Page 112 of Demon of the Dead


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Náli took a deep breath of his own and folded up his elbow, a wad of cotton batting pressed tight to the cut he’d made to stem the blood flow. He felt lightheaded, and didn’t know if it was blood loss or nerves; maybe a bit of both. “For now.” With his free hand, he set the silver bowl in the center of the parchment and dipped his forefinger inside. “I’ll need each of your foreheads.”

They leaned toward him, and he traced the necessary runes there on their brows. The last rune he drew on his own forehead, the blood hot and slick on his skin. All of them together, their circle read: The blood of the living shall welcome the blood of the dead. Old words, first spoken in the wild days of nomadic clans; words that tasted like fire and magic on the tongue. He had context, now; could imagine Lucian’s father, wild but beautiful, pale and austere, kneeling before the lovely, elfin woman brimming with all the magic that would grace the continent for centuries to come.

His pulse quickened, as he gathered the diamonds, and slipped them one by one into the bowl of blood. “The blood of the living shall welcome the blood of the dead,” he said aloud, in the old language. “I am the keeper of the Fault Lands, and the dead shall keep me.” They were only words, but they sent chills skittering across his skin like always. The back of his neck tightened and prickled. Only words…but they stirred the air around him, tugged at the pit of his stomach, the dead already reaching for him.

Ripples shuddered out across the surface of the blood in the bowl; the diamonds danced and clinked against the bottom.

“Gods,” Danski murmured.

“I’m going to cross over now.” He closed his eyes and felt himself slipping already; swore he felt the weight of the water crushing him. He’d never done this on dry land before, but he’d learned a valuable lesson when Valgrind ferried him across last time. The drake breathed cold air against his neck, now, trilling and chittering. Náli reached up and gripped one of his horns. “Valgrind will help you across when it’s time,” he said, with no idea if that was possible. He had to trust that it was; he had to loosen his chokehold on his magic and flow with it, let it carry him.

“Wait for me,” he said, as bright white light swelled behind his closed eyelids. “I’ll send for you.”

The light flared, blasted white and ice-cold throughout his body; filled his lungs and froze his limbs and choked him, choked him, squeezed him–

He gasped and opened his eyes to a cool, dim space that smelled of wet stone and wood smoke.

He took a moment to catch his breath and marvel at the ease of his crossing. He realized he was grinning: he’d done it! Closed his eyes and slipped straight into a meditative state and across the veil. No well, no drake towing him.

“Heh,” he said, chuckling quietly to himself. He was getting stronger.

“You made that look easy,” a familiar voice said.

He was seated cross-legged on the ground, just as he was back in his body, and twisted around to see Lucian step around a corner and into view. He appeared as he had last time, with his hair clean and shining and his cheeks clean-shaven, startlingly like the portrait of Náli’s father hanging above the mantel in the dining room.

He looked haggard, though; worn and tired, and too pale. Náli marked a certain blurriness about his edges, as if he were an apparition begun to fade.

“Easier than before,” Náli said, as he sat down across from him and mimicked his pose.

“It’s those.” Lucian nodded to the ground between them, and there were the diamonds, all five of them, clean and gleaming, lined up in a neat row across the cavern floor without a trace of blood nor bowl. Náli patted his chest and found his own where it should be, on its chain around his neck.

“I’ve not done anything with them, though.”

“No, but proximity is enough. The magic calls to the pieces of itself. It wants to be joined.”

Náli frowned. “But it won’t be joined, in the end. We’ll all be sharing it.”

Lucian cocked his head, his gaze boring through him.

“What?”

“I think you’re underestimating the intimacy of what you’re about to undertake.”

“No, I don’t think I am.”

Lucian shrugged. “We shall see. Now. Are you ready?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

Lucian sent him a withering look and fanned his hands open, placed them palms-down on the stone just shy of the diamonds. “First, you must absorb all that these contain.”

“I know,” Náli huffed, mirroring his pose, hands splayed open on the ground.

“No,” Lucian said, matter-of-fact. “You can’t begin to know what this is going to feel like.”

Náli gritted his teeth, leaned forward to put more weight on his hands, and took a deep breath, throwing open the doorways to his mind at the same time. He let his magic boil up out of his bones and fill him head to toe, the tingling, prickling cold of it, the thrumming like a new heartbeat.

Beneath him, the diamonds began to glow, faintly at first, but then it swelled, the same white, over-bright light that had looked like a sun at the bottom of the well; the same flare that drew him across the veil into the land of the dead each time. He could feel it, a discordant buzzing outside his body, a stronger, wilder echo of the pulse of magic inside himself.

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