Page 83 of A City of Emeralds and Envy
The scrying stone, the gods-tear, gleams in the brown hands of the girl with the one blue eye…
And I have been forced into my true form by the boy’s wish…
Fuck.
They are doing this on purpose.
No. No, no, no…
The West Witch sits up.
Not dead.
Not dead, not dead, no, thiscannotbe happening, no… I struggle to change forms, but I cannot fight the wish. I am trapped like this for five minutes.
The girl with the braids takes a book from her pocket and hands it to the West Witch. “I give you the Tama Olc, of my free will, to be yours…”
No, I want to scream aloud, but I have no lungs or mouth in this form. I cannot make a sound.
I can only burn.
The West Witch accepts the book and rises from the hammock in which he was carried. He stalks toward me, his eyes wide open, green magic flickering around his body as it reverts from stony gray to cursed green. He’s intoning a spell…thespell. The one I fear above all else.
The others are watching, circling, closing in, their faces avid and hungry. They are scrawny, crook-necked, grotesque vultures, ravenous for my demise.
The old words on the West Witch’s lips are sapping what little strength I have left. Each phrase lashes around me, sentence after sentence forging invisible chains of arcane power. The other god-stars were fuckingfoolsto let the Fae have magic at all. They thought it would be a wise balance to our cosmic power, but it was moronic, tragic.
In my fury I claw at the binding force of the wish, seeking a loophole. I have little time and even less power, but…
Jasper wished to retain his sight and memories… to have no harm done to his friends…
Ah, there’s the crack in their scheme, the hole in the wording.
No harm tohis friends.
But I can do harm tohim. Not to his sight or his memories, but I can hurt him. I canruinhim.
A bolt of energy snakes out from me, striking its target just in time, just before I cave inward. I hear screams of shattered love and mortal anguish echoing through my throne room. They are the sweetest music…
But I have barely a second to enjoy those cries.
I am crushed, shrinking...
Growing smaller...
Fighting... I can fight this...
Smaller
Until I am
So very small
And the last line of the spell sucks me into the orb
Where I float, muddled and dazed
The dragon squished into the head of a pin, and there is no more room for plans or thoughts
