Page 26 of Iridian

Colorful magic burst out of my hand as I raised it in the air together with all of them. My flames were brighter than the rest, and I was sweating by the time we started on the last paragraph.

Slowly. Steadily. We chanted every single word, and our magic, in so many beautiful colors, stretched and stretched until we couldn’t see through it, until it became a thick box of colors hovering in the air.

Then the last word of the spell left our lips at the same time, and the colors of our magic faded.

A golden dot remained in the middle of the room, so bright it could have been a miniature sun, but none of us looked away from it. None of uscould—I felt that light as if it was inside my veins. I felt it and it held my attention and it took the air out of my lungs and it forced me to follow it.

To someone watching, it remained in the same place, burning there a couple of feet over the coffee table.

To me, and to the others who brought the spell to life, it moved at the speed of light.

Images popped in my head. It was like watching a movie, except the movie held me prisoner, frozen in place, my muscles locked, my lungs empty, my eyes unable to blink. The only thing that was moving inside me, thatcouldmove and was being forced to, was my magic.

It was tearing itself out of me and rushing down my arm, and the pain was even more intense than when I used my ring after draining the Rainbow. I gritted my teeth to keep the scream inside, but it was no use—the whole room heard it.

AndIheard the screams of most of the people who’d been chanting with me.

A curse,said a voice in my head. It was really a curse. I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t do anything to stop the magic that was beingdraggedout of me with such force.

But…

Taland wrote this spell. Taland memorized it from that script. Taland would haveneverlet me chant if he even suspected that this wasn’t what we thought it was.

No, that wasn’t it. The tiny sun that was pulling my magic out of me—allour magic out of each and every one of us—was nota curse, but it was powerful. And the heat of the colorful flames that sprouted on the palm of my hand without my say-so almost burned my skin.

Another scream ripped out of me because I was holding that light in my palm now, and it was just as hot as it had looked from a distance. The others screamed, too, until I couldn’t tell my voice apart from theirs.

Pain. So much fucking pain.

Then I touched it.

Just when I thought I wasnevergoing to feel cold again, I did. Just when I thought I was never going to get my body to obeymycommands again, I did. Just when I thought that I was dying once more, I breathed. My lungs worked and I was alive.

The ball of light in my hand was gone, and inside my fist was something hard, something cold, something that I had never seen before.

A parchment scroll with dark wooden handles on the sides.

I blinked, half of me focused on the air going down my throat to convince myself that it was real, that I wasn’t dying. Nobody was screaming anymore, and…they all had those same scrolls in their hands, too. Everybody was holding onto their chests and breathing deeply, heavily, and Taland’s hand was on my cheek as he looked at me. He’d been in that same pain, too. He was breathing like he’d been racing, and his eyes were bloodshot, his hair all over the place.

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” I said, and we could all see that we were okay, but it took us a little while to get our heartbeat to slow down and our breathing under control.

Meanwhile, the others who hadn’t chanted with us were standing on the other side of the room, watching us with wide eyes, curious, concerned.

“What the hell happened?”

“What kind of a spell was that?”

“I swear it felt like it ripped my arm off…”

“But itworked.”

We all stopped.

We looked at Radock who had already opened his scroll and was smiling at the brownish parchment he held in front of his face, though it was empty.

“It worked,” said Helen from my other side, and she, too, was rushing to open her scroll, so we did the same. Maybe Perria’s location would be in these. We had nine—one of them was bound to contain that map.

Andminedid.

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