“Yes.”
I exhaled with relief. “That’s what I hoped you’d say.”
I bent my head down and drew the bow over the strings. The song itself was a wordless overtone, low and droning, and the musical accompaniment wove its way around it in high arches and long, flowing sustained notes. It didn’t take very long before the Old Man ordered his garden to begin singing accompaniment.
It was beautiful. I can’t deny it was beautiful.
I lengthened the notes, let them build. What I didn’t think the Old Man could tell was that it wasn’t purely musical talent. I wasn’t just playing music.
I was casting a spell.
It had taken months of work to figure out how. Tyentso didn’t think a spell like this had ever existed before. We had practiced by using the temple gate to sneak off the island, never for more than an hour at a time, while I practiced against every kind of rock I could find—until I had found a type of onyx that was the perfect match.
The garden statues sang so melodically I think they could tell what was about to happen and welcomed it. Underneath the intertwined notes, a deeper resonance began to vibrate. Sand danced in circles away from me. Ocean waves lost their rhythm and collapsed. I built up the sound, note by note, and the dragon’s aura of cacophony wasn’t enough to stop the relentless vibration, a pattern that I built and stacked higher with every note—
The harmony cut off sharply as the garden statues cracked and crumbled to chunks of rock no bigger than my fist.
Thirty-six trapped men and women died in an instant, free at last to return to the Afterlife. I felt guilt—even at that moment I felt guilt. It was impossible to truly know for sure if it was the fate they would have wanted. If they would have chosen death and later rebirth over an endless immortal prison trapped in stone.
All I knew for certain was that it’s what I would have wanted. I wondered if Elana Milligreest, who had freed me from my prison inside Vol Karoth in another lifetime, had questioned if she was doing the right thing too.
I wished I could meet her just once, to tell her that she had.
In that same moment, the Old Man became a statue himself, temporarily frozen by his own outrage.
I was already running.
The roar that rose on the air behind me made the ground shake so hard I was thrown off my feet. A great rumbling echoed, and over my head, the mountain at the center of Ynisthana erupted in a giant cloud of smoke, ash, and lava bombs.
“How dare you!” the Old Man screamed. “The mountain will bury you in lava, the molten rocks will be your tomb. You will spend eternity screaming in despair and pain. You will never know peace.”
Now that’s a standing ovation, I thought as I picked myself up and kept running.
I was halfway up the slope when a large crack opened in the ground in front of me. Lava fountained into the air, a wall of fire threatening to burn me to ash.
“Kihrin!” Teraeth tackled me and pushed me to the ground as one of the lava bombs came uncomfortably close to finalizing our plans in an unexpected way. The threat was real; the Stone of Shackles felt like fire at my throat, as it prepared to keep me alive at any cost. There was no one, after all, who was directly responsible for my impending demise.
That’s not what the Old Man saw, however.
“NO!” the Old Man screamed.
What the dragon saw was Teraeth tackling me to avoid the lava bomb. Because of that tackle, the Old Man saw me trip and fall, stumbling toward the just-opened crack. I tried to grab the edge, but screamed as my hand met volcanic rock hot enough to sear flesh from bone. I fell. Likely I’d have impacted on the surface of the lava and burned to death, but the eruption was still in progress. My screams were cut short as my body was churned under in the lava fountain.
Teraeth, for his part, staggered—exactly as you might expect for someone who had just been possessed by the soul of the man he had accidentally killed. He put his hand to his chest, but found only that black arrowhead necklace, and no sign of the Stone of Shackles. Teraeth stared horrified at his hands, looked at his body, disbelief evident on his expression.
“I am not that dramatic,” I protested.
“Shhh,” Teraeth told me. “And yes, you are.”
We needed to keep low. The air was growing hard to breathe, and gods help us if a mudslide or ash flow decided to make its way down the mountain.
We watched as the illusionary Teraeth turned to run just as an equally illusionary river of burning cinders came streaming down the mountain. He was engulfed in but an instant, and this time, without air to breathe or the Stone of Shackles to keep him alive, the result seemed sadly all too predictable. Kihrin, now Teraeth, would burn to cinder, choke on ash, and die quickly and painfully.
“Damn you, fool.” The dragon’s voice was so loud I could still hear it over the eruption. “Come back here and let me save you.”
“That’s our cue,” I said, grabbing Teraeth’s hand. “Come on.”
The dragon started ripping into the mountainside not far from us, no doubt trying to recover and save a nonexistent illusion of Teraeth. Since the mountain really was erupting, it wasn’t long before he was tearing huge gouges of molten rock out with his claws, scattering them all around. Tears of lava ran down his face, making it seem like the Old Man was crying.
Perhaps he was.
We were forced to dodge to the side as a giant slab of basalt landed right where we had been hiding. The rock elongated and distorted, flowing to the sides of us. I looked around.
Tyentso stood farther up the beach, gesturing. “Come on then. What are you waiting for? The whole mountain is about to come down around our ears.”
“Too late,” Teraeth said while staring toward the center.
I followed his gaze and inhaled sharply. A real ash flow surged down from the volcano, looking graceful as a slow-moving cloud if one didn’t know better.
“Run!” Tyentso screamed, which seemed like solid advice: the gate that was to be our escape route lay in the center of the old Temple of Ynis, now rededicated to Thaena.
That meant we were going to have to run toward the death cloud if we wanted to escape.
“We can’t,” Teraeth said. “We’ll never make it in time.”
I knew what he was talking about. I’d paid attention all those times the Old Man had created similar clouds. There was zero chance we would run faster than that air would move. I wasn’t worried about Doc. Khaemezra was with him, and she was more than capable of protecting them both.
Us? I wasn’t so sure about us. Even if the burning cloud didn’t kill us, the mountain was spitting out molten rocks that slammed into the ground. Just one hit would be enough.
Tyentso started running anyway, and she had a determined gleam in her eye that told me she was going to try something insane. Probably, she meant to try holding back that cloud through force of will alone, and much as I thought of her skill as a magus, I didn’t think she was that powerful.