Page 56 of When Monsters Fight
“Do it!” Jilyana urged. “She’s right. It needs to feel her. It needs to feel what we represent to know we’re not a threat.”
“Fuck!” Gabriel kissed my temple. “If you die…”
“Then find me in the afterlife.” We flew toward the center of the crater. “Drop me! Now!”
He released me with a curse.
The light swallowed me whole.
I was no longer falling.
I was no longer afraid.
This was peace and bliss.
This was home.
The light filled me, reading me. Finding its haven through me. It communicated without words, telling me that it had waited so long, that it was so lonely and was ready to go home.
“Rue? Rue, can you hear me?” Gabriel pulled me out of the light. “Rue, wake up!”
My eyes snapped open to find everyone standing around me. Jilyana clung to Asbeel, and Yomiel braced Kokabel, whose abdomen was no longer wounded. Kabiel was unharmed too. Good. This was good.
“You got it.” Kabiel’s gaze dropped to my chest, where I clutched the relic from the crater.
I’d found it.
The light and then… “What…what happened?”
“You fell into the light, then you floated out of it, clutching the relic. It glowed for a little while and so…so did you.”
It had spoken to me. It had been alive but now…now that consciousness was gone. Where had it gone?
“We have to move,” Kabiel said. “The Ioness seem to have backed off, but who knows, they might change their minds.”
He was right. They’d been somehow controlled by the relic for decades. Protecting it. Now they were free, and we could very well be food to them. “The gate? We need to find it.”
“Already did,” Yomiel said. “It’s a portal. A vortex suspended in the air.”
“Take me to it.”
Gabriel helped me up, and we hurried past the stationary Ioness and across the sand. Several heads bobbed far from shore, dark hair gleaming in the moonlight.
“They’re watching,” Kabiel said. “No food for you today…hopefully.”
The sand gave way to a stretch of rocky land, and there in the distance was the dark blue shimmer of the portal.
The channel to the Morningstar was still open a crack and the closer we got, the more the power writhed and thrummed.
“I feel something,” Jilyana said. “It’s through the portal.”
“Another relic piece?” Asbeel asked.
“No.” I stepped closer to the vortex. “Not another relic, but the being that they belong to.”
Everyone gathered round, and Gabriel took my hand.
This was it. The moment of truth.
