Page 217 of Golden Queen
I pulled my hands away, dusting the mellitrium from my wrists, looking in wonder at the pale blanched white flesh that had lain beneath the metal.
As the last of the powder floated to the floor, a weight lifted from my chest in a glorious explosion of relief. "Oh!" I cried, feeling a lightness inside me, something unfurling, building, opening.
Power thrummed through my veins, making wild, streaking paths through my blood, my skin, deep inside my bones, fighting, growing, wanting to get out.
"Oh shit," Io said. "We have to go. Now!"
I barely heard him as my body pulsed and ached for release. Energy crackled down my limbs making little sparks dance at my fingertips. The ground vibrated beneath us.
Fire, golden and lovely, so achingly familiar, burst from my hands. It wreathed them, licking up my shirtsleeves.
I raised them before me in wonder as the material caught fire.
Io grabbed my arms. Cool, fresh water soaked my shirtsleeves as the acrid scent of burning filled my nostrils.
My body still vibrated, and my hands still burned.
"Beautiful," I heard him say from somewhere far away.
I couldn't focus. I was too full of hot, screaming, angry fire. I would die if I didn’t let it out. All of it.
"Sera," he said, sharply.
And then I exploded.
Thirty-Seven
After what felt like my entire body detonating and disintegrating into infinite points of bright starlight, I stretched out across the cosmos past all semblance of time or direction. I soared everywhere and nowhere before retracting, slowly dancing back as though to a rhythm. I re-formed from nothing back into something—one tiny, infinitesimal point at a time.
I raised my head to see darkness.
Shadows swirled lazily around me, billowing in great gray clouds, some looking more like smoke, others falling across my face and casting my vision in muted night as they moved like wraiths around me.
The shadows were everything. They swayed and pulsed with some depthless energy that I knew must have swallowed the entire world outside me.
They had devoured everything except for the black clad shoulder under my chin and the shock of tousled dark hair at my side.
"Are we dead?"
"No," he chuckled.
"Is everyone else dead?"
"No one is dead," he said, loosening the arms encircling me.
I pulled back to look at him and saw the truth in his eyes as the shadows began to draw back.
"I shielded us," he said, as my gaze flitted around the room. "Well, I shielded them from you," he revised.
I looked around but couldn't make out anything in the darkness.
A startled laugh escaped me as I remembered what I had just done, remembered that endless power that erupted from inside me. I had finally gotten back what they took from me, and my body reveled in it. I wanted more of it—ached for it with a fierceness I had so far only ever felt for him. My hands began to tingle and grow warm.
"Sera, look at me," Io commanded.
I obeyed, even as my eyes ached to look down at the flames I knew would be wreathing my hands again.
"Put your hands on me and channel it into me."
