The power has ideas of its own about what we should do. It tugs my mind towards the Palador Mountains, towards the Green Sea. It beckons me to Avaris, to where the temple once stood.
But it doesn’t demand. When I defy it and reach somewhere else entirely, it bends to my will.
I wield the power and trace a path over the Wastes, climbing over the city walls of Faros like they’re nothing. There, I find the Alchemists’ Guild, its ancient walls nothing more than lines in the sands of time, penetrable and impermanent, like all things made by human hands. I reach through them, ducking through hallways and passing through barriers erected by magic, until I find a phoenix, frozen in time like everything else is at this moment.
But when I look at it, gazing at it with the power, it gazes back.
“What is that?” Ronan asks, but the second he asks the question, he knows the answer.
He knows because I know, and we are one.
“Yes,” he says, knowing what I’m going to do. “We’ll find another way.”
The power recognizes a fragment of itself. It responds urgently as I call to it, crumbling the ceiling of the Guild above the phoenix, breaking through floor after floor until there’s a path for it to escape. It doesn’t move—it can’t yet—but it’s free.
This is what the power is in our hands.
It’s freedom.
“The land,” says Ronan, and he sweeps out over the Machair Wastes that surround Avaris. The wasteland his father made. “Fire and flood.”
Ronan reaches down into the earth. The power shakes the land as he finds something red-hot and molten deep beneath the surface.
The moment I wonder what he’s doing, the answer appears in my mind like my own memory, Ronan’s thoughts as much a part of me as I am part of his.
I see a vision of an island mountain on fire, hot smoke and ash pouring out as a river of lava trails down its side. In the land to the east, a farm flourishes. An old man in a straw hat bends down to talk to the young Ronan of the memory, telling him not to fear the fire. Explaining that the ash is life; the dark soil it leaves behind gives life to the land.
A memory of a trip to Enez as a child and a wish Ronan carried for years, looking out at the slumbering Palador Mountains. If there were only a way to bring them back to life.
Looking directly down at the hilltop of Avaris, I see it finally for what it truly is: a crater, the sides worn away by wind and rain until the surface flattened. Ronan pulls the power throughlayer after layer of rock until he finally reaches the collapsed tomb of Queen Julia and Leander.
He pauses, sensing my desire.
I take hold of the power and free their burial vaults, carrying them to the mausoleum in Dalven where they were meant to be all along. Then I give back the reins, and Ronan breaks the ground of the temple open.
Lava bursts forth in a fiery spray, the red sky above churning as smoke and ash fill the air. The mountain bellows, raining its hellfire of destruction and renewal into the lands to the south.
But the soil there is still tainted, a corrupt magic clinging deep to it. “Flood,” I say. We must wash the poison from the soil to allow the ash to take hold.
I call forth the storm that lingers over Faros, bringing the rain above the Wastes and flooding them. The rain pours and pours, one hundred years of rain falling in mere moments. The stormwater surges and crashes in waves, surrounding the spewing volcano as hot bursts of steam fill the air where molten rock strikes the surface.
The floodwaters spiral around Avaris, a whirlpool of magic beyond anything the world has ever known.
This is it. This is the end of days. We hold hands and look down at the apocalypse we’ve created, feeling what the power would allow us to do.
It wants us to cleanse the earth with the waters we’ve made, to sweep them across the land, across Selara and the world beyond. To surge the seas and wipe the slate clean. To start over fresh, to rebuild the world beyond the mess we’ve made of it.
We realize now why the prophecy resurfaced during our time. We sit at an inflection point in history, a moment where the world will turn towards redemption or destruction, and the gods have chosen us to decide the answer.
The power urges, but it does not order.
“It chose us for a reason,” I say, finally truly believing Ronan’s words.
Because while the gods may deal in absolutes—life and death, light and dark, the beginning and the end—we are the spectrum of things in between.
There is another path here, one we both see. A path where we guide the waters along the Mara into the sea, diluting the land’s poison until it can no longer harm anyone, sparing Selara. A path where we allow the mountain of Avaris to churn but shelter the people from its smoke, and when it has given back to the soil, put it back to sleep once more.
A path where we give up the chance to crush our enemies, where we give them a chance to make a different choice. Where we give them the freedom to decide their own fate instead of deciding it for them.
