Page 252 of The Cradle of Ice
I need you.
She felt his gaze sharing hers, his hand in hers, his memories with hers.
As with the dome’s door, she struck the copper—and dove into its emptiness.
Daal gasped in her ear, maybe using her chest. They were both too confounded together to tell one from the other.
She flooded through those empty spaces, around those hardened motes spinning with energy. She showed him the duality that still defied her understanding.
The all of solid copper, yet the nothing within.
All yet nothing.
She swept along the floor until she sensed the shadow entrenched above. The darkness of bronze. She dove deeper into the copper, ducking under the Root’s position.
She shared with Daal the memory of the copper floor vibrating and rippling up the Root’s legs. She showed him the tendrils of bronze draping across the copper, spreading his base thinner.
Once under that shadow, she gathered her light and Daal’s fire. She took both and forged a golden spear and shot upward, traveling with it. She pierced through the thin bronze at the Root’s base—and burst into his core.
The emptiness of bronze exploded into liquid fire and impossible energies. Suns were born and died around her. Or so it seemed, so it felt. She clung to Daal, torn and ripped by forces and dynamisms she had no words for. She became both fleeting storm and ageless rock. Madness threatened in a breath.
Then she spotted it—or willed into being because she knew it must be here.
Above her hung a perfect cube of crystal, pulsing with golden fire.
Like the sphere.
Like in Shiya.
She drove toward it, then hovered. She dared not crush it or it might end the world. She hung there in the wildstorm at the Root’s core, struggling how to smother the cube’s fire, to deactivate without destroying.
She cast a few questing tendrils.
Can I pick this lock like I did the dome’s door?
She touched the cube, and in a heartbeat, she knew the truth.
I can do this.
But that single beat took too long.
The world burst around her with an explosive boom.
She was thrown far, out of the storm, out of bronze, and into her own body. She slammed hard, toppling backward to the copper floor. A wave of emerald fire blasted over her and away.
She struggled to breathe, to remember how. She finally gasped once, coughed, and breathed again. She sat up into chaos. Her vision swam; her ears rang hollowly and muffled. Sights became snatches of confusion.
Another thunderous boom made her flinch.
Before her, the Root had reared up, hardening all of his surfaces. He fled to the dome wall, a blur of metal. He shoved a hand into the labyrinth of crystal and pipes, melting his fingers deeper. Jagged bolts of green fire spat and chained over the arc of the dome and blazed down to his arm, sweeping over his body, turning his bronze into a lightning rod for those infernal energies.
Nyx despaired, knowing the Root was impenetrable now.
Next to her, Daal struggled to rise to an elbow, drained and shivering, pale nearly unto death.
Then Krysh and Graylin crashed upon them and struggled to drag them up. The world spun worse. The alchymist shouted something to Graylin, but the ringing in her ears deafened his words. Still, he pointed to the side.
Her head swung in that direction, responding to Krysh’s terror.
