Page 5 of Shadowlands Omega

Hands drag me out from underneath him. People are racing around, trying the other windows and exits, but for every door opened, another arrow greets the one to make the attempt. I can hear their screams. “Farro!” The shriek wrenches out of Justine. Only a few feet away from me, Zelie is trying to staunch the wound in the center of Tor’s chest, but I know already that Tor’s not going to make it.

“Kia, help me!” she shouts. Automatically, I roll onto my knees, crawling until I reach his body. I press my palms over Zelie’s to increase the pressure around the arrow’s thick shaft. We try to hold back the bleeding while Tor sputters up mouthfuls of blood. It slashes across his pale skin and his eyes roll back.

“Should we try to remove it?” someone says.

I shake my head, but it’s Zelie who vocalizes it. “No!” she shouts. I’m still shaking my head and staring into Tor’s lifeless blue eyes as huge gales of thick grey smoke bleed around the edges of the front door.

Everyone is crying. My heart is a battle axe in my chest,just like the one that he bore, cleaving away everything that matters. Everything that counts.

I picture his face, the little I saw of it, as he came up the road. Wreathed in darkness, just as his skin had been cloaked by it. I’d sensed more than seen his justice, his firm hand, his desire for retribution. I know it has something to do with my parents and my sisters and the Betas and the dead bodies in the cellar. I know it does.

I love my family more than life itself, but right now I can’t help but wonder why they did what they did? Why did they feel they had to? My mama said she wanted more for us. More. More more more. More will be what kills us. And I find a sentient rage simmering in my chest along with that all too potent grief, too.I was fine with less.

A window shatters and I look up in time to see the flash of glass sailing through the air, something alight sticking out of it. “Someone catch it!” a voice says. But no one catches it. It shatters against a row of empty pews near the altar and they blaze instantly.

The church was built to burn, its body nothing but a crucible.My body was built to burn. I am nothing but a crucible.

The heat is immediately sweltering. My eyes start to water. Several more of my people try for the broken windows and I see in cold clarity as Justine takes an arrow to the stomach. Justine. She’d been my friend for as long as I can remember. I went to all of her birthday parties. We snuck out once together and took our punishments together, too.

She went with me to the Heart Forest once — that was back before Paradise Hole had grown over that section of it. Just on the southernmost edge healing berries used to grow. We even managed to sell some of them in our village market before Owenna and Justine’s older brother, Victor, caught us. They sentenced us to take over the latrine duty in the castle. We’d had to do it for a week and, though they thought it was punishment, it had been one of the most memorable weeks of my life. It’d been my first time inside of the castle and I’d been cleaning a latrine on the first floor when I saw him for the very first time up close.

He’d been talking to one of his Crimson Riders in the long, breezy corridor. He hadn’t seen me, of that I’m sure. I’d been twelve. He’d been twenty. The energy cascading up and down the entire hall had shifted with his presence — it was what drew me out there in the first place. It’s the same energy I feel in the air now. Subtle vibrations. They’re terrifying, unwelcome.Unwelcome, but still magical.

Fire licks up the walls. Bodies fall over one another in desperation. Someone is screaming my sister’s name and I see that Owenna has thrown herself over my father, who is…he has an arrow sticking out of his back. What… How…

“Cyprus!” Zelie screams. The room fills with smoke. I can’t see. Everything stings — my eyelids, my nostrils, my lungs, with every inhale. I glance to my right to see Sandra and Nikolai shrieking as they hide beneath the pews. Engaged, their wedding is set for next month. They asked me to bake the cake. It’s not the first time I’ve baked a wedding cake, but I was honored.

A burning fills my chest. I release Tor and clutch at my apron with bloody hands.Bloody, like my father and mother’s aprons had been in the cellar.Zelie screams my name next. I try to look up and find her, but I can’t see… And then Cyprus’s voice chimes, “Move, Kia,move!”

But he’s too late. A huge weight slams into my back.

The fire. Something’s on fire. It’s on fire on top of me, pinning me to the ground and I can’t move. I open my eyes and see Cyprus crawling towards me on his belly, but I want to tell him to stop, it’s no use. I’m dying.

“Kiandah, no!” Cyprus roars and he’s suddenly up on his knees, touching at whatever’s got me pinned, moving it off of me. Lifting it like it weighs nothing.

“Cyprus,” I whisper, amazed. He’s almost got the beam completely off of me now, but before he can fully dislodge it, a massive, splintering sound shakes the foundation of the church. Cyprus says my name again and I look up at him over my shoulder as he burns both of his hands, just to help me. Save me. But I notice that his hands aren’t the same hands they’ve always been. They’rebigger. His chest swells. His eyes flare as they connect with mine. All at once, he emits a powerful scent marker, like he’s wearing cologne, and while it doesn’t appeal to me — he’s my brother — I still gasp as I watch him ascend.

“Cyprus,” I say again, shocked. It’s…not possible. No one ascends this old. No one in the Shadowlands haseverascended over the age of twenty. Most ascend by the time they’re thirteen, if not younger. He shouldn’t be ascending. It’s a miracle from the ancestors. I want to laugh, because it’s terrible that he may be Gatamora’s greatest miracle and that he won’t survive to prove it, and I won’t survive to tell the tale. No one will.

“Cyprus…” I inhale and his eyes widen to orbs.

“Kia…” he starts to say, but his voice is taken over by a massive cracking sound. In the next moment, Cyprus is gone, his lower half fallen beneath flaming floorboards while his torso tries to crawl back over the floorboards that remain to get to me. But the fire is too hot, the flames too high. They burn right against the skin of my arm. They dance over my dress, eat at my hair, my eyelashes…but who gives a shit about any of that because Cyprus… I can feel in my bones that I’m losing him and I have to do something.

I open my mouth. Pain hits me again as the fire climbs inside of my mouth, but as I swallow it whole, itmovesthrough me, changing…transforming…becoming something beautiful. My eyes roll back as a horrible, wonderful bliss chars my entire body.

Cyprus is moaning, still alive, but not for long. I exhale and inhale that desire to save, that belief that I can, and then…I feel warm. Fire comes to me, like a distant friend, like a lost lover, like the warm embrace of every charred and fallen ancestor.

Cyprus is pinned underneath a fallen rafter, just like I am, but he’s not on fire anymore. The fire seems to have dispersed to smoke around him and he coughs these terrible, hacking coughs as he breathes it in.

Cyprus, you ascended, you can’t die now,I would’ve shouted at him, had I the voice. My left cheek is pressed to the floor. I manage to move my arms, get my palms beneath me. I push, knowing that the beam that has me pinned is too heavy to move, but that’s okay, because I’m not trying to move it.

Fire flicks at my vision, brilliant and blue. I look past it, wondering how it’s possible that I can see through it. Maybe I’m already dead. But I can’t believe it. I don’t think death would hurt like this. Pain rattles all over me in too many places to process at once. Sweat slicks my skin and I close my eyes longer than the standard blink, and when I open them, I see everything through a filter of blue and what I see astonishes me.

The bright orange fire? The red flames licking at the walls? They’re creeping towards me. The fire is crawling, shimmying, dancing gleefully over the rafters and the thatch roof above it — what’s left of it — down the walls, over the pews towards me. The fire leaves black scorch marks everywhere it touches, but it avoids the people. It bypasses them, disappearing when their bodies lie across the journey it wishes to take and resuming right after or simply carving broad paths around their outlines.

It doesn’t even touch Tor even though he’s right in front of me. It doesn’t touch Cyprus even though he’s right beside me, but skips across the beam pinning him in the floor. The flames converge against me, becoming me, joining with the blue fire that coats my body like oil until the pews become blackened ash. The windows and walls are pocked with holes that look like mouths with shards of glass for teeth, but they are no longer burning. Now, the only thing burning is me.

I hear people coughing. I hear shrill shrieks. They may be in pain but they’re alive. Thank the ancestors.Thank me.Tears prick my eyes. I did it. I don’t…I don’t understand…

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