“Oh, Mika, what did you find?” he whispered.
I refocused on Marcus, confused by the concern pinching his brow. “It’s broken,” I said. “I have to fix it. I have to.” If he was going to stand in my way, I could send him the same direction as the sword.
“Okay. Okay, we’ll fix it. That’s what we came here to do. Just link with me first.”
“I don’t need to.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I’m strong enough without you.” Magic trembled in my grip. It would be so easy to open the ground at his feet.
“I can see that. But you asked me to protect you. At least let me try.”
I sucked in a deep breath, grounding myself in the quartz-flavored air. “Okay. Link.”
Marcus thrust his pathetic amount of balanced elements toward me, and I accepted it, closing my magic around it. He groaned and fell to one knee, but he’d ceased trying to stop me, and that was all that mattered.
I strode around him to put him out of my sight. I’d spared him because . . . because . . . I shook my head and put him out of my mind, too. He didn’t matter.
We pulverized the fractured crystals beneath the broken roof and swept them and the rubble from the cave-ins into the mountain below the baetyl. A few layers of elements spread in the baetyl’s pattern laid the groundwork for new crystals along the floor before we turned our attention to the offending holes in the roof. Unnatural tunnels bisected the mountain above, and we collapsed them all. They were the reason we’d been weakened. They were the reason all our gargoyles had died and our magic had mutated. For good measure, we grew solid beams of quartz to bisect every previous tunnel. The mountain had plenty of quartz to work with, and it was a simple matter of encouraging it to grow solid and strong.
Crystals sprouted from the gaps in the ceiling under our careful guidance, brightening the cavern with their inner glow. When the last one burst into place, healthy magic swept through the baetyl, and we listened to it chime. Every time we encountered a sour note, we adjusted the crystals, mending a crack here, smoothing erosion there. The two unwelcome gargoyles sat like ugly deformities near the exit, vibrating at the wrong elemental frequency, and we scooped them up and tossed them out.
The baetyl hummed with perfection, and contentment spiraled through us until we felt a singular entity that didn’t belong. We turned to face it, scoop it up, toss it out—
It clung to us! It was inside us! Foreign magic pulsed within us, hot and unbalanced.
Panic flared, rumbling through the baetyl, setting the crystals rattling and squealing against each other.
“Mika, fight it. You’re strong. Let it go.”
It—his—voice rasped unnaturally in the hallowed air of the baetyl. He didn’t belong. He wasn’t a gargoyle. There was no quartz in him, not in his magic or his body. He was a nuisance.
And yet . . .
We looked down at his hand on our arm. None of it looked right, not the thick brown-pink bands of his fingers, not our curved and doughy forearm.
“Fight it. For me.”
We gathered ourselves to sever his connection with us and crush him before he poisoned our purity. Lapis lazuli eyes locked with ours and alarm spiked inside us. In me. The baetyl faltered, not comprehending. His presence was wrong. He didn’t belong. But the thought of crushing the life from him repulsed me.
Fear and revulsion widened the gap between me and the baetyl, helping me find and define myself. This was Marcus, a fellow human. The man I had a crush on—another emotion the baetyl couldn’t understand.
I seized upon the feelings, rolling fear and attraction in my mind to distance myself from the baetyl. I stopped trying to pull myself free of Marcus’s grip and really looked at him. Sweat ran freely down his face and soaked his clothing. He was on his knees in front of me, his face pinched with pain. I frowned. I wasn’t fighting him now, but he looked like he still struggled.
“Fight it,” he said through clenched teeth.
The baetyl surged back through me. He was an affront to its restored perfection. He must go.
No.
I grabbed for control, but it slipped from me. The baetyl’s magic roared inside me, filling my body and readying itself to bury Marcus. The amethyst crystals on the back of my hand lit up, singing in harmony with the rest of the baetyl. I belonged; he did not.
No.
I gritted my teeth. I couldn’t best the baetyl’s strength; nothing could. So I let it go.
It hurt. Loosening my connection with the transcendent power of the baetyl gave space for all my weaknesses: my fragile flesh split open in so many painful places; my frantic life beating away too fast; my tiny, mostly useless body gasping for oxygen in the muggy air.
Through tear-blurred eyes, I sought out Marcus, surprised to find him so close, still clinging to my arm. His features looked crude and misshapen where once I’d thought he was strikingly handsome. The crystals around us were the true beauty, so perfect and geometrical and glossy.
I caught my reflection in the side of a dark crystal. Bulbous. I was bulbous and hideous like Marcus. I didn’t belong here, no matter how much I wanted it.
Aching with the loss, I shattered the amethyst crystals on my hands and reknit my flimsy, inferior flesh, then released the last pieces of the baetyl. It receded from my consciousness, its magic pulling back to the heart and the walls and the crystals all around us. I clung to the knowledge of the baetyl’s pattern as long as I could, seeing it around me and in my mind’s eye stretching through the mountain, so perfect and gorgeous. When it faded, I crumpled, empty and small and so very alone. Hiccuping sobs rocked my body, suffocating me, and I couldn’t bring myself to care.