It was probably fifteen minutes before things settled down enough for him to poke his head above the boulder. He tried streaming a sphere again, but he could only do so long enough to see his immediate surroundings.
What he saw looked like a war zone. Blasted cliffs, craters, ground up rock about a meter deep in all directions, the tinge of ozone, as if that massive storm of tethers had burned the air itself. When his light sphere winked out after using the last of his ether, he was left in darkness under a star-filled sky.
All he could do was hope that such a raw display of power kept other wyverns away, rather than draw them like moths to a flame.
He reeled in disbelief, knowing he had done something that no mage could ever hope to do. None of it had been a lie or a hallucination.
He held one of the seven fabled Orbs of Starsea.
4
Lucian forced himself to stand, his legs shaking. He felt as if he were coming down off the hardest of hard drugs, every neuron fried to a crisp. An impenetrable fog made it hard to hold onto any thought for long. Despite feeling completely empty, he still needed shelter, and fast. He would not be able to handle another outburst of magic, and more shrieks were already echoing in the distance. It was impossible to tell just how far away they were, but he had no doubt they would be upon him soon.
He began searching the piles of rock and disintegrated boulders for somewhere to hide. Surely in all this mess, there was some hole he could crawl into. He’d have to risk it collapsing on him, because sleeping out in the open was simply not an option. He had to find a crevice large enough to fit into, but small enough that the wyverns couldn’t reach him with their long talons.
After a few minutes of aimless searching, he found something that would suit well enough. He got on his belly and crawled inside like a worm, going as deep as he could until he was sure nothing from above could follow him in. Serah had mentioned they could sense heat, so he needed to go deep enough for them not to detect him. He couldn’t create a fire, so he’d have to rely on the shelter of the rocks themselves.
There was always the danger he could be buried alive, and he didn’t relish the thought. But as he saw it, this was his only option. He was simply too exhausted to run any farther.
Once deep enough, about five meters beneath the surface, he closed his eyes. Until he heard the crunch of feet on the rocks above.
“Lucian? I thought I saw something over here.”
Serah? How in the Worlds had she found him? He remained as still as a mouse, unsure of where he stood with her after the Ramore incident.
“I can feel you around here,” she said. “Too tired after your fight for a concealment ward, eh?”
Concealment ward? Lucian had never heard of such a thing. “What do you want, Serah?”
“Prickly, aren’t you? You buried alive or something?”
“Something like that. Where’s your friend?”
“I left him back in the cave. Sorry. He must have gotten jealous or something. He doesn’t really have much impulse control these days, and it’s been a while since I’ve seen how he acts around others.”
She waited a moment, apparently waiting for him to accept the apology. He remained quiet.
“If you hold on a minute, I can lift up these rocks with an anti-grav disc. It’ll probably kill me, but . . .”
“No!” Lucian said. “I’m not buried. Just hiding.”
“Oh. Well, coast is clear for now. Can you get out of there so we can talk?”
Lucian considered a moment whether he could trust her. It didn’t make sense that she would risk her neck just to hunt him down. So what did she want?
Lucian shimmied up through the rocks. The squeeze was so tight that for a moment, Lucian believed he might be stuck. He could see Serah’s bare, dirty feet above him, illumined presumably by a light sphere. He sucked in his breath, and pushed upward, scratching his torso in the process. The next moment, he was standing in front of her.
She gaped at the surroundings. “You did all this?”
Lucian looked around at the devastation, which was made even more apparent by the light of Serah’s sphere. “Seems so.”
“I saw the blue light from the cave,” she said. “Either you’re the best Binder this side of Sol, or the dumbest one.”
“Probably the second.”
“There’s bloody bits of what looks like two wyverns on the rocks over there.” She pointed with her chin.
“You’d be right about that. That was the focal point of the tether I made.”
“How’d you manage to bind two beasts that size?”
Lucian decided to ignore that question. “Why did you follow me?”
“Well, I risked my neck to see if you were all right. As to the why, I don’t know. I just follow my gut, and my gut said to come check on you.” She smiled sheepishly. “Sorry again about Ramore. Like I said before, I guess he jumped to conclusions when he saw us together.”
“Don’t worry about it. Look, are we sitting ducks out here or what? What should we do? Because I’m not heading back to the cave.”
“I don’t know what sitting ducks are, but I think I know what you mean. I don’t think getting us both out of here tonight is in the cards. Besides, the pass is buried now.”
“Then how did you get over here?”
“I’m nimble as a rift goat, and my primary is Gravitonics. I’m almost good enough to fly.” A shriek sounded in the night, to which Serah rolled her eyes. “Great. They got the scent of us now. You think that gap can hold us both?”
“Probably. It’ll be tight, though.”
“We’ve got
