding them running down the hall towards us, the flame traps broken by the earthquake.
“Stay there!” shouts Ronan, his voice echoing towards them as they appear in the doorway.
“It’s blocked!” yells Quinn. “The way ahead is blocked.”
“Fuck!”
We race to the top of the ramp to join them, the four of us looking frantically for an exit. Several chunks of rock have fallen from above, but there’s only a single narrow shaft of light visible near the roof. It’s dozens of feet in the air from us, completely unreachable.
“There’s nothing down there? No way out?” asks Seth, pointing down to the platform.
“No,” says Ronan. “No way out.”
“What about that extraordinary power you were supposed to get? Did you get it?” asks Quinn.
“Yes, but it’s…I don’t know.” I have no idea what it can do. It’s our powers combined, but it’s also something beyond that. I’m just not sure exactly what.
Ronan’s eyebrows furrow. “If the prophecy is true, if there’s no way to prevent it, then we don’t die here. We can’t die here. We’ve already seen the future.”
“Excuse me. What?” says Quinn.
Seth whispers quietly to me, “What the fuck was down there?”
“Not now.”
Ronan closes his eyes and reaches out into the space with the new power, a pulse of light and shadow flowing outward in acircle. “There,” he says, leading us down the ramp a short way to a crack in one of the side walls. “Help me, Sylvie.”
I reach out with the power and understand what he means. The wall is thin here. If we punch through it, we’ll be in a chamber that leads outside.
It feels strange to know that. It sounds like something Larus would say. It’s almost like having earth magic, but that can’t be right.
Ronan forces the power into the crack, and I join him with mine. The rock shudders, chipping and shaking until finally shattering, opening a hole large enough to climb through.
“What thefuck,” says Quinn.
“Go,” says Ronan, pointing to Seth. “Help Quinn through, and then we’ll join you.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see the shadow of a rock falling right where Seth is heading.
I stop it with the power, flinging it harmlessly below.
Holyfuck.
This power, the way it feels, the way I feel, the waywefeel.
It feels unstoppable. Inevitable.
It feels like the end of the world.
So much so that when we race through the side cavern and emerge onto the hillside above Avaris, I expect the sky to be red and filled with fire.
But it isn’t, not all of it at least. The part of it directly to the west is going red as the sun slips behind the mountains, but to the east the sky is a cloudless blue.
The ground beneath us shakes.
