“We should go,” Abi said in a hollow, distant voice. “This is a sacred place. We can’t steal from Meriwa and survive.”
Eric and Clem muttered their agreement. They wouldn’t meet my eyes as their feet shuffled back toward the door. I yearned to join them, to bow low before this ancient and mighty creature and crawl back the way I’d come in shame.
“This isn’t right,” I said.
Streaks of black and gray dread and shame aspects floated in my aura like ink stains on still water. These weren’t my feelings; they were put in my head by the tomb’s defenses. I tried to cycle them away, but they clung to my thoughts like wet clay. More of the persistent aspects appeared with every passing second, and their weight was eroding my will.
“We have to go, Jace,” Clem said with tears in her eyes. “We shouldn’t have come. It’s not right.”
It was hard to ignore her words. But I pushed forward, gritting my teeth against the desire to leave, and took one step after another. The weight of the skeleton’s empty black stare hunched my shoulders and bowed my spine.
This wasn’t real. The feelings were false.
I repeated those two sentences like a mantra. One step after another, I made my way to the base of the throne. The stone hung above my head, ready to be claimed.
“Don’t do it, Jace,” Eric called. “This isn’t right. I can’t let you take it.”
My friends had succumbed to the tomb’s guilt. Silver scales covered their eyes and fed them dark illusions. Shadows surrounded their cores and twisted true feelings into a warped need to defend the blackened sphere from thieves.
From me.
All three of my friends headed in my direction, their faces twisted into angry masks.
I summoned my serpents and willed the mechanical limbs to carry me up the throne to the orb. Their sharpened tips dug into the black stone, and I scuttled up the skeleton’s legs like an overgrown spider. The urge to turn back became a heavy burden around my neck. It took all my concentration to raise my hand toward the dangling stone. Even then, my fingers refused to close around my prize. My hand trembled inches from victory, my muscles paralyzed.
“Stop, Jace.” Clem’s voice was beyond weary. My friends were fighting the command to stop me with all their might.
And that wasn’t enough.
When their resistance collapsed, they’d come at me with every technique at their disposal. Burdened as I was by aspects that wouldn’t leave my aura, there was no way for me to defeat them all. Fighting my friends went against every reason I had for going on this quest. I wanted to protect the people I cared about, not destroy them.
With a pained shout, I forced my fingers to obey me. They closed around the sphere and I let myself fall from my perch on the giant’s knee. The heavy metal links snapped as my weight fell on them. I plummeted to the ground and landed on my serpents. The stone twisted in my grip like an angry eel, its jagged edge biting into my palm, its slick surface trying to slip through my fingers. I wasn’t having any of that. I shoved it into my robe and sprinted toward the room’s exit.
The aspects clogging my aura melted away with every step I took away from the throne. My friends watched me, their eyes dull and lifeless. Whatever compulsion had driven them to close in on me must’ve been tied to protecting the stone. Now that it had been stolen, they were frozen with indecision. Even after I’d escaped from the room and stood in the hallway, their heads swiveled from me, to the skeleton, and then back to me.
“Come on,” I shouted. “Abi, I need you to snap out of it. Summon the portal. We can leave.”
My friend didn’t move.
Footsteps rattled down the hall from the direction of the plateau. A glance in that direction showed me frost-covered heretics rushing in my direction. These didn’t bear firearms. They wielded fusion blades that hummed and spat with vicious power.
A string of syllables I couldn’t understand exploded through the air. The lights that lined the hallway change from purest white to red. Wailing alarms sounded, and the walls around me began to come apart.
The Escape
I WAS STUNNED BY HOW quickly my mother’s followers had reached us after I’d given them the slip in Khan’s basement. Twenty heretics stormed down the hall toward me, fusion blades blazing with sacred energy. There was no time to worry about why my plan had failed. In seconds I’d be up to my eyeballs in deadly foes, and not even the Thief’s Shield could defend me against that. The only way out of this mess was through the swarm ahead of me. I raised my blade, summoned my shield, and prepared for what looked like the last battle of my life.
And then the walls came crashing down to reveal the tomb’s true guardians.
Giant skeletons wrapped in shreds of dried skin emerged from pockets hidden behind the now-crumbled stone façade. Sinuous curves of armor that seemed to have grown from the creatures’ bones reinforced the titanic warriors. Heavy cages of glossy black metal shielded their bony joints from attacks and strengthened them with coils of jinsei. The massive fighters wielded oversize swords that sparked with scrivenings so powerful they sizzled and popped with unrestrained sacred energy.
The wailing sirens and flashing lights from the alarm combined with the sudden appearance of the enormous guards stunned every human in that massive corridor. Before anyone could react, the first of the four giants waded into the fray and crushed two heretics beneath its bony feet. Its sword swept from one side of the hallway to the other, catching three more of my enemies across their chests. That brutal weapon’s edge sliced through flesh and bone without pause
