Page 137 of Serpent and Shadow

I also went blind.

Bones had warned me that most invisibility spells rendered their target blind.

I gasped, fighting to see in reflex, but I got hit with another lightning curse. My whole body spasmed and shook, making it impossible to breathe.

Once again, I was rendered silent.

Before I’d recovered in any way, Mordopast muttered another spell, and the sound of my breathing and gasping abruptly died.

I was confused by that at first, more than by the invisibility spell. I wondered if he’d made me deaf, but then I realized I could still hear Norrick’s pained gasps and sobs, Scar’s murmured curses, and Orrin growling he wanted to go first on me.

I could hear all of them.

I just couldn’t hear me.

The reality of what that meant hit me violently, making me fight the spell harder, writhing to get free of it. I couldn’t count on anyone intervening now.

Even if my friends appeared in the vicinity, they wouldn’t be able to see me. If I managed to get free of the curse enough to scream, they wouldn’t hear me, even if I could force my voice and breath to work well enough to scream at all.

Mordopast had made sure that anyone who might look out a window would only see a handful of royals standing in the tall grass. They wouldn’t see they had the school’s only known hybrid with them, and wonder what was going on.

They wouldn’t see me if I got tossed into the river, either.

ALARIC! I screamed into the Aether. BLACKSTONE! LUCIFER! FORSOOTH! Even using my mind hurt, and my magic. The pain was worsening, making it difficult to think. BONES! I screamed, louder. BONES! PLEASE! PLEASE HELP ME! BONES!

No one answered.

I continued screaming into the Aether until I couldn’t any longer.

My chest hurt, I could feel myself starting to lose consciousness from the strain.

I reached up, as high as I could, looking for my sun primal.

I tried to pull some of that magic down. It was a vain hope it might be able to circumvent their lower magics somehow, if only by operating at a different frequency. Blackstone had lectured me on such things before, but other than in that one fight with Malefic in Bones’s room, I hadn’t had much luck in actually using it.

Now, I couldn’t even reach the sun.

I could see it there, burning blue, white, gold, green in the distance. I could sense its presence there, floating in the dark, but I couldn’t get to where it was.

Instead I felt a different presence there, watching me.

It didn’t feel like the sun.

It felt like something else, something strangely still, alien.

It stared down at me, as unmoving and dense as a statue, red eyes burning as it took me in. I felt its awareness of everything around me: the five mages, me on the ground, the spell crushing my heart and lungs, tensing my muscles into severe pain, the burned grass around Norrick, Mordopast’s scorched hair, Norrick still screaming in pain from the bloodfyre curse while Scar patted him on the shoulder and assured him they’d pay me back for it.

Please, I thought at the presence. It felt dangerous to speak to it, but it also felt like I had no choice. It was the only thing there. It was the only thing that had answered my screams into the dark. Please. Can you help me?

I remembered Forsooth’s words about divinities.

They were gods, essentially.

I fought to think, to reason through this.

Was this a god? Was it the thing that powered my sun?

Or was it something else?