It’s a rent, Avena realized. One of the rents the demons poured out of. She could see the hole in the fabric of the world repairing itself. It wasn’t a spider cocooning him, but a weaver stitching cloth together with threads of black.
He was on the other side.
She couldn’t touch the threads. Some force repelled her light. She pushed and pushed. Tears spilled down her face. Raya’s lover stared at her with sadness in his eyes while his face held calm acceptance. The rent knit tighter and tighter. It swallowed his torso. His shoulders and neck.
Only his face remained.
“Raya,” the man whispered as the darkness wove across his face.
Then all that stood before her was the devastation of a battlefield. She sank to her knees and buried her face into her hands. She sobbed and sobbed, pouring out all her grief. Avena had felt this pain once in her life.
When Dualayn told her that Chames had succumbed to the spring fever.
I’m so sorry, Raya, Avena thought. She was dreaming the White Lady’s memories. This had to be the Shattering when the Archon-Supreme had led the devas into driving the darklings back. The healing rent must have been a Warding being established, banishing the demons and other monsters from their world.
But why was Raya’s lover trapped in there?
I’m so sorry! The words felt hollow. Avena didn’t know if the White Lady could understand her nor if she could even affect anything in this dream.
Raya beat at the earth next, liquid diamonds falling to the scorched earth. She threw back her head and let out a pained cry of anguish to a sky covered in a haze of gray dust. Pure grief, undiluted by any other emotion. Her entire body shook.
Avena wanted to hug Raya. The memory of their last conversation, when the White Lady had kissed her forehead, resonated through her. The woman had mentioned losing someone and wanting to get them back. This was what she wanted.
To free her lover from this barrier.
From the Warding.
What did that mean? There had been breaks in the Warding in the past. When her ancestors had first landed at the mouth of the Ustern River a thousand years ago, they had found the darklings free. Boan Sword-Arm had to use three artifacts—supposedly, the Amethyst Band held by the Kings of Lothon, the Lost Emerald Spear of Ondere, and the Healing Staff of Roidan—to re-establish the Warding and trap the darklings back in their black domain.
In this dream, Raya’s lover seemed to be at the focal point of the closure, the point where the weave between realities was completed. Avena knew the weakness of any weaving was at the end, where the tails of the threads used to create it lay. If you were to pull on one of those, you could unravel everything.
Did the White Lady seek to unravel the Warding?
Before Avena could even consider this, whispers intruded on the vision. She knew what they were now. Why she was having such problems with her body around the crystalmen. She was hearing the commands they received. Impulses that she could almost make out. There was a single voice giving orders, and they were responding. She concentrated on them.
Her dream of Raya’s life faded.
Avena floated in a dark void. A place of nothing. There were harmonics that rippled in the background. They were hard to make out, faint like the ringing in the ear after a loud noise. They were all merged together and yet separate. They had . . . auditory flavors to them.
Fiery.
Soothing.
Gusting.
Radiant.
Was she hearing the tones that powered the gems? Were these the reverberations of creation that the jewelchines tapped into and channeled?
Maybe.
But there was something else. She could hear a commanding voice over them. It boomed to her right. It came from a construction of diamond and obsidian, the two jewels merged and connected to each other via an intricate network wire trapped inside of them. The device floated with her, projected into the immaterial like her thoughts. The jewelchines went beyond any she could imagine. It seemed like magic to her.
It was sending signals to a dozen units. Four of them were close. Those were being directed to chase. To hunt. Demons had intruded. They had to be destroyed. Koilon had to be defended. In the commands were images.
Fingers and Ōbhin ran, a limp figure in the Qothian’s arms.
That’s me in Ōbhin’s arms. We’re being chased. Understanding crashed through her. The voice gives purpose to the crystalmen. They’re nothing without it. They have no minds, so the ancients created a mind to control them.
Avena knew what she had to do.
Chapter Thirty
Avena collapsed as Ōbhin reached the pair.
“Avena!” Fingers gasped, clutching her body and keeping her from hitting the ground.
Fear consumed Ōbhin’s shock at seeing the pair. The crystalmen still lumbered after him. His plan to only risk himself had backfired. Now Avena was in even more danger. Fingers struggled to lift her limp form.
Ōbhin couldn’t allow that. He wouldn’t entrust his Avena’s life to the impostor. With practiced skill, he slammed his tulwar into its sheath as he stopped before Fingers. Fear gleamed in the impostor’s face, faking the older man with skill.
“I have her!” growled Ōbhin. He ripped Avena from Fingers and hefted her across his arms. He clutched the lantern still in his left hand, her legs draped over that limb. “Let’s move!”
“Right!” Fingers shouted and ran the only way they could.
Away from the crystalmen.
They all blared alarms. The sounds resounded through the alley. Ōbhin’s legs already burned from his run. How long will it take Dualayn to turn it off? Fear gripped his chest that the old man was waiting for
