Page 63 of A Monsoon Rising

Talasyn felt all this and more. Rivulets of sweat ran down her spine. She ached all over. By some miracle, she managed to keep her focus, drawing on the spate of concentration exercises she’d done with Alaric, and she kept her strength, buoyed by the hours she’d spent tapping into the primordial thread of the Light Sever.

It was with ten minutes left on the clock that something began to go horribly wrong.

The feeling—Talasyn could compare it only to when the aether cores inside the jars burst, back during the month’s first trial. But the shattering came from inside her. It washerbody hitting a critical point. Her magic—pushed to the limit, amplified by rain and blood and tempest—redirectedinward.

It had nowhere else to go within the barrier. A radiant blaze engulfed her outstretched hand, strands of Shadowgate clinging to it like smoke. Her arm burned and froze all at once, the sensation quickly spreading through the rest of her, pouring into the stitch in her side, into every fault line of her shaking frame.

Another bolt of void magic slammed into the shield. Beside her, Alaric let out a hiss. The shadows were wrapping around his own arm, threaded through with the Lightweave.

He looked at her, a question in his silver eyes.

He wanted to put a stop to the exercise. He wanted to bring down the sphere.

But he would only do it if she agreed.

Talasyn couldn’t stand the thought of him getting hurt. But she needed to believe in him, and in herself, and in what they were capable of together. The fate of their world depended on that belief.

She shook her head. “We can’t stop now.” Her voice was strained, almost drowned out by the roar of magic, but the expression on his face told her he was hanging on her every word. “This is the last chance. If we really can’t maintain the shield for an hour, then we have to come up with another plan. We need to knownow.”

“All right,” Alaric said softly. “Breathe with me.”

And Talasyn did. The minutes wore on and she coaxed air through her body the way he’d taught her to at the Roofof Heaven and amidst the Belian ruins. She felt a calming, a centering. It took the edge off somewhat, at first, but the burning freeze never subsided and eventually grew worse.

No one knew they were in trouble. The Enchanters were controlling the amplifiers from a hovering ship, beyond the sphere. Everyone else was too far away to see what was happening to them.

Talasyn watched in horror as her splayed fingertips and Alaric’s turned blue. Then their skin rippled with red blisters. She felt no pain from them, which meant that the nerves were deadened, but everywhere else in her body—everywhere else was ice and inferno. The eclipse magic was eating away at them both, even as amethyst cannon fire continued to ram into it.

Then, in a moment of double vision, she was looking at her hand afire with blackened light, but she was also looking at that gnarled, aged hand as it dug into the snowy ridge, as it unfurled beneath the sun. Had it been her hand all this time? Had she been seeing what was yet to come to pass?

She thought that she might understand now what had happened to Gaheris. The Shadowgate had consumed him, demanding its due in exchange for power. One could gaze only so long into aetherspace before something lunged from its depths.

This was the price for meddling with the unknown.

It went on and on, the waves of black and gold and amethyst, and just when Talasyn couldn’t take it anymore—

—just when she was fit to collapse, to lose herself in this ice-tinged death of a sun’s scorching heart—

An hour had ticked by.

The void blasts stopped coming. The Ahimsan Enchanters brought down the amplifying configuration’s nets, and the sphereof eclipse magic dwindled in size, receding from the space around Iantas until it eventually collapsed into nothingness as Alaric and Talasyn cancelled their aethermancy.

They stumbled together, catching each other with their uninjured arms, and swayed over the moonlit sands. People were cheering in triumph, but for her there was only exhaustion and inferno and the broadness of him, his arms clasped around her waist, cooling the fever in her bloodstream. Her face was buried in his shoulder, but out of the corner of her eye she watched her right hand. Watched the blue fade from its fingertips, leaving behind only the angry red blisters on her palm.

“I think, perhaps,” Ishan Vaikar said much later, in the dining room, “we must prepare for the possibility that the after-effects will be … long-lasting.”

The table’s other occupants—Urduja, Elagbi, Talasyn, and Alaric—stared at her blankly. Talasyn was famished after the taxing exercise, but she paused mid-chew, willing the daya to admit that her statement had been made in jest.

A vain hope, as it turned out.

“The amplifying configuration has clearly influenced Their Majesties’ aethermancy on a molecular level,” Ishan went on to explain. “I believe that our experiments have magnified your connection to each other.”

“Connection?” Alaric repeated, frowning.

“Whatever it is that enables your magic and the Lachis’ka’s to merge, Emperor Alaric,” Ishan clarified. “If only there was a way for Enchanters to manipulate the Lightweave and the Shadowgate as well. Then I could study it better.” She gave a wistful sigh. “But back to the matter at hand. The amplifier’s effects could act like a poison, slowly leaving the system as they’re processed. Or its effects could become a chroniccondition in which the changes are more … permanent. It’s impossible to determine which way they’ll resolve at this time.”

“But either option sounds positively delightful,” Talasyn sniped.

“Well, let us hope that it is the former,” Elagbi said with a scowl that matched Alaric’s as the two men exchanged contentious looks.

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