Page 25 of The Shadow Wand

I hesitate, wanting the small animal to have time to hide deep in the earth, safe from me.

And then I take a deep, quavering breath and raise the wand.

I begin to speak the words to the candle-lighting spell, the words beginning to roll off my tongue as if drawn out of me by the wand, and it begins.

Tension builds in my lower body, warm and simmering, as the words draw up Erthia’s power. This sensation doesn’t surprise me. I’ve felt it before.

But then the rumble of energy coursing through my lines coalesces in a wholly new way. The power contracts and intensifies, then makes a sudden rush for my wand hand with startling force, fire magic blazing through my affinity lines.

I gasp as my wand hand burns hot and begins to glow scarlet without pain, my fingers seeming fused to the wand as my entire body contracts toward it, driving the air from my lungs and rooting me to the spot. Tremors begin at my feet and slowly work their way up my legs as panic seizes hold. Soon, my whole body is quaking with violent energy, and I’m helpless to stop it. I gasp and strain against it, completely at the mercy of Erthia’s massive, unpredictable power.

I cry out as another overwhelming surge of power shoots up from Erthia, through my body and wand arm, and courses straight through the wand.

Fire explodes from the wand’s tip in a roar, rapidly furcating into thick streams of flame that fan out over the desert, the streams coalescing into a blazing flood that sets every last bit of vegetation alight as I buck and tremble, completely at the mercy of the power.

The sea of fire surges forward and engulfs the landscape, multiple exploding fireballs at its edges destroying everything in their path.

The fire flashes toward the horizon, up the distant hills, arcing skyward, its heat building. Pillars of black smoke rise as the great ocean of fire crests and then starts to curl backward, everything transformed into a cataclysmic world of flame.

Aghast, I struggle to pull my hand away from the wand, away from the power that has taken on a life of its own, as the great arc of fire starts its tidal wave roll back toward us.

A scream rises in my throat.

My savage connection to the wand abruptly gives way and I wrench my hand from it, falling backward onto the ground as the wand falls from my grip and the roaring inferno crashes down on me, a sky of fire meeting earth.

Frantic yelling in the language of the sorceresses. Horses screaming as the searing heat plummets onto us, accompanied by the earsplitting, all-encompassing roar of the fire.

I close my eyes tight as the fire flickers red through my lids and the heat rises, and I wait for the terrible pain. My Vu Trin garments are made to shield the wearer from fire, but they can’t possibly protect me fromthis.

I’m going to burn to death.

I scream as the fire burns through me, and I wait to feel my own flesh melting down to exposed nerve endings, then to bone, and finally to dust. I keep screaming, the sound drowned out as the fire roars its unbearable heat through me, its force shaking me like a discarded rag doll.

And then I surrender, falling into the fire the way the drowning must eventually submit to the water, as I wait for death to turn the red to black.

The black comes, and the roar begins to die away.

Lying on the ground, I feel for my body and am shocked to find it solid and whole. The dry, crackling sound of fire is all around, the acrid taste of smoke in my mouth as a cool breeze touches my cheek.

Theskinof my cheek.

Dazed, I reach up and touch flesh that is still miraculously there.

I feel strangely disconnected from the panicked whinnying of horses in the distance, the cries of the sorceresses frantically calling to each other in their language, the din like a faraway dream.

I open my eyes and sit up, afraid of what I’ll find, not completely trusting my body to be whole.

Before me is a charred, smoldering landscape, even the stone formations rendered to ash. Small brush fires dot the desert as far as the eye can see. A bloodred sky filled with clouds of black smoke looms above it all.

Stunned, I hold up my hands and turn them over and over.

They’re covered in black soot, but still there, marked by the fasting lines. I glance down at my body. My fireproof Vu Trin garb is sooty, but intact. But the travel bag and wand-belt that hung from my waist have been burned away, only a few singed leather strands remaining, the Wand of Myth nowhere in sight.

I lift my hands closer to my eyes, stunned by the sight of them.Unharmed.

Recklessly curious, I thrust my finger into a small brush fire that burns beside me. The heat courses through my finger as I turn it over as if coating it in rich honey, but...nothing.I thrust in my entire hand, then my arm. Nothing again.

I’m impervious to fire.

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