Jatin looks at the bubbling earth, then swivels and sees me. The look on his face makes me want to cry. Those eyes hold both the torture of my death and the euphoria of my revival. Beyond any doubt, in this moment I know he loves me as much as I love him. I can’t hear him over the roar of destruction, but I know what he is saying. He is yelling my name.
I’ve resigned to die on this volcano if that’s what it takes. For the first time in my life no voice holds me back, saying,Careful, you are the future raja.Maybe because in this moment I am a raja, and this is what I was meant to do—protect my country.
I know it’s also the grief, consuming me, pushing me.Adraa…is…gone,my mind rattles, both unaccepting and inconsolable. But I won’t die before I know this is over, that I have stopped Mount Gandhak from killing anyone else’s Adraa. That means facing this thing, climbing up to the mouth and casting inside the belly.
I yell out freeze spells like never before. I unleash my anger, my pain, on this force of nature. It is just like me, exploding, bleeding its heart out. But something’s wrong. This eruption is unlike that of a normal volcano, or at least what I assume to be a normal volcano. Pressure points arise throughout the landscape, as if the power of this thing seeks any crack in the earth to blast open. From what I can tell, the true monster has yet to blow, and yet the explosions and mounds of lava keep coming in bloodred geysers, and I keep casting.
A glint of red smoke soaks into the ground, and I turn. The earth chokes back an explosion that might have killed me. Ash cascading, heat soaking, thunder roaring, within it all Adraa’s ghost emerges through the firestorm. She stands meters away with a hand raised as if she has just finished a spell.
A sob rocks my body in one heave.Have I gone completely mad? Yes, yes, I have.And yet this is a happy madness if she is here. I’m okay with whatever realm my mind has escaped to if it means Adraa and I can be together again. I’ve never wanted anything more in my life than for her to be real, for this not to be a mirage created by my grief and volcanic fumes.
“Adraa?” I scream. “Adraa!”
We run to each other as best we can through the minefield of boulders, gas, and lava.
And then her body slams into mine. She’s in my arms. She feels real, so real. I can’t stop touching her, squeezing her, feeling her hugging me back.
“Are you real?” I whisper.
“What kind of question is that? Of course I’m real.”
“I thought, I thought…” The agony and joy of knowing I haven’t lost her suffocates and fuels my lungs at the same time.
I cup her face and stare into her fiery eyes.
“I won’t be late again,” she says with a smile.
“How? How are you here?”
“I’ll tell you later. We need to stop this.”
A burst of heat ripples up my back, which means only one thing. Lava. Without thinking I cast an ice shield and tuck Adraa behind me. She has a similar thought, and puffs of smoke explode around the two of us, shielding us further.
“It’s my firelight!” she yells.
“What do you mean?”
She points toward the top of Mount Gandhak. “The Vencrin or Moolek or both of them, whoever, they put my firelightintoMount Gandhak. That’s why they were stealing it. That’s why Mount Gandhak is erupting.”
Those bastards!Were they willing to destroy us all? I want to ask how she knows this, but that doesn’t matter right now. After weeks of working on the streets, we still hadn’t discovered this plan, and now it’s blowing up in front of our faces. I’d promised her we would find out what was happening to her firelight. We failed.
With Adraa by my side, safe and well, a part of me wants to grab her and run. We could still escape this. Both of our cities would die, but she and I would live. I would have her.
Adraa looks at me and I know she can read my hesitation. “Jatin, we are the only ones who can do this.”
She’s right. Gods, she’s right.
“Tuhinadloc!”I holler, and cold white magic releases from my arms, creating a large sheet of frost at our feet.
We climb. I pave the way in a sheet of ice and snow. Adraa extinguishes the heat on either side of us. The past month of fighting together has taught us well. If I sweep low, she covers the sky. We work in rings like in a fight. Our mission is to cool the ground in front of us and then proceed, step by step.
“How exactly does your firelight make this any different from a normal eruption?” I yell.
“If we don’t stop it, Mount Gandhak will continue to blow for two months.”
My stomach drops out from under me. Two bloody months. “How do we stop it?”
“I don’t know. Let’s get to the top and try to force it. If you cool it from the inside and I work to release all the gas, it might work.”
