Oliver perched twenty feet away on a bright citrine crystal hardly larger than him but glowing twice as bright as it had before we’d entered the heart. The baetyl examined him through my eyes and gathered itself. He wasn’t a gargoyle who belonged here, but together, with a few tweaks, we could make him one of ours.
It wouldn’t be hard to alter him to resonate with us. The baetyl played images through my head, showing me the process. Altering his pattern would kill him, but then we’d bring him back and he’d be better than before. And bringing him back . . .
For a breathless moment, a pattern more intricate than anything I’d yet encountered lay before my inner eye, thousands upon thousands of glowing elemental strands laid just so and compressed into a single spark. It was the pattern of life itself and the root of every living creature. Tears of awe dripped down my chin, and I blinked to clear my vision. To have the chance to use the baetyl’s power to create life—
I forced myself to look away from Oliver. To make him a gargoyle of this baetyl, I’d have to kill him first, and I wasn’t going to do that.
Denied, the baetyl’s power receded, taking with it the knowledge of how to shape life from the elements. Gasping, I scrambled for the memory, but it slipped from my mind. I lifted my gaze back to Oliver, seeing only the gargoyle and not the elemental design of his life inside him. My chest ached, and telling myself I’d made the right decision didn’t make me feel any better. I’d had life in my hands, and now I couldn’t remember more than a fragment of the pattern.
“Don’t come near me, Oliver.” I didn’t trust myself; if he came closer and the baetyl offered me the chance to create life again, I didn’t think I could say no twice.
Swiping tears from my cheeks with shaky fingertips, I crawled over a large jasper crystal. It would have been simple enough to move the quartz out of my way using the baetyl’s power, but the more I held the power, the more I wanted to use it. If I gave in just to shift crystals out of my path, it wouldn’t take much to convince me I really did need wings. Or that Oliver would be better off sharing this baetyl with me. Or that the power in my hands was worth more than the lives of the gargoyles I’d come here to save.
So I climbed over and through the crystals and up the sloping floor back to Marcus, telling myself I wanted to be human and to heal the baetyl and leave. I didn’t want wings or to fly. Flying was scary because it meant leaving the ground. Heights were scary.
I didn’t believe any of it, and that alarmed me. I was scared of heights, but the baetyl wasn’t. Fear wasn’t a concept it understood.
I scrambled down the glowing side of a tigereye crystal that wouldn’t reach its full potential for another three centuries and spotted Marcus. He stood, sword in hand, gaze assessing and steady, and relief made me stumble. He rushed to my side before I fully caught my balance, but he didn’t reach out to steady me. Up close, I could see the worry in his lapis lazuli eyes, and behind them, I caught hints of the pattern of elements that made him, him.
“So you’re scared of heights,” Marcus said.
“What?” I squinted, trying to map his pattern, unexpectedly warmed by his voice.
“It’s a good fear. It’ll keep you safe. Fear is good.” He used a soothing tone, as if he expected me to bolt.
“What are you talking about?” I demanded. The nightmares had twisted a few thread-thin strands of elements out of place inside him, making snarls.
“You’ve been chanting about being scared of heights,” he said.
I blinked. “I have?” Damn it, I lost the snarls. I let the magic I’d kindled in my fingertips flow back into the baetyl.
“Come on, let’s get out of here.” Marcus gestured for me to precede him toward the exit. Blood soaked through his shirt at the shoulder. Sweat beaded and rolled down his face.
“Are you hurt? I can heal you,” I offered.
“You can heal me? Since when?”
I opened my mouth and realized I couldn’t explain eternity in words. It didn’t even make sense to me, at least not when I tried to define it. But I could feel it in the silence in my mind and in the baetyl’s strength.
“I need to finish healing the baetyl,” I said instead.
“Finish?”
I turned unerringly to face the closest cave-in. Marcus inhaled sharply, and in the periphery of my vision I saw him stretch a hand toward my back, but he dropped it before he touched me.
“Mika?”
“Hang on.”
“Oliver said you’d healed the heart,” he said, using that soothing tone again, but I barely heard him. The quartz that had hummed inside me while I’d been in the heart grated here near the giant gaps in the roof. Magic pulsed from the heart, perfect and pure, then fractured over the broken ceiling and misshaped crystals. That had to be fixed or the discordant magic reverberating back to the heart would eventually damage it and the entire baetyl again.
“It’s still flawed. Can’t you hear the disharmony?” I asked, reaching for the baetyl’s magic.
Marcus swung back in front of me. “You’re not repairing the ceiling by yourself.” The tip of his sword etched a short scratch into an aventurine crystal with his exuberant gesture. I wrapped the blade in air, yanked it from Marcus, opened a fissure in the ground, and threw the sword into the depths before I remembered embracing the baetyl’s magic. Contemplating the shadowy hole barely large enough to fit the broadsword, I tried to remember the elements I’d just used, but couldn’t. Had I been in control of the magic or had the baetyl? Deliberately, I stitched the floor back together, sealing the sword in the earth. The satisfaction of eliminating the threat to the crystals wasn’t mine, but the fear that chased it was.
Marcus watched me with wide eyes. He’d gathered a thimbleful of elements, and I wondered what he planned to do with that paltry amount of magic.
“Are the gargoyles boosting you?”
“There are no appropriate gargoyles. She—I—refused . . .” I blinked and looked around for the foreign, unwelcome gargoyles. There had been two in the heart.