The water beneath me grew solid somehow. A small pedestal of water raised me up, and Regalia appeared standing beside me. I lay there, shivering and wet, and eventually I realized we were moving. The water pedestal was zipping along the surface of the ocean, carrying me with it, approaching the glowing painted walls and bridges of Babilar.
Regalia could appear wherever she wanted—or, at least, she could appear anyplace that she could see. So this wasn’t about transporting her, but about moving me.
“Where are we going?” I asked, getting to my knees.
“Has Jonathan ever told you,” Regalia asked, “what we know about the nature of Calamity?”
I could see it up there, that omnipresent glowing dot. Brighter than a star, but far smaller than the moon.
“You can view Calamity through a telescope,” Regalia continued, speaking in a conversational way. “The four of us did it quite often, back in the day. Jonathan, myself, Lincoln. Even with a telescope, it’s hard to make out details. He glows very brightly, you see.”
“He?” I asked.
“But of course,” Regalia said. “Calamity is an Epic. What else did you expect?”
I … I couldn’t respond. I could barely even blink.
“I asked him about you,” she said. “Told him you’d make a wonderful Epic. It would solve all kinds of problems, you see, and I think you’d take to it quite nicely. Ah, here we are.”
I struggled to my feet as our water platform stopped moving. We were in the lower section of Babilar, near where the operation to take out Newton would soon begin. It seemed Regalia knew about that too.
“You’re lying.”
“Do you know of the Rending?” Regalia asked. “That’s what we call the time just after an Epic first gains their powers. You’ll feel an overwhelming sensation driving you to destroy, to break. It utterly consumes us. Some learn to manage with the feelings, as I have. Others, like dear Obliteration, never quite get beyond them.”
“No,” I whispered, feeling a growing horror.
“If it’s any consolation, you’ll probably forget most of what you’re about to do. You’ll wake up in a day or so with only vague memories of the people you killed.” She leaned in, voice growing harsher. “I’m going to enjoy watching this, David Charleston. It is poetry for one who has killed so many of us to become the thing he hates. I believe, in the end, that is what convinced Calamity to agree to my request.”
She slapped me in the chest with a liquid hand, shoving me off her platform. I fell backward into the waters, and they churned about me, raising me in a pillar toward the night sky. I sputtered, righting myself, and discovered that I was hanging some hundred feet in the air, as if on an enormous jet made by the spyril. I looked upward.
And there was Calamity.
The star burned fiercely, and the land around me seemed to grow red, bathed in a deep light. Like on that first night, so long ago, when Calamity had come and the world had changed. Impossibilities, chaos, followed by Epics.
It dominated my view, that burning redness. I didn’t feel as if I—or it—had changed locations, and yet suddenly it was all that I could see. I felt, against reason, that I was so close I could reach out and touch the star. And within that blazing, violent redness, I swore I saw a pair of fiery wings.
My skin grew cold, then shocked alive with a tingling, electric sensation—as if recovering from numbness. I screamed, doubling upon myself. Sparks! I could feel it coursing through me. A foul energy, a transformation.
It was really happening.
No, no … Please …
The redness upon the land retreated, and my water pillar slowly lowered. I barely noticed, as the tingling feeling continued, more frantic, like thousands of worms squirming under my skin.
“It is unsettling at first,” Regalia said softly as I lowered down to sea level beside her. “I have been assured that you will be given powers that are ‘thematically appropriate.’ I suggested the same water-manipulation abilities that young Georgi possessed. That, if you have forgotten, is the Epic who was killed to make that abomination you call the spyril. I think you’ll find being an Epic to be far more liberating than using some device to ape us.”
I groaned, rolling over, face toward the sky. Calamity now seemed only a distant prick, but that red glow upon the land remained—faint, but noticeable. Everything around me was bathed in a shade of crimson.
“Well, on with it,” Regalia said. “Let’s see what you can do. I am distinctly interested to see how your former teammates react when you bumble into the middle of their careful planning, manifesting Epic powers, murdering everyone you see. It should be … amusing.”
A distant part of my brain realized that this was why she’d been so fast to help me escape the base. She hadn’t believed I was defecting; she intended to use me, and my new powers, as a way to disrupt the Reckoners’ plans.
I rolled back over, finding my way to my knees, still positioned on a section of water that Regalia had made solid. My face reflected in the waters, lit by spraypaint on a nearby building.
Was I now an Epic?