Sorry, Amelia whispered in his mind. You might want to go ahead and land, because this is going to hurt.
Julius nodded and dove for a bit of open roadway below, but he’d barely made it ten feet before a wave of weakness knocked him out of the sky. There’d been no attack, no injury. Every muscle in his body had simply given up, leaving him limp as a ribbon as he plummeted through the air. He was trying to roll over so he’d at least land on his feet when a shout shook the sky above him.
“Julius!”
The roar was so loud it made his ears throb. Then giant sharp claws stabbed into his back as Justin snatched him out of the sky.
“Ow,” Julius groaned.
“Better than hitting the ground,” Justin snarled, the transformed Fang of the Heartstriker on his jaw punctuating each word with a plume of green fire. “What is wrong with you? I didn’t see you get hit!”
Julius couldn’t begin to explain what had happened with Amelia, mostly because he didn’t fully understand it himself. Fortunately, Justin’s questions seemed to be perfunctory, because he didn’t even wait for Julius to answer before dropping him on the ground so he could take off again.
“Wait!” Julius cried after him. “Justin, come back! We need to stay on the ground!”
“But we’re not done!” Justin yelled, blasting another tentacle out of the sky before swiveling his massive head to glare down at his little brother. “Just stay there. I’ll be right—”
GET DOWN!
Justin jerked as the command hit him, his whole body seizing as if he’d been electrocuted. Julius wasn’t much better. He was already on the ground, so there was no danger of falling, but the pain was still excruciating as Amelia grabbed his fire and twisted, forcing her will into the flames.
Everyone on the ground NOW, she roared, her voice shaking with effort before cutting out as fast as it had come up. Her presence vanished from Julius’s fire at the same time, making him gasp in relief as the unnatural weakness faded, leaving only good old-fashioned normal pain behind. He was still trying to breathe through it when a tiny voice spoke beside him.
“Whew,” it said. “Sorry about that. Dragons lost in battle lust are notoriously bad listeners, so I had to pull hard to make sure I had enough oomph to get through.”
Julius blinked in confusion. The voice sounded like Amelia’s, but it was so soft he could barely hear it. He couldn’t see her either when he opened his eyes, then something poked his forefoot, and Julius looked down to see a tiny dragon made of fire standing on the ground beside him.
“Hi,” it said. “Thanks for the boost.”
He blinked at the little creature in wonder. “Amelia?”
The dragon was no larger than a kitten, but the annoyed look on her face was definitely his sister’s.
“What is going on?” Justin demanded, setting down beside them. Then he spotted the little dragon. “What the—is that the Planeswalker?”
“Laugh at me and die,” Amelia growled, giving the knight a killing look before scampering up Julius’s leg to perch in the spot between his wing and his neck. “This isn’t a form I wanted to revisit, but I didn’t have much of a choice. Something’s gone seriously haywire in the Sea of Magic. I don’t know what Marci’s doing over there, but it’s big.” She cowered in Julius’s feathers. “You might want to duck.”
Julius swallowed. Now that she’d mentioned it, the world did feel a bit… empty. He’d been too busy to notice before, but now that he was paying attention, he could feel the lack of magic like dryness in the air. If the city hadn’t been so saturated with the stuff only minutes before, Julius didn’t think he could have maintained his dragon. He already felt uncomfortably heavy, like a fish out of water, and he wasn’t the only one. Justin was actually gasping, his green eyes strained as he ripped the cage of his transformed Fang of the Heartstriker off his mouth.
“What is… going… on?”
As though in answer to his question, a cold wind rose, but not winter cold. This was the cold of the grave, and it was coming from the ground, rising up through the dirt like it was blowing in the world below. Under any other circumstances, it would have been the creepiest thing Julius had ever felt, but this time, the dry, death-scented air brought a giant smile to his face.
“It’s Marci,” he said, crouching low, as Amelia had suggested. He was reaching up to drag his gasping brother down as well when the wind doubled, filling the air with the cold anger of the forgotten dead.
***
Marci had never known she was so empty to be so full.
She was holding more magic than she’d ever felt in her life. Keeping it all contained felt like trying to carry the ocean in a thimble, and yet, thanks to Ghost, it worked. Everything she couldn’t hold, the Empty Wind took, letting the magic pour into the abyss of his vessel, which was now floating below them.
Marci stopped, blinking in confusion, but that didn’t change what she saw. With one blink, she was standing on the mountain in the Heart of the World. With the next, she was floating inside the yawning emptiness of the Empty Wind’s domain, the same place he’d brought her when he’d eaten her during the fight with Myron and the DFZ at the Merlin Gate.
“What’s happening?”
You’re blending with me, her spirit replied, his voice as loud as hers in their shared head. The magic is blurring the barriers, making you see as I see.
“This is what you see?” Marci said, horrified. Every time she blinked, she saw something different: the dark, the mountain, her own unconscious body back in the DFZ, their crushed house far below the battle. Hundreds of images flicked past like slides on a sped-up reel. But while Marci found the chaos even more nauseating than the Sea of Magic, a cold part of her mind found the mishmash comforting, even inspiring. It was utterly confusing until Marci realized that bit wasn’t part of her mind at all. It was Ghost. Her spirit was inside her thoughts in a way he’d never been before. Likewise, she could feel herself in him, blowing through the dark as the magic poured in.
“Wow,” she whispered, flexing her hands, which weren’t her hands at all, but his. A soldier’s dark, sure fingers. “And it’s the magic that’s doing this?”
The magic is crushing us together, yes, he said. But the fact that we’re handling it is all us. She felt his smile on her face. Our bond is strong.
“We are awesome,” Marci agreed, searching through the confusion of images until she found one that looked down on the DFZ from high above. “There.”
They moved together, sliding through the barrier, which was no longer much of a barrier at all. With so much focused magic near it, the wall between reality and the Sea of Magic was running like hot wax, sliding out of the way easily as Marci stepped out of the Heart of the World and into the high, cold air above the Leviathan.