It was singing. The magic was singing to her.
Iris felt it rushing through her veins, flooding her senses, hot as fire and cold as ice, exhilarating and terrifying. She felt and tasted the beauty and the music. Everything was a blinding white, and everything was clear. The roars whispered, the shadows glowed, the discordant rang true. She could see now—see everything. Hear everything. Understand everything.
She saw the truth.
She saw the multicolored bits of magic that did not belong to Micah, sparking off of him and popping before they could escape. She saw the emptiness where his heart should have been. She saw the surprise and doubt in his icy blue eyes reflected within his core.
She heard a chorus of voices revealing his secrets.
“Micah.” Her voice rang out in the silence, confident and challenging. “You want the power in this amulet? You don’t know what you seek. But he does.”
She pointed to Micah’s right with her left hand, her skin bathed in the same soft white light that shone between the fingers of her right hand. The red cord and the blue flames were gone, but crimson blood still trickled down her arm.
A man materialized beside Micah, gray and translucent, little more than a shadow. Micah jumped back, startled. The features of the man’s face were dull and blurry, but his eyes were clear. Clear, hollow, and sad.
“He was like you, a man who sought more power. He found the crystal, and he cut the amulet from it. His greed sealed his fate.”
She pointed beside the shade, and another man appeared, shorter and stouter but just as despondent, his eyes just as empty.
“Because his spell didn't just trap his magic inside the amulet at his death. It wrenched his very soul from his dying body and locked it away, a tool for the next bearer to use until he, too, died and found himself imprisoned in the amulet, unable to rest. And when the next bearer died, he, too, found himself trapped in the amulet, unable to rest.”
A horde of the gray figures filled the throne room to her left and Micah’s right. Men, women, humans, dragons, elves, dwarves—all had borne the amulet in life, and all were bound to it in death.
“They all know the power of this amulet, and they’re all tired. They want it to end. For a thousand years, they have searched for the person who won’t succumb to greed, the person who will break the cycle. They’re all in my head, every moment of every day. Do you know what that sounds like? Do you know what that feels like?”
Micah’s eyes widened. Several of the court ministers clapped their hands over their ears. A roar of whispers echoed in every mind within the room. The common tongue, old draconian, elvish—dozens of languages, hundreds of voices, all saying the same thing: End this.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret, Micah. Your extraction process doesn’t work on me. The past bearers give you a drop of magic so that you think you’re getting what you want, but you’re actually unlocking their power within me. Every time, you just make me stronger.”
She took a step toward him. He took a step back. Blue magic shot from his hands toward her, slamming into her and engulfing her. He smirked, but then the blue vanished, absorbed into the white radiating from her body.
Her eyes were white, all traces of brown gone.
Micah’s smirk vanished. He took another step back.
“You said compassion is my weakness, but you were wrong. I know who you are, Micah. I wanted to hate you after what you did to me, but I can’t. I pity you.”
She raised her left hand and laid it flat over the center of his chest. He tried to sidestep around the throne, but a wall of white prevented his escape. She closed her eyes, and the white whitened under her left hand, spreading across his torso.
“What are you doing?” he exclaimed, his voice strangled.
“God calls me to love everyone, even you, and you’ve become an amulet. They’re all trapped inside you. So I’m setting you and them free.”
Another gray, translucent form appeared on his left, Iris’ right, a little girl who couldn’t be more than five years old.
“I could be cruel and make you feel everything I felt every time you did this to me, but I’m not you.”
The white spread further, pinning him against the barrier behind him and pulling more shadows from him. They lined up beside Alana, as many as the past bearers of the amulet, humans and enchanted creatures of all shapes and sizes. The king and the court officials crowded against the door, hard pressed to find room among the throng of ghosts.
Char recognized Jonah and Father John among the last of the pitiful faces.
Then the wall behind Micah vanished. Iris withdrew her hand, and he collapsed to his knees, pale, sweaty, and shaking. She raised her left hand over her head, and dozens of golden lights appeared above her, twisting and twirling together.
“What’s left, Micah? How much magic is actually yours? Can you even kill one fairy? You can’t, can you? Because you never were a mage. Jonah and Alana were mages, but you weren’t. Your obsession with magic came from your jealousy of your younger siblings. You studied dark magic so you could steal their power, but you could only accomplish that because of the hole in the crystal. The crystal was always meant to limit and regulate magic. Greed and hatred have destroyed its ability to do so.”
He crumpled into a ball before her, covering his head with his hands.
She stepped past him and walked to the back wall of the throne room. The fairies trailed after her. She placed her left hand flat on the polished marble, fingers splayed wide, as she had done with Micah, and the fairies landed in between and around her fingers, forming a perfect golden circle radiating from her hand.
She closed her eyes and pushed.
A shockwave shook the castle. Draperies and wall hangings fell to the floor. People fell to their knees. The wall shuddered and split, releasing a bright light that forced everybody to shield their eyes again.
Dread settled in Char’s stomach. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t Iris.
He opened his eyes and climbed to his feet, heart pounding.
A giant, clear crystal stood behind the throne, its top reaching almost to the vaulted ceiling. Threads of gold and silver snaked around it from above and below, stabilizing it.
Iris’ hair was snow white. Her shoulders rose and fell with the effort of each labored breath.
Char raced toward her. “Iris, you have to stop this!”
She looked back at him with those strange, pure white eyes. A wall of magic rose to stop him at the throne. When she opened her mouth, a mixture of voices poured out of her.
“Iris has no control over this anymore.”
She stepped back from the crystal, and her right hand finally released the amulet. She reached behind her neck to undo the clasp.
“Come,” the voices said.
The silent gray shadows walked toward her, passing through the barrier with ease. Iris pressed the amulet into the crystal and closed her eyes. White flashed from her fingers, and her brow furrowed in pain, but she held her hand to the spot.
One by one, the past bearers walked through her, vanishing into the crystal. Micah’s victims came as well, led by little Alana.
Each shadow seemed to take something from her.
The blood on her arms congealed, dark reddish-brown stripes marking her ever-paling skin. The line between her brows deepened. Sweat dripped from her chin.
“No!” Micah shouted, clambering to his feet and throwing himself at the white barrier in a panic. “This cannot happen!”
“You.” Char grabbed Micah by his collar with both hands, lifting the mage off his feet and growling into his face. “You did this to her!”
He pulled his right hand back and punched Micah in the jaw, releasing the mage with his left hand when his fist made contact. Micah flew back across the room from the force of the blow. He hit the wall and slumped to the floor, but Char was already storming toward him, hauling him to his feet and throwing another punch.
“Char!” Rath called, jogging after his livid brother. “We have to get out of here.” He glanced back at the throne room doors, now wide open. “I think we’re about to have the whole army come down on us.”
Char dropped a bruised and bloody Micah and drew his sword. He pointed it at the mage, pressing the tip into the man’s neck.
“You deserve to suffer much more than this, but luckily for you, I don’t have the time to put you through anything close to the hell you put her through.”
Micah looked up at Char, one eye already swelling shut. The corner of his split lip turned up.
“You should have heard her begging me to stop.”
Char’s face twisted. He redirected the sword and plunged it into Micah’s groin, then he yanked Rath’s sword from its sheath and cut Micah’s scream short with one stroke. Micah’s head rolled across the floor in one direction. His body slumped in the other.
“Give me that.” Rath wrenched his sword from Char’s clenched fist and stabbed it through Micah’s heart. “Okay. Now, we gotta go.”
“I’m not going anywhere without Iris.”
She had sunk to her knees, her right hand held in place only by the magic flowing between the amulet and the crystal. Her forehead was pressed into the crystal, and her mouth was open, panting with each labored breath. There were still dozens of the sad gray figures crowding the throne room and passing through her in a somber procession.
“Iris, let go of the amulet!” Char shouted. He ran to the wall of white and pounded on it. Unlike Micah’s red barrier, it didn’t burn Char’s hand. It didn’t give way, either.
“I… can’t…” It was her voice gasping the words, no longer mingled with the voices of the past bearers. “Please… go…”
“Even if she survives this, she’ll be in no condition to fly,” Rath insisted. “She just saved the king’s life. He won't forget that. We can come back for her, but we need to go now.”
“No. I’m not leaving her.”
“Those men are imposters!” somebody shouted behind them.
Rath cursed as soldiers flooded through the doors. “There goes our exit.”
“This… way…”
The shield came down, just for an instant. Char and Rath bolted past the throne, and the shield rose again.
Rath grabbed Char when he reached for Iris. “Don’t touch her.” He dragged Char past her to the hole in the wall, giving her a wide berth. “Nice cave system. There’s gotta be an exit aboveground, too, for that mage to find the crystal a thousand years ago.”
“Unless it caved in.”
Rath shrugged. “Good thing we’re dragons. I’ve never actually carved stone before, but I’m itching to try it. Shall we go?”
“No.”
The soldiers were keeping their distance from the line of ghosts and Iris’ shield. Her breathing was slowing, each harsher than the last. The fairies hovered around her, but like everybody else, they were afraid to touch her.
“Hurry,” Char muttered.
The last shadow was Father John. He followed the rest in silence through the shield, but unlike the others, he stopped at Iris’ side when he reached her. Though his features were still blurred, Char could tell the priest was smiling as the old man laid his hand on her head.
“I knew you would use it appropriately.” He turned his hollow eyes toward Char. “Take care of her.”
And then he stepped through her and into the crystal, and he was gone.
Her hand fell to the floor. Her shield evaporated. She swayed and collapsed, and the crystal’s light intensified, casting deep shadows on her face. The ground shook.
“Go!” Rath shouted. “Our time’s up!”
Char was already rushing toward her, but he stumbled when the ground shifted beneath his feet. The fairies caught his arms and steadied him. He heard the crystal humming, and he scooped Iris up and turned to race into the cave after Rath.
The crystal exploded.
Shards sharper than glass and harder than diamonds whistled past the dragons. The ceiling was crumbling, dust and loose stones falling like rain. The fairies zipped before, after, and around them, deflecting crystalline knives and throwing the biggest chunks of stone aside.
Iris was limp in Char’s arms. He wasn’t sure she was breathing.
He said a silent prayer and kept running.35Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡTKze1h3AAz
