Chapter 16: Act I Finale: Awakening

Chapter 16: Awakening

Nadine took a bite of the cake and scrunched her face. She chewed in abrupt, jerking movements that looked more mechanical than human. By the time she finally swallowed, she looked thoroughly disgusted. “This tastes like shit.”

Theresa held the cake up to the light, peering into the suspiciously yellow center, and frowned. “I don’t think it’s done yet,” she said, though she sounded unsure. Raynor furrowed his brow.

“But it’s burnt already?” He pointed at the area in question, namely the blackened outer rim that crumbled away at his glancing touch. He jerked his finger away like it was acid.

“There’s something wrong with your oven,” Altair muttered. Nadine spun around to face him, eyes narrowed, hands on her hips.

“Use your own oven if you’re gonna complain.” She grabbed the plate from Theresa, set it back down on the table with a loud clank, and grabbed another slice that she tore into in a manner more resembling the way someone would eat meat than a cake. “Whatever, it’s fine, it’s still cake. We’re not making another one.”

Altair sighed, but sat down and grabbed a piece as well, which he stared at like it had personally wronged him. Theresa and Raynor followed suit, everyone too tired to verbally complain further.

Nadine took another slice and shoved it at Enya, who’d been standing off to the side silently watching the cake judging. “Eat,” she commanded. “You’re not getting out of this.”

Enya stared at the cake, then at her sister’s determined expression and the watching eyes of Raynor, Altair, and Theresa, and took it without complaint. She took a slow bite. The texture was similar to that of a sponge, and the burned edges provided an unwelcome bitter kick. She understood why Nadine had been eating so slowly.

“Well?” her sister asked.

Enya took a moment to swallow the stuff down, savoring Nadine’s growing impatience with each prolonged chew, and smiled.

“It tastes terrible.”

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In the past, there were many times when Enya would find herself paralyzed and numb. Maren had called it a freeze reaction, but the woman’s assurances had never truly assuaged her worries. The more it happened, the more she grew to resent her body’s lack of response during critical moments.

This, however, was not one of those times. The moment the fire came into view, she rushed into the blaze without a second thought, heart pounding in her chest as the heat around her became nearly unbearable.

Around her, flames climbed to many times the height of the buildings. Thick grey smoke wove and twisted between charred piles of destroyed homes, fogging up her vision, but it couldn’t fully obscure the surrounding silhouettes collapsing into burning pieces.

She ran past street lamps melted and bent until they bowed, past caved in buildings forming jagged outlines jutting out from the sizzling earth. Smoke and ash stung her throat as she lept over fallen rubble flooding into the road. At the sides of the path, charred forms dotted her vision, limbs outstretched and frozen into the air like the twisted branches of a tree. Burnt beyond recognition as human. She heard no voices, only the crackle of fire and her own heart thumping against her ribcage as she forced her legs forward.

A wooden building collapsed down onto the path in front of her, the smoldering sign recognizable as the florist’s, and she barely had time to dodge out of the way of splintered, burning wood. Heat permeated every step; she felt like she was swimming in a pool of molten lava. Her skin was red and blistering, but she continued pulling herself through, knowing that stopping would mean suffocating.

The streets were an unfamiliar landscape, a crooked mess of destruction. The tavern was an unrecognizable pile of ash mixed with long spikes of burning wood. She didn’t even see Raynor’s house between the smoke and the flickering flames.

A distant, numb part of her realized that this was the result of magic. The entire town looked like it had been hit with a wave of heat before the fires were ignited. Heat that intense and sudden could only be from magic, and powerful magic at that.

“Nadine!” Enya’s throat was hoarse, and she could barely hear herself over the roaring flames, but she kept yelling until her voice was raw as she drew closer and closer to the edge of Acrine Village.

And there, waiting at the end of the road, was a burning blaze engulfing the collapsed remains of her and Nadine’s home. She stumbled to a halt, eyes wide and vision blurred. She took a step forward, then another, approaching the flames as though in a trance. She felt her feet kick something and looked down.

Resting against the simmering ground was a single lavender earing. Her gaze drifted to its side. Lying not even five feet away from it was a small mound of ash.

Enya felt her knees burning, and distantly she realized she’d collapsed onto the ground. Her hands gripped around the earing, so hot it burned the skin of her fingers, clutching it like a lifeline. Around her, all she could hear was the roaring fires, wood splintering and collapsing, and she wished she could hear screams. But amidst the red flames and the coiling smoke, Enya realized that she was the only one still alive.

The air around her grew even hotter, a new wave crashing over the village, and as she numbly raised her head, her eyes met distant golden ones watching from atop the branches of the Emerald Forest.

Time slowed, and every detail was made vivid. The deep red sky, the fires rising higher and higher, her blistering skin, the heated ground beneath her, the taste of ash on her tongue, the weight of smoke in her lungs. The earring burning into her palms, flames dancing in the wind, an engulfing roar, her own thoughts screaming in her head. Red hair billowing out among darkened trees, vivid even from the distance. Eyebrows that rose in surprise.

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As her eyes met that familiar gaze, the figure smiled in the crimson light, the same smile she’d worn that day on the cliffs that now felt so long ago.

Enya watched, transfixed, as Wren raised a hand. It glowed crimson, bright even from this far away. She felt a burst of magic, and then a wave of blazing heat engulfed what remained of the village.

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Evening fell softy over Elaren. The vibrant hues of the falling sun had cooled into a few lingering golden rays creeping out from below the horizon. Long clouds blended together with the darkening sky, a passing wind mixing rising trails of smoke together with them until they were indistinguishable. Birds flied overhead a ruined landscape, instinctively avoiding landing in the lingering heat.

Sitting beside the long road leading to the capital was a mountain of ash and rubble. A few stray pieces of surviving metal and stone jut out from the pile like fingers, but the charred remnants of the fire were indistinguishable to a passing eye. By the time the heat cooled and the smoke faded, Acrine Village would be marked as another victim of the Rot.

Beneath the pile of destruction, a charred, still smoking body clawed out from underneath, progressing forward one jerking motion at a time. Blackened fingers dug into the ash-covered earth, pulling and dragging a broken, dead body forward.

The body, which should have been a corpse, burned with life from the steady pulse of the Twelfth’s soul fragment. The figure glowed red in brief, stuttering intervals before the glow faded, healing efforts reversed as another limb cracked and crumbled away. The body would stop then, waiting while the magic in the atmosphere restored emptied reserves, then try again and again and again.

Skin formed halfway before halting. Limbs extended in warped shapes before melting and being formed again. The process repeated as the body finally escaped the mountain of ruins resting atop the earth.

Throughout this process, the mind remained active. There was the pain, so sharp and visceral that nothing seemed real, and there were the memories. Memories of the distant and not so distant past, memories of a future that would never come to be.

She saw Raynor kneeling on shaking legs, sucking in his breath as he waited to be officially declared a Paragon. She saw Altair and Callan watching in the audience, frowning throughout the ceremony but ultimately clapping with resigned happiness.

She saw Theresa dressed in ornate robes, a practitioner’s badge clasped onto her chest, wiping away sweat and smiling as she was called to heal another person. She saw all of them gathered at the tavern, crowding around a too small table. She saw Nadine, earrings swinging as she threw her head back and laughed, raising her glass high in the air for a toast.

And at the edges of those visions, she saw a cliff, hair billowing in the wind, a vast uninterrupted sky, a smile illuminated by crimson light, and she felt a new emotion root itself deep into her mind, drilling its way through the pain and exhaustion and grief. It smoldered beneath them, a steady, continued flame that grew with every new drag across the ashen ground.

It continued to grow as the darkened sky glowed and dimmed with sputters of magic. It grew as the grief settled into mourning. It grew until it had overtaken the splintering pain and the memories replaying over and over again in her mind.

It grew past disbelief, it grew past resentment. It grew and grew until all that was left as Enya dragged her charred, broken body across the dirt was the burn of all consuming fury.

 

Act I End

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