Page 91 of Crown of Darkness
My bloodied palm slaps against the tree just as the first gush of water slams into my feet. Ayelet screams and throws her arms around my waist.
Maybe it’s a combination of fury and the desire to protect what I’ve come to cherish, but the second my blood marks the tree, it sets off an alchemical explosion within me. Something suddenly unlocks within my soul. I reach out and thousands of roots spear out from the tree, sinking my mind down, down, until the earth beneath my feet answers, the lands suddenly singing through my veins.
I can feel it all.
I am the city.
I am the lands.
I am Evernight.
“Vi!” Thiago screams in my mind.
Nothing can touch me right now.
Water parts around me, thundering past as I splay my fingers wide. The spray of it stings my face, whipping my hair behind me, but I can’t focus on the physical.
Hear me!
The earth groans beneath my feet. And then cracks begin forming in the cobbles as I clench my fist together. Water plunges between the cracks, gushing down into the sewers and caverns beneath it. I feel them snaking through the earth. Catacombs. Underground rivers. Hollows and nooks where the rats lurk. I send the water down, letting it pour through those hidden tunnels.
I am a woman standing before a flood.
I am a queen with the power of the lands shivering in my veins until I can barely see the world around me.
I am every inch of earth beneath my feet, every little earthworm creeping through the dark unknown, every bone in the ground, every stone that forms the numerous catacombs beneath me. I am water gushing through newly opened channels, plunging into the sewers and tunnels that form an underground town beneath me.
I can’t keep forcing all of this water down into the underground caverns, and there are millions of cubic meters of it in the dam above.
The dam.
Pain screams through me as I turn all my focus upon its stone walls. Rock turns molten, hissing with steam as I force it to fuse, until there are no more cracks, no more mortar. Simply an enormous expanse of solid rock forged together.
And then it’s slipping through my grasp as a spearing slash of pain drives through my right eye. Behind it.
I stagger away from the tree, and suddenly Ayelet’s the only thing holding me up.
“You’re safe,” I whisper, running my hand through the fringing of hair that shields her face.
She starts crying, but she only squeezes me harder.
And it finally hits me.
We’re alive.
We’re all alive.
The street lies in ruins, and I’m ankle deep in water, but nobody was swept away. The Wayfarer’s Oak still stands. Indeed, it seems to be growing as I watch, new buds unfurling from the ends of its branches, and bright green leaves bursting into life.
Did I do that?I can feel it still, its roots anchoring deeper and deeper, almost…. Almost as if it reaches for the ley line.
A shadow falls over me.
I’m so weak I can barely keep my feet, but as I sway a dark figure lands in front of me, strong hands capturing my arms.
Thiago.
“I think I broke your city,” I rasp and try to smile.
