Page 85 of The Silversmith

“But we have at least a week.” I pulled away and met his gaze with hopeful eyes. “We still need to go to Brinnea. And I haven’t found my power. Surely Simeon can’t send me to Elias until I find whatever it is they’re counting on, so you can stay with me until I find it, can’t you?”

His breath quickened, his eyes darted between my eyes and my mouth. “Aryella, I—”

The ground rumbled beneath us, and an energy that I could only describe as alive reverberated through my core.

To our right, fire, smoke, and screams erupted into a terrible cloud of destruction.

A booming shock wave right in the heart of Tovick as the temple began to crumble.

Chapter twenty-one

By some miracle—driven by fear—I was on my feet quicker than he was, though he was close behind. The shock wave lasted only for a second, but I felt the wall of pressure absorb the oxygen around us like an inferno’s eclipse.

As if hell itself had reached up through the center of that temple, ripped out its heart, and sucked the life and air back into the earth.

I stumbled through the trees, down the rocky hill, toward the temple so close to the tavern where my friends—

My eyes burned. My pace increased.

My friends.

“Gemma!” I screamed, scrambling onto the cobblestone path.

Ash polluted the air. I coughed but sprinted through the airborne embers, not caring if they burned me. It would be a blessing from the gods if, just like the day Ezra and I had been there, the temple was empty at the time of the blast.

I watched in horror as flames roared inside the temple. Rainbow stained glass shattered and boulders of stone crumbled as heat expanded and cut down the majestic house of worship. Mothers grabbed their children from the streets and stumbled back from the collapsing splendor, screaming.

“Help!”

I turned toward the source of the scream.

“Please! My boy, my boy!” A short brown-haired woman kneeled in rock and shards of glass and ash as she cradled the limp form of a small boy.

I ran to them and knelt down on the boy’s other side. He was four, maybe five, with sandy-brown hair and freckles. Too sweet and innocent for this mess of a world. Collateral in a war fought by selfish people wanting power.

A strained whimper left my throat at the sight of a deep gash across the boy’s collarbone where he’d been licked by fire and struck with debris. It was deep—too deep, and near his throat. Blood pooled beneath him, the puddle growing.

The face of another little boy flashed in my mind.

I choked out a sob and impulsively lunged forward to cover the little boy’s wound with my hands. Through my tears, I begged the gods for mercy. Whatever they had to do, whatever parts of me they had to take, I begged for what I hadn’t been able to stop a year ago.

I begged for Ollie.

“Please,” I wept, squeezing my eyes shut. “Please, please, please—”

Dread gripped me by the throat, air was torn from my lungs, and for a moment, I was floating. Glimmering onyx swirled in every direction. Ropes of void-like darkness snaked around my wrists and ankles, holding me somewhere where gravity couldn’t exist.

Until I was dropped into the center of a twelve-spoked wheel.

Sharp pain burst up and through my ankles at the force of impact. I stumbled and winced, bracing myself with my palms on the ground, forcing myself to breathe in, out, as I opened my eyes to take in my surroundings.

Time stood still, and the Temple of the Selvaren surrounded me. Only now, Ezra wasn’t with me. Neither were the assailants that Gavin had slayed. And Gavin… I couldn’t see him, but I could feel him there, somewhere, anchoring me to the present.

But the temple had just crumbled, so… this had to be all in my head.

The hall of worship trembled around me, as did each colorful shrine, and I began to spin. No, they did. Each spoke of the wheel was connected to one of the twelve gods, and while my feet remained plastered in the middle of a small silver circle, the wheel drove the room clockwise around me. Faster and faster until the colors blurred into a violent, iridescent tempest.

Fear prickled the base of my spine. It was spinning too fast. The small silver disc I stood on couldn’t possibly hold. It was going to crack, rip the wheel off its axis until each spoke was thrust outwards to impale and shatter the stained-glass shrine of each god. And I would be launched up, away, back into the shadows of the suffocating purgatory that brought me here.