Page 37 of All Out of Flux
“Is everything okay?” I asked, rubbing circles down his back.
“Get away from me,” he said, his voice hoarse.
“But — ”
He shoved me away with a strength that far surpassed his lean frame. I stumbled back in shock, and then in awe, watching as blue fire exploded from his body, blazing like every inch of him was alight. Leon screamed, his face raised to the heavens. Tiamat’s fire wasn’t burning him, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t searing him on the inside.
“Tell me what I can do.” I hadn’t said it loud enough for anyone but myself to hear, the despair clotting my voice. Penetrate. Obfuscate. Dissipate. Illuminate. What could I possibly do to help Leon now?
“Emanate!”
I heard the word in my head, not from Leon’s lips. In this state, he no longer needed to speak to command the dragons. Was he even in control anymore?
The ground beneath me trembled, splintered, cracked. Jagged spires of rock thrust upward precisely at my location. My heart quavered — not fire, not water, but earth.
This was Bahamut’s doing. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. An enormous hand reached out of the broken asphalt, the ends of each lamppost-thick finger tipped with wicked talons. This was the grasping claw of a dragon, but almost certainly not to scale. Small mercies. The hand wrapped around me, sharp rock snagging at my clothing, ripping into my leather jacket.
The dragon’s hand squeezed. I screamed, locked in the crushing embrace of an ancient dragon. A mere fraction of Bahamut’s power, but concentrated on the fragility of the human body — I could imagine it, hear my bones breaking, my muscles tearing.
“Leon,” I shouted, the agony shooting through my body. I writhed, flailed, shredding the skin of my hands as I struggled in vain. “Please. You can’t let them take over.”
Magic swirled in Leon’s eyes, azure and green and yellow as the dragons battled for dominance.
I slammed my palms against the talons, wriggling in their grasp. My hands looked so small. Sweat and rainwater dripped down the back of my neck. The human body wasn’t designed to take this amount of pressure. Any longer and Bahamut would crush me into paste. And all the while, Brendan Shum took his sweet time approaching, lips moving as he muttered the words of his ritual, fingers weaving the right magic.
“Don’t kill him,” Leon wailed. “This isn’t what I wanted.”
He was still in there. I just had to get him out before I died in the attempt. And then the rock hand crumbled away, the fingersshattering into rubble. I fell to the ground winded, bones aching, skin scraped, my blood mingling with rainwater.
The rainwater. It wasn’t falling upward anymore. Now the raindrops swirled around Leon, slowly at first, gaining speed. Clever boy. In order to save me, he’d allowed a different dragon to take over. Bakunawa this time. But how long could Leon keep this up?
The rainwater spun and spun in a ring around Leon’s position, gathering into threads, gouts, until he’d built a rushing, opaque wave. With a shout he thrust his hand forward, directing the flow toward Brendan Shum. The wave slammed with the force of a cannonball, a log jam, a ballista fired at full speed.
The Quartz Spider’s scream cut short as he flew off his feet, thrown outside the circle. I chuckled, then spat out a mouthful of blood and water. How soon I’d forgotten that at least one of Leon’s dragons wasn’t as obsessed with destruction as the others. Bakunawa was the closest thing we had to a good guy.
“You can’t stop me,” Brendan snarled, swiping water away from his face, forcing his way back into the circle. “I’ve worked too long and too hard for this. Things must go back to the way they once were.”
“That’s not how this works,” Leon said, his words coming out through gritted teeth. He was winning, taking over the dragons, or at least gaining the upper hand. “I don’t know the first thing about chronomancy, but there are some things that magic can’t fix.”
“He’s right,” I shouted, picking myself up from the asphalt, wobbling as I rose to my feet. “Even necromancers know better. If death magic can’t bring him back, what good can time magic do?”
And its consequences were somehow even more dire.
Steam hissed wherever the wave of water struck the Quartz Spider. He continued walking unhindered, Bakunawa’smanipulated water changing into vapor, remembering what it once was, rendered harmless by time magic.
“I’m so close now,” Brendan said, resuming the weaving of the spell web between his fingers, the tumbling of the hourglass. “Why can’t you understand that? Let me wind the clock back. No harm done. Take us all back to the day before he died.”
My skin crawled. Brendan’s grief knew no bounds. How long had it been since his brother had died? How selfish was it of me to think of Leon above all things else? If the Quartz Spider brought the world back to a time before Leon and I met, where would that leave us? I wouldn’t remember having ever met him, everything we’d shared together. The pang of loss gripped hard around my heart, somehow hurting more than Bahamut’s stony grasp.
But the consequences of Brendan’s ritual could be farther reaching. Just how far would the spell go? And his mastery of chronomancy was clearly imperfect, the magic improvised from what he’d pieced together himself in place of proper training, the components cobbled together from disparate parts. All the time anomalies he’d manifested had been so destructive, potentially more so if Leon and I had never intervened. This enchanted hourglass, a clock formed by the twelve mirrors of the Masque’s image — the Quartz Spider could rupture time itself, unravel the fabric of reality.
And even then, even knowing all this, my heart ruled above all my other instincts. I rushed Leon headfirst, trusting the impact of my shoulder against his torso to confuse and disorient both him and the dragons, buy me enough time to bring him out of Brendan’s circle of madness. I threw him over my shoulder and ran with all my might. Tiamat could burn me. Bakunawa could drown me, and Bahamut could flay the skin from my flesh. Leon would always come first.
His fingers dug like talons into my back, nails biting through the leather of my jacket. I knew it was him fighting, straining every muscle in his body to contain the power of the dragons. Good effort. That was all we needed, just long enough for me to race past the circle of Masques. And when we did —
“You saved me,” Leon whispered in my ear.
“I haven’t yet,” I whispered back. “You have to save yourself.”
