Excerpt: The Mother of the Mountain

Ellian stepped in front of them, an oddly menacing gesture from so young a child, putting himself between them and their exit. He glanced around the ledge warily. “Is there something you do not wish us to know about?” he accused. Iah opened his mouth to respond and Ellian toppled over sideways, blood gushing from his neck.

It took Iah a breathless moment to understand what had happened. The drake was on top of the boy, rippling back into visibility as it thrashed. The pale white of the boy’s skin was already darkening to a frightening gray. Iah was paralyzed with shock.

Not so Sol. Within moments he was on top of the drake, trying to wrestle it off the boy. The creature let Ellian go long enough to screech—a high-pitched rasping sound. It flailed its body, writhing to try to get Sol off its back.

As soon as it dropped the boy, Iah rushed to Ellian’s side. He fumbled out his crystal from his belt pouch, drew in the energy as fast as he dared. He tried to send the tendrils into Ellian’s body, to see how bad the damage was, if there was anything he could fix.

But he couldn’t. Something was wrong, strange. The veins, the rushing blood that Iah would normally insinuate his magic into, had hardened. What had once been passages of life were solid stone branches, filling up the boy’s body. Iah opened his eyes and switched to a more mundane approach, hoping to staunch the wound however he could, but the boy was no longer bleeding. The torn-open edges of his flesh were like granite, solid and petrified. Iah felt for a pulse, but found none. Ellian’s eyes were open, his body heavy and cooling. He was already dead.

Iah wrenched his gaze back to Sol, who still straddled the drake’s back. The animal’s head was just barely too short to twist back and bite him, and he was far enough from the tail to avoid injury there as well. Desperate, the drake rolled, grinding Sol against the rock ledge. His pack was scraped open, supplies scattering and rolling off the nearby edge of the cliff, but somehow Sol managed to maintain his hold. It certainly wouldn’t last long, however.

Iah’s fingers tightened around the crystal in his hand as he wrenched magic from it, desperately searching his mind for some technique that could help them. He’d learned a handful by now; surely one of them must be useful.

All that came to mind was fireworks. Silly, showy, impractical, but there would be light and noise. The memory of the classroom was as clear as if he was standing in it, Noki’s firm voice saying, “Compress it, tight. Put pressure on the magic until it fights the confinement, until it boils with it. Then, let it slip-”

A rocket of light shot out of Iah’s crystal and up into the sky just as the drake managed to peel Sol off its back against the edge of the mountain. The drake turned back to face its attacker, and then the rocket exploded in a cloud of light and smoke.

The drake startled with its whole body, shifting its stance. Its tail cracked through the air like a whip, striking Sol just below the knee. Sol howled in pain, but the sound was hidden under the continuing pop and boom of the magical light exploding.

The drake took off, flitting across the stone ledge with its strange lizard run and then disappearing into a previously unnoticed crack in the mountainside.

Iah was immediately at Sol’s side. He gingerly touched the enormous red scrape that the creature had left on Sol’s leg, making him hiss. It was slightly bloody, but the damage to the skin looked superficial. “Are you okay?” Iah asked.

Sol shook his head. “I think it’s broken,” he said through clenched teeth. “What about Ellian, is he...?”

“He’s dead,” said Iah. His body felt numb, slow.

Sol’s face pinched in grief, his eyes squeezed shut. For a moment he just panted, harsh breaths filling the silence. Iah didn’t know what to say.

“Take our packs and throw them over the cliff,” said Sol after a moment. Iah just stared at him, confused. “There’s no way they didn’t hear your flare. And that’s assuming Ellian didn’t manage to tell the other spellchildren where we are before he died. They’ll be coming down to check what happened. We shouldn’t let them know we were trying to leave.”

Iah gaped for a moment, his mind racing. “No, we should go, we can be gone before they get here, we-”

“I can’t walk like this,” Sol pointed out. “There’s no way we could outrun them.”

“I can heal you, I have the strength to channel again, I just need to rest for a second, I can- we can-”

“Their son is dead, Iah,” Sol said sharply, silencing him.

The weight of the words settled into the air around them, heavy and final as a tombstone. After a moment Iah got up and gathered the scattered items that had burst from Sol’s pack. Taking both satchels by the strap, he walked to the edge of the stone ledge and tossed them, far enough that they slid out of sight, bouncing down towards the treeline. Then he returned to Sol’s side to wait.

“Something’s wrong,” Sol said after a few moments.

“I’m sure they’ll be-” Iah started to say, but Sol shook his head. Or at least, he started to. The motion seemed to unsteady him and he tipped over, falling sideways onto the dusty stone. Luckily he’d already been sitting, so it wasn’t a long distance to fall.

“Sol?” Iah could hear the panic in his own voice. Somehow through all of this he had been calm; paralyzed, indecisive, slower than he should be, but calm. Seeing Sol slump over made his heart race with a deep fear that felt horribly, painfully real. No emotion should ever feel so immediate, so present; it seemed unfair of the universe to allow such a feeling within it.

“Iah, I-” Sol twisted on the ground to look up at him. “Did I... am I lying down? How did...? I feel... off...” He squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed.

Iah checked his pulse. It seemed faster than it should have been. No fever, at least not yet, and not pronounced enough to feel with his hand. Infection couldn’t be setting in so soon, could it? Iah looked back at the wound on Sol’s leg. The scrape had torn several holes through the loose pants under his robe, but it wasn’t like the garment was in tatters. The bleeding had already stopped, so why...?

As he examined it more closely, Iah saw what he had missed before.

Sticking out of the wound were a series of fine hairs, thin enough to be nearly transparent, and stiff like little needles. They were almost like porcupine quills, but more slender. Iah hesitated, unsure if he should pull them out. He’d had to pull quills out of the faces of dogs before; the things were nasty and barbed at the tip, and wouldn’t release easily. If left in, however, they had a tendency to slide in deeper.

Even more worrying was the effect they seemed to be having on Sol. He was growing paler, sweating profusely, and his heart was still racing. This couldn’t just be a reaction to the wound itself.

“I’m going to use magic on you, okay?” said Iah. “I’m sorry, but I need to see what’s wrong.”

Sol nodded, swallowing, his eyes still closed.

Iah put his hand on his crystal again and drew the magic carefully into himself. He put a hand on Sol’s leg, insinuating himself into the blood, feeling his mind slowly reach out into Sol’s body...

Poison. There was something foreign, something insidious in Sol’s bloodstream, coming from the wound. Iah wasn’t sure what it was, only that it felt wrong. It was out of place in the body. His focus swam around the interior of the wound, but the hair-like needles had already delivered their payload. There was no containing it anymore; it was in him now, being pumped through his body with the rest of his blood.

Iah clenched his jaw and forced himself to take deep breaths. He was going to have to do something stupid.

Poison, like infection, was difficult to fight with magic. Almost no healer ever actually attempted removal; it required a great deal of magic, could kill an unwary healer through over-channeling, and often didn’t work anyway. Each infected drop—every cell of the foreign or contaminated matter—had to be individually tracked down and eliminated. It was grueling, and took hours even for a small infection. When it was done at all, it was almost always done in pairs or groups, so that one person could replace another when they became exhausted.

None of this mattered. Iah set himself to following the trail of foreign bodies, tracking down the strange little gray chunks of matter in Sol’s bloodstream. It was a bit like trying to kill all the ants coming out of an anthill: there was no shortage of targets, and it was easy enough to kill one individually by applying a little jolt of extra magic to burn and wither it into nothing, but it was incredibly difficult to tell if he was getting them all.

The process was repetitive, but required a great deal of focus. Iah tried not to think about anything else, to lose himself in the healing. Seek forward in the blood vessel. Find the poison. Burn it. Find the next, until there were no more to see. Seek forward, branch into another vessel. Protect the vital organs first: brain, heart, lungs. Can you see where the poison is pooling? Where is it trying to go, what is it attacking? A larger chunk than usual over here... gathering there? Or coincidence? Eliminated. Onto the next.

Much too quickly, Iah felt himself growing tired. He’d already spent more energy than he cared to admit working the unfamiliar magic of the firework. He’d been careless in his panic, probably channeled more magic than he’d needed to. In a distant, disconnected way he could feel sweat dripping down his own skin. He was more aware of Sol’s body than his own right now, but the sharp focus of the magic that kept that true was fading alarmingly fast.

Iah forced himself to ignore it. The poison had to be dealt with. There was no way he was going to get it all, but maybe if he could get enough he could keep it from killing Sol. This was the only thought he had space for in his mind. Just get enough. Just remove enough. Sol’s body could do the rest, if he could just get enough.

Move through the veins, the arteries. Hunt it down. It became harder and harder the more he eliminated; stray gray shapes became fewer and farther between, much easier to miss when they weren’t in large clumps. He also had to be careful not to accidentally damage anything that was supposed to be there. Iah had never felt this focused on a body before, this aware of every detail. Was the cell wall supposed to be that way? Was that normal? What about the firmness of the liver? Was it the correct consistency? He felt like he’d never seen an internal organ before, hyper-aware of anything that could be wrong, unsure of what, exactly, the poison was doing to harm the body.

His focus grew dimmer. Iah fought the exhaustion, raged against it. No time for rest. No time for weakness. Find the poison. Burn it. Move forward. Find the poison. There was more left still, he knew it. Find it. This couldn’t be all. Find it. Find it. Find it.

It wasn’t just Iah that was fading quickly. The magic flickered, and Iah realized with mounting horror that it wasn’t just his own bodily weakness; he must be approaching crystal exhaustion. It was something he’d never experienced before himself, but he’d been warned about it. Towards the bottom of its magical reserve, a crystal’s magic became temperamental; unreliable. A sign that it was nearly empty of magic and would soon exhaust completely.

Iah tried desperately to ignore the alarming flickers and find what he could before the magic ran out. There was still so much poison left. He was missing something. It was going somewhere and he was missing it, not seeing it, it was-

In the muscles. It was building up in Sol’s muscles, stopping his body’s signals from firing.

The image went dark.

No no no no no. Iah could have screamed as he felt himself fading back into his own body. He needed more magic. He wasn’t done yet. He was sweating heavily, spots swimming in front of his eyes, breath coming in exhausted pants. But he could do more. He needed to go back in, he needed to finish what he had started, he needed to save Sol, he needed-

He looked down at the crystal, at the now dull and lifeless shell that had given every last drop to assist him. That was it, there was nothing more he could do. Without the necessary power-

By Iah’s leg, a tingle.

Ellian’s body, on the ground next to him, and under it-

A glistening puddle on the stone, just barely touching the edge of Iah’s leg. That hadn’t been there before.

No, not a puddle.

Crystal. Crystal like the mountain. Crystal like magic. Where had it come from? It hadn’t been there before. It didn’t look normal.

It didn’t matter. Iah dropped his exhausted crystal and shifted until he could lay his hand on top of the stone formation. Power thrummed under him, surged up his arm and into his heart. It tasted strange, like crackling ozone, but he didn’t question it. He dove back into Sol, drove the magic forward.