Then her hand brushed the Chaos Shard. The whispered knowledge of beyond that before had tickled at her ears and fluttered against her mind now spoke with a voice of thunder within her, and as her fingers closed around the cylindrical, sharp-ended God Stone, its message vibrated through the fibers of her being: POWER.
Nira could not feel the whip at her throat. She could not see her friends being overwhelmed by an inhuman enemy. She could not hear the harsh, sibilant screams of enraged worshippers defending their violated sanctum. She could not even feel the Shard in her fist. Yet her mind danced through the world around her, unfettered by the constraints of humanity and the distractions of an organic being. Her self unfurled, touching the raw bits of the world around her, knowing each piece for what it was, calculating precisely each vector of possibility. Here was a heart, there was a scale; those bits are fallen leaves – though with a touch they could live again – and all together they danced in the order of Chaos, the most beautiful pattern of all.
But the pattern was leading to her death, and the death of those she cared for, and that was not as she wished it. And so, blindly yet seeing all, Nira pushed. The probabilities of the moment shifted, expanded, reordered themselves, and collapsed back into a reality that had not existed one second before. It was a reality in which her friends stood unopposed, because every single Naga had been knocked flat on its back and rendered unconscious by a magnetic tremor passing through their bodies that left the humans unscathed.
Except for the priestess. The tremor made her body erupt from within. A red, formless ruin slumped to the floor of the dais without a sound. From within the timeless cocoon of the wisdom of ultimate power, Nira thought it seemed only just. The whip fell to scattering dust, and she drew her first breath as a being of power, marveling at the myriad functions that single breath fed. She instructed the tree to release her from its grip, and she rose to the surface of the altar, pulsing with strength and understanding.
One of the humans, the bearded one, ran to her. A corner of his mind was clouded, she could see, and she knew that a moment’s work would put it right, but his speaking distracted her from the issue. “Put it away, Nira. In your pocket. Not touching your skin. Please, Nira. Put it away.”
The sounds were so ridiculously simple, so bereft of deeper meaning, that it was curiously difficult to derive the sense of them. Once she had, she thought it might be amusing to allow the creature to have his way, so she slipped the wise old Shard of glass, remnant of those long gone, into the loose pocket of her trousers.
She collapsed, and Gamarron was there, scooping her up, speaking her name. Nira. I am Nira, and he’s Gamarron. Her old sense of self sprang back to life, and her guts cramped at what she had just done. I used the Chaos. The thing they had only let an experienced wielder do under the most extreme of duress, she had waltzed into without a care in the world, without even realizing what she had done. I could have killed us all!
The Naga were stirring, slowly regaining consciousness. Tychus was the first to reach their side. He had been hiding below, she knew, though she couldn’t sort through the last several minutes well enough to figure out how she knew it. “That was ridiculously satisfying,” admitted the Naga, “but now would be an excellent time to make an exit.” Nira pushed against Gamarron, and he set her gently on her feet. She swayed but stayed upright. Her guts didn’t feel right, but there was no time for worrying about it.
Kest caught her by the arm as she swayed, and she managed a shaky grin and said, “Top that, Mister Beast Rider.”
“I heard more voices below,” Renna reported, joining them. “We’ve stirred the hive.” Guyrin cowered behind her, trying to stay as far from Nira as he could without standing among the waking Naga.
“No problem,” crowed Tychus. “Just have little miss Chaos here…” he waved an arm lazily at the ramp, carelessly indicating all the tree and its denizens below them, “take care of it.”
Nira blanched and shook her head, thinking with horror on how casually she had wielded the Chaos while her mind was empowered by it. She didn’t dare to look at what was left of the high priestess. And she just felt wrong inside, as if her guts had a rock in them. “No,” she said, trying not to retch. “Please… I don’t think I can.”
“Do you have another way down from this tree?” inquired the Naga breeder with false politeness. “I’d love to hear it.”
“Quickly would be best,” interjected Renna, who was watching the Naga get back on their tails and gather themselves.
Nira thought of the knowledge she had of the tree, and the island on which it stood. That understanding had been expanded by her touch with Chaos. She knew what the tree was made of, how it luminesced, and exactly how elastic its flesh was. She tried to calculate out the idea that came to her, but her mind had shrunk back within her human skull, and the numbers were beyond her. Well, shit. Time to gamble. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” she announced. They’d never agree if she told them, so instead she turned heel and ran to the edge of the bower.
She jumped off.
Her stomach lurched and spun, and
