“I feel it, too.” The hum of energy emanating from the heart crystal hammered spikes into my skull, all but drowning out the sweeter notes I’d heard earlier.
When I looked up, I spotted the eggs. Lying amid of the multicolored crystalline floor, the drab spheres struck me as insultingly ugly. There were nine, each no larger than an ostrich egg, and all were the same dead gray as the gargoyles we’d encountered on the mountain. Several were cracked open, and I looked away from the lifeless husks inside.
A flare of earth and air boiled out of the crack in the heart crystal high above me, the elements snarling together as they drifted through the crystal wall. I gaped at the newly formed magical storm. Anywhere else in the world, I would have said the spontaneous creation of wild magic was impossible. The elements existed all around us, but it was people or creatures who called them forth and put them to use. They didn’t burst unguided from inert stone.
But this wasn’t ordinary quartz. It might have been sedentary, but if the heart crystal could use magic to rejuvenate gargoyles and protect itself, it wielded magic as adroitly as any walking, breathing creature. Broken, it’d lost control of its own powers and the elements escaped, warped and deadly.
If saving the lives of the dormant gargoyles wasn’t a worthy enough cause, stopping the formation of more wild storms would have been more than enough reason to heal the heart crystal.
I strode across the sloped floor, conscious that I moved alone. I expected my headache to get worse with each step closer, but it remained a steady, pounding pain. Still, I hesitated before touching the enormous crystal.
Without a blemish or even a seam between the different types of quartz, the smooth surface felt as soft as silk. I petted it as if it were a gargoyle, and when nothing happened, I formed a hair-thin strand of quartz element and tested the surface. My magic met the resistance of the other four elements, and I grabbed fire, water, wood, and air to balance my probe. The elements responded to me as easily as if I stood outside the baetyl. Whatever had limited my magic earlier didn’t apply in the heart.
I shouldn’t have been surprised to find the heart crystal’s elemental chemistry to be almost identical to a gargoyle’s. A little more water, a little less air, but otherwise the same—if on a much grander scale.
I widened my probe, reassured to find the crystal’s elements harmonious at the base.
“Okay, Oliver. I could use a boost.”
When I pushed deeper, the baetyl’s magic reacted. Faster than thought, it latched on to the line of my magic and burrowed back along the elements, flowing into me as smoothly as a gargoyle’s boost.
Alarmed, I gathered myself to fight off the invasion, but the baetyl’s magic was already inside me. It didn’t react like a gargoyle’s, either. Rather than passively enhancing the amount of magic I could use, it reversed the rules and pumped the elements into me.
I gasped when Oliver’s boost opened a fresh well of potential magic inside me, and before I could utter a warning, the baetyl’s magic rushed to fill the void, spilling through the link and diving into Oliver. With a pained scream, he severed his enhancement. A whiplash of displaced elements jerked from my control and shattered the baetyl’s grasp. Liberated, I fell backward, landing on my butt and hands. A dozen new pinpricks pierced my palms, but I barely registered the pain above the explosion inside my head.
I stared in horrified awe at the heart, swaying in place until the agony abated to a throbbing in my temples and my blurry vision cleared. When I decided movement wouldn’t induce vomiting, I gingerly rolled to my feet and tottered to Oliver’s side. The gargoyle clutched his head with both front paws, his body curled tight.
Cautiously, I reached for the elements again. They responded naturally, and I breathed a soft sigh of relief as I tuned them to the proper blend and tested Oliver. Aside from a headache, which I could do little more than buffer with gauzy weaves of carnelian-tuned quartz, he was fine.
“Let’s not do that again,” I said, trying to inject a smidgen of levity into the moment.
“I would advise against it. This is not our baetyl,” Celeste said, coasting down to land on the same crystal as Oliver. Her wings closed over her back with a soft rustle. After almost a year of working with gargoyles, it still amazed me that their heavy quartz feathers could sound so soft.
“I shouldn’t have asked,” I said. It hurt Oliver just to be inside this baetyl; I should have realized asking him to open himself up to the elements here would have been a bad idea even if I couldn’t have predicted the baetyl had the ability to use my connection to the elements to overpower me.
“I’m okay,” Oliver said, lowering a paw from where he’d been stroking his temple. “But can you hurry?”
Despite the urgency, my footsteps lagged as I walked back to the heart crystal, and I stopped before I was close enough to touch it. The baetyl had exploited my lightest brush of magic, burrowing into me. I hadn’t known such a thing was possible, but even prepared, I doubted I would be able to prevent its invasion the second time around. It had pushed magic into me and filled all the extra space of Oliver’s boost without effort. The power it’d given me hadn’t been malevolent, but it hadn’t been mine, and I hadn’t been able to deny it—or control it. The baetyl’s magic hadn’t been passive, and opening myself back up to an aggressive, semi-sentient magic terrified me. If I wasn’t strong enough to seize control, the baetyl would crush me. No one would come to my rescue, either. Marcus was incapacitated; Oliver and Celeste were helpless against this baetyl.