Page 143 of While the Dark Remains
I look down into the Sea of Bones, wicked and grinning in the moonlight. I look at Ballast, his face racked in anguish.
“I’m afraid of falling,” I whisper. Tears blur my vision.
His jaw works. “I know.”
My heart beats, beats. I take a breath of ice-sharp air. I turn once more to the Sea.
And then I leap off the cliff.
All the breath is sucked out of my lungs as the frozen wind laughs and tumbles me downward.
Down, down, down.
I’m falling.
Falling.
Terror clouds my vision as images flash through my head: my sister’s wings, Kallias’s laugh, my roar that shook the very mountain.
But I’m falling, falling, the ice thundering up to meet me with its open, bony arms.
I’m screaming, somewhere outside of myself. Tears freeze on my cheeks. He told me to trust him and I did.
Still I fall, fall.
I scrabble desperately for my magic. But the only thing in my mind is fear.
My eyes close. A deadness steals through me, and I know there are only seconds left before I smash against the ice.
I am nothing, no one.
I fall
fall
fall.
I blink and see the chamber where the Bronze God once sat, mutilated and alone. His table is empty now, the candle guttered out. The hooks lie glinting wickedly in his vacant seat.
But the chest containing my magic is nowhere to be found.
Outside of my mind the wind rushes around me, the ice claws at my hair, the Sea of Bones reaches up to shatter me.
I will be nothing more than a memory, a whispered nothingness in the dead of winter dreams.
Inside my mind, I snatch the silver hooks and run from the chamber into the ancient cavern, where I’m greeted by crumbling statues and stone pillars half worn away. Everywhere, there are cracks in the stone, and I scrabble frantically inside each one, searching, searching, for the place I hid away my magic.
The silver hooks burn in my other hand, bitter fire gnawing down to bone.
My heart beats, beats.
Outside me, I am falling.
I dig into the cracks, anguished with each one that turns out empty.
But then I see a spark in the stone, glittering bronze, and I shove my hand into the rock and draw out the chest.
I sink to my knees as I open it, my magic mounded in a glittering pile. I tremble, because I’ve found it now, and I don’t know how to take it back again.
