Chapter 49: Under Siege
A rotting smell blanketed the air as they stepped out of the dungeon, a specter of death clinging to Glimmer's skin and clothes and hair like a pall. Three seconds walking outside with Lonnie and already it felt like the smell would never leave her. Even if they were fortunate enough to make it off Scavria alive and she took half a dozen showers, Glimmer wasn't sure she'd stop smelling like a dead body.
The overcast sky toned everything in a drab, muted light. The soldier standing guard outside the door to the dungeon they'd just vacated snapped off a sharp salute to Lonnie as they passed. When he caught sight of Glimmer coming up just behind her, his eyes widened in surprise.
"At ease," Lonnie said. She held her hand out and, after a moment of hesitation, the soldier handed over Glimmer's PDA which he'd been safekeeping. "She's clean. Go join your squad at the rear. We need everybody we can muster at the wall."
The soldier gave an over-compensating 'yes Ma'am!' and double-timed away. Lonnie handed over the PDA and Glimmer slid it back onto her arm as a second figure, taller and bulkier than the first, approached them. Glimmer recognized him immediately.
"What the hell are you doing up and about?" Lonnie said to Rogelio before Glimmer could squeal in happiness and hug him. "You're injured. I need you to be resting."
Rogelio grunted at her, barely an acknowledgement, and turned a concerned, questioning look on Glimmer. Large swathes of his body—anything not covered by the bits and pieces of his armor he could still wear—were covered in bandages. They were wrapped double thick and still blood had seeped through. His right arm was held close to his scratched-up breastplate in a sling, and upon closer inspection Glimmer saw it had been amputated just below the elbow.
"It's me," Glimmer said, voice gentle. "I'm not corrupted. How did this happen? Are you going to be okay?"
Rogelio grunted and nodded.
"My harness came loose in our transport," Lonnie said, "and he undid his own to shield me. He took the brunt of the impact when we crashed not far from here."
Rogelio turned his bad arm away and pulled Glimmer into a side hug with his good arm, strong enough to squeeze the breath out of her.
"Gave me one hell of a scare, but he'll be okay. The arm will regrow." To him, she said, "You're too stubborn to let some surface wounds and a missing limb keep you down, aren't you? Just like you're too stubborn to do what I say and rest."
Rogelio snorted and the corners of his lips pulled back in a smile. He released Glimmer and patted the grip of his blaster strapped to his side as if to say, 'I'm well enough to fight, too.' Lonnie rolled her eyes but didn't argue further. Instead, she stalked off toward the fortified wall in the distance, beckoning for Glimmer and Rogelio to follow her.
The castle district was enormous. As a preserved historical site nestled inside an even larger garden complex at the heart of Tir, it was also sufficiently isolated from the rest of the surrounding city.
A stone tower keep stood the compound's center clearing, and it loomed high over the surrounding buildings. Although it was shorter than the skyscrapers Glimmer felt on her way in, it dominated the district and imbued sense of ancient, regal power in the atmosphere that battled with the muted, drab suffocation the fog imposed.
"We were lucky we made it as close to our LZ as we did before we went down," Lonnie said as they headed for the far wall. "Fleet command wanted us to secure this as a base of operations. They were planning to launch the last effort to retake the city from here before the emergency evacuation orders hit."
"Why here?" Glimmer looked at the ancient buildings as they walked, but always returned to the tower. A pair of soldiers trucking a machine gun and reams of belted ammunition ran by and she shifted to avoid them. "Sure, these buildings were designed to protect against attack and fortify a position in the past, but that was thousands of years ago. How are stone and mortar going to protect against hordes of Beast thralls?"
"You'll see why soon enough," Lonnie said, nodding up ahead to the wall. Glimmer and Rogelio both followed her up a set of stairs jutting out the side of the wall. As they crested the top and they got a clear view of their surroundings from atop the wall, Glimmer finally understood why Lonnie and the few soldiers she'd seen since waking looked so grim.
"The fog…" Glimmer trailed off when words failed to describe what she saw.
"Yeah." Lonnie answered each of her unspoken questions with the defeated tone of her response.
The sky wasn't actually overcast, it was the Beast's fog surrounding them. The trees and lawns and artificial lakes of the gardens surrounding the compound disappeared abruptly behind what amounted to an unnaturally thick curtain. Glimmer couldn't even see the sun. No wonder Kyle had lost their tracking signal; the Beast had trapped them here, just like it had almost trapped Glimmer in the city.
The sky lit up. The soldiers standing watch by the nearby parapets jumped and spoke in quick, hushed tones to one another, each wearing nervous faces.
"Lightning?" Glimmer asked, still staring up at the sky.
The ground began to shake in another tremor, and Lonnie reached for the closest parapet to keep stable. "That's the fleet bombarding the planet from orbit."
"How is that possible? There are at least ninety ships in orbit firing down on the city—we should have been space dust after the first silo. Is the Beast muting the salvos like that fog dome is some kind of shield?"
"I don't know. This is the first I've seen something like this, and you said yourself you experienced some crazy things in that fog. Who knows what it's capable of?" Her look hardened. "That's not the only strange thing going on around here, either."
"What do you mean?"
Lonnie gestured again for them to follow as she moved toward the soldiers standing guard together further along the wall. One of them noticed their approach and snapped off a salute.
"They've been quiet for some time, but I think they may be gearing up for another surge any minute now."
"Is that you going off a hunch or have you actually seen something that would indicate that?" Lonnie clapped the soldier on the shoulder when he hesitated and walked past him without waiting for an answer. "Don't make the mistake of guessing what they'd do like they were just any other group of thralls. That's a one-way ticket to an early death. They've already shown us they aren't like the others."
She said the last part quietly as if to herself, and Glimmer wouldn't have heard it had she not followed Lonnie closely to the very edge of the wall. When she looked over the parapets and down, she saw yet another unexpected sight.
"What are they doing?" she asked, staring down at a mob of thralls standing outside the wall, clumped together shoulder to shoulder and chest to back. "Why are they just standing there?" Thralls not only always attacked if they sensed you—typically rushing a position with mindless abandon and with no regard for their safety much like their namesake would imply—but they were also always spread out from each other. She had never seen them gather that close together before when there was plenty of space to roam.
"Beats me," Lonnie shrugged, looking down at them as if studying an interesting bug. "They're a lot harder to kill too. Our ammunition is coated with purer ignominite than most of what the rest of the armed forces use. It's expensive as hell, but it usually means a thrall goes down in one shot. These guys? We've put enough holes in some of them to make until they're unrecognizable before they finally drop."
Glimmer frowned. "Are…are they developing some sort of immunity or something?" The implications behind that struck deep. Thralls resistant to ignominite would take away their one advantage in ground combat away. The empire had lost every conflict in the first war badly before Taline's sister first discovered the stuff. The idea of regressing to that state of conflict was terrifying.
"I sure as shit hope not," Lonnie said. "I'm just catching you up to speed with what we've experienced so far. We've walked the entire perimeter wall of the compound and there are no thralls anywhere except here, and you're right that they're acting super weird clumping together so tight like this. I don't know why, just like I don't know why they're suddenly harder to kill and I don't know why this damn fog is protecting us, either."
Glimmer 'hmmed' and narrowed her eyes in thought. A breeze blew past, playing at the short strands of her hair just as another ripple of lightning and subtle shake of the ground occurred.
"What is it?" Lonnie stared at her like she might transform into a literal angel in front of her. "You're thinking hard about something, that much I can tell."
"There's something off about this whole situation," Glimmer said. "And I'm not just talking about the thralls. The way everything suddenly shifted as we were taking the city. How no one could tell what exactly happened that turned the tide against us. And then how quickly everything fell apart from there—it wasn't even a few hours before the infection had engulfed most of the city once we lost it."
Glimmer shook her head, not liking how any of this sounded now that she was speaking her thoughts aloud. "Taline warned me a long time ago about what would happen and what I'd experience if the Beast were ever to directly attempt to subvert me. I've experienced some of that, but…"
Lonnie raised an eyebrow at her. "But…?"
"But some of it seems so different, so far out of left field I can't help but feel there is something else. I've been seeing things. Things that aren't there."
Lonnie snorted. "Yeah, we all have been seeing things. Damn shadows lurking in the corners of your vision. One of them snuck up on one of my guys taking a piss out behind one of the buildings and scared the shit out of him, but they're pretty much harmless."
Glimmer shook her head. "They weren't shadows, Lonnie. I saw visions. Concrete ones, of things that I think have already happened, and of people who are long dead. One of them could see me as if I were there. Talk to me and ask me questions as if I were really there. They could touch me."
Now Lonnie looked concerned. She leaned forward and, in a low voice meant to keep her words between them, said, "Are you sure you aren't really an Abomination and just not telling me?"
Glimmer had been so ready to hear whatever secret bit of information Lonnie was about to share that having the rug yanked out from underneath her like that pulled a snort of laughter out of her in response.
"An Abomination would say no," she said, rolling her eyes. "They also wouldn't have told you about Rinne."
"Fair." Lonnie smirked before growing serious again. "Whatever it is that's happening, we can figure it out once we get off this planet and somewhere else. Do you have a plan for getting out of here?"
"I might." Glimmer gestured over the parapet wall to the idling mass below. "Do you have any idea why they might have concentrated here in particular rather than a different part of the wall? You said they weren't anywhere else."
"It's weakest here." Lonnie pointed to a spot behind Glimmer. "The entrance to the compound is back there, barred shut by a pair of heavy metal doors, but this section of the wall here is weakened structurally. I don't know how, but they've managed to find it and have been occasionally trying to ram through it ever since we holed up in here."
"They're trying to ram through a fortified stone wall?" Glimmer asked, feeling all the more incredulous when Lonnie only nodded at her with a serious expression on her face. "Even weakened, you wouldn't be able to break an entrance without a battering ram of some sort. Why don't they just climb it? Thralls can't scale walls with their hands any better than you or I could, but I've seen them pile on bodies layer after layer and then climb the mound like a hill. Trying to break through a wall in the first place just doesn't make sense."
"Reach over and touch the outside of the wall," Lonnie said, gesturing toward the edge.
Glimmer wasn't why Lonnie changed the subject so abruptly. She reached over the edge, expecting one of the thralls to leap up and bite her arm off, and touched her hand to the cool stone.
"You've got to be kidding me," she said, yanking her hand back. "The walls are infused with ignominite, too? These structures are supposed to be ancient. When did they make the additions?"
"This whole compound was converted sometime after the last war to be a fortified storage facility against the Beast in an emergency," Lonnie said. "The Vestamid, shady as they are, must have put a lot of resources into this area. We never tapped into it before because the threat was honestly so small and our response was so large that fleet command didn't think it was needed. When things changed—"
"That's when they decided to use this site to mount a more effective offense," Glimmer said, understanding where Lonnie was going. "Geez, the cost that must have gone into preparing this is staggering." As Etherian royalty and a Battlemage with a pay grade that reflected the status of one of the Enclave's highest-ranked and most valuable combatants, Glimmer was intimately familiar with large sums of money. But even she blanched when she first learned the cost of a pair of high-quality ignominite restraints. Thinking of the cost to infuse a fortified wall that wrapped the entire perimeter of a compound was overwhelming.
"I don't think about the cost," Lonnie said, amused at whatever shocked expression had found its way to Glimmer's face. "I'm just glad it's kept us from being overrun so far. We'd last ten minutes max once they got through. Maybe not even that."
Glimmer looked at the soldiers who had been listening to their conversation. There were five of them, including the two who had guarded her when she woke up in the dungeon. All were young. Three had lacerations on their faces and through the plating of their infantry armor, but otherwise seemed battle-ready, if out of their depth and nervous.
"Is this all you have?" Glimmer asked, surprised. "Five?"
"Five plus the two who ran by you with the machine gun earlier," Lonnie said. "Aside from Rogelio and I, they have the most combat experience so I put them on the heavy repeater in front of the tower. Everyone else either died on impact when we crashed or fell to the thralls before we got inside the compound. Plus the three I sent outside to grab you when you just appeared. They didn't make it either."
Ah, right. She quashed the guilt roiling in her gut. Lonnie was giving her an appraisal of their situation, not blaming her for deaths that weren't her fault. She had to stay focused—use that information in a sterile, surgical manner. To feel and process guilt was a privilege that would come after they'd escaped, not before. She resolved to ask Lonnie their names once they were safe, at least.
"We have to get out of here," she said instead. "The Beast may be growing immune to the ignominite and its thralls may be growing smart enough to strategize, like a virus adapting after so many years. Kyle said he lost contact with you altogether as soon as the fog started expanding, but we're going to need to get some kind of message to the fleet in order to get out of here. What's going on with your communications?"
Explicit talk of escape caught the soldiers' attention. Hope bloomed on their faces. They looked at one another with subtle smiles, and Lonnie knew to capitalize on it.
"We certainly have better chances of survival now that you're here," she said. "As for communications, we managed to yank the orbital radio from the Warbird when we crashed but haven't gotten anything in or out. As far as we can tell, the fog is blocking all transmissions."
Glimmer eyed her PDA and the blinking icon on the screen; it was still searching for a signal, trying to reconnect her to Kyle. The beginnings of a plan were brewing there, although she still wasn't feeling confident about it. They'd have to do something about the fog dome. A dubious thing to contend with in the first place, but if they managed to disperse it, wouldn't that just expose them to the fleet bombarding the surface?
An ethereal wail drifted up from below, startling everyone as it crescendoed to a chorus of screeches.
"They're surging again!" one of the soldiers said, staring over the edge of the wall while the others press checked their rifles.
Glimmer had never seen anything like it. The mob of tightly packed thralls weren't mindlessly scrabbling over one another trying to push forward. Instead, they were rearing back to charge the wall together as if they were one body comprised of hundreds. Like a living battering ram, they slamming into the ignominite-plated bricks with enough force to splatter those at the front of the charge into flying chunks of meat and viscera, spraying the surrounding grass with body matter.
The wall shook hard enough that Glimmer tottered to keep her balance. She could have sworn she heard the sound of the stone itself fracturing. The soldiers aimed their rifles down range over the parapets and fired coordinating bursts into the mob as they reared back for another thrust.
Glimmer felt grateful that the ignominite in their bullets didn't seem to lose all its efficacy. Sure, they took more than one or two bullets to go down, but they did go down. A single thralls was frighteningly strong, and with them acting in coordination? The wall would go down, and sooner rather than later.
Lonnie grabbed onto a parapet to keep from falling over when the thralls impacted a second time. Rogelio grunted and widened his stance, his sidearm already out and ready to fire.
"You said you might have a plan," Lonnie said to Glimmer. "So that means you're in charge. I'll command the troops, but you're in the driver's seat. Tell me what you need us to do, and I'll make it happen."
Rifles continued to rattle off beside her as Glimmer looked to the tower in the center of the compound. The top looked like an open roof, again with parapets from which to defend.
"We need to get to the top of that tower," Glimmer said, pointing. "And hold off the thralls long enough for Kyle to get us. I'll take care of the fog."
Lonnie nodded and turned to the soldiers. "Change of plans boys," she said, bellowing. "Those fish will jump out of the barrel and slap you dead, so we're leaving. Get your asses to the tower and up to the top floor. Standard defensive formation, three plus me in the back providing cover, the rest up front, and we all move with the Battlemage, clear?" A chorus of 'sir, yes sir!' rang out and Lonnie smirked with a strong gesture of her fist. "Let's go, move, move, move!"
The soldiers pulled off the wall one after the other like synchronized divers. Despite the fear plain on their faces, they moved with the automated professionalism of a team that had drilled scenarios like this enough to instill deep-rooted muscle memory. They encircled her and kept pace as she rushed down the wall, jumping the last four steps as she neared the bottom.
The wall burst as her boots hit dirt. Screeching, clambering thralls spilled into the interior courtyard like water through a crack in a dam.
"Keep going, don't stop!" Lonnie said, grabbing one of the soldiers by the back of their neck guard and pulling them with her when they'd slowed to stare. "Stop and you're dead. Are you trying to die? Remember the others?"
The automatic repeater stood mounted on its tripod before the entrance to the tower, one soldier behind it while the other held the belt of ignominite rounds feeding into it. As soon as Glimmer cleared past them, they opened fire, the sound of controlled automatic fire playing accompaniment to her pounding heart, wheezing gasps, and the sounds of thralls screeching louder as they fell.
"Get inside, all of you!" Lonnie said, throwing open the door and gesturing for everyone to hurry in. She and one other soldier remained as the two on the repeater dragged it back through the mud, continuing to hold off the flood as they eked to their escape.
As soon as Glimmer got in, she heard a scream and a gurgle out from outside. Thralls had caught up to them, piling on top of the gunner who was still firing into the mass as they tore into him.
"Get inside!" Lonnie bellowed, trying to pick them off before retreating with the other soldier inside. "Let it go and get in, both of you!"
The assistant, extra belt of ammo still hung across her shoulders, startled out of the paralysis that had gripped her. She turned, casting only one forlorn look back at her partner as they fell, and she sprinted toward them, thralls hot on her heels. She burst through the open doorway as one of them caught her arm. She screamed and her armor crimped in the thrall's grip, sending a sick cracking sound echoing inside the chamber. The thrall yanked and pulled her off her feet, and began dragging her back outside.
"Let me go!" she said, screaming and kicking at the thing. Rogelio and three others have already pushed the door nearly shut, keeping more thralls from flooding in but unable to fully shut it since it's caught on the arm of the first.
Another sickening crack and another cry as blood started running at the crevices of the soldier's armor, staining the rest of her. Despite two others holding her back, she was slowly getting dragged out.
"I'm sorry for this," Lonnie said, looking into the woman's tear-streaked eyes. She threw her arm out and a wicked, serrated blade extended from her gauntlet. She slashed up, cleaving the woman's arm off above the elbow.
They pulled apart, soldier and thrall, each yanked back from the sudden release. As the soldier tumbled to the ground inside, Rogelio and the others nearly got the door shut until another thrall took the place of the first, wedging itself inside the doorjamb.
"Fucking get back," Lonnie said, voice growling low as she surged forward and stabbed through the opening with her serrated blade. Another screech from outside and now it was Lonnie getting pulled outside instead—her blade had gotten stuck.
Glimmer, healing rune twisting in her palm as she helped cauterize the soldier's bleeding stump with magic, left here side and went to Lonnie's with a new rune ready to activate.
"Damn it," Lonnie said, fumbling for her sidearm and shoving it through the crack in the door, firing four, five, six rounds haphazardly outside. Glimmer was there the next moment, emitting a continuous stream of purple fire from her palm through the same opening. More screeching from the thralls outside, but still Lonnie was stuck.
"To hell with this," she said, anchoring herself with both feet planted wide. With a jerk of her arm, she broke the blade off, ostensibly still embedded in whichever thrall she'd stabbed. She pulled her arm free, and the door slammed shut the moment it was clear. Glimmer was on it the next moment, casting a large sealing rune over it. The door bumped once, twice, three times as the thralls on the other side tried to break through, but the rune pulsed with light on each bump and held.
"That won't last long," Glimmer said, turning back to the group. "If they keep trying to barge in haphazardly it might hold, but as soon as they clump up and start working together again this door will fall. If they can break through the fortified outer wall, nothing here is going to hold them back forever."
"Then we'd better climb," Lonnie said. She looked to the wounded soldier. The others had used a belt as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, and a thick patch of cloth ripped from one of their uniforms covered the stump.
"I can move, too," they said, sweat pouring down their clammy face. "I can make it. Just…"
Lonnie nodded, holding a hand up to cut her off in a silent command to rest for a few moments.
The thralls continued to bang on the door and Glimmer inspected the ground floor as they got situated. It was bare and musty with a wet feel to the air. Despite it being an ancient structure, bare lightbulbs attached to open wires ran the length of the wall near a spiral staircase and provided their only source of light—all the windows had been boarded up with ignominite-veined metal. There was no furniture, but several black cases lined the floor, filled to the brim with sparkling crystals.
"Are those…those can't be apeirons can they?" Glimmer asked. On instinct, she reached with her mind to touch one and felt the surge of power living within. Taken together, a single case emanated a small star's worth of magical energy just sitting there waiting to be used. And there were dozens of cases sitting there around them.
"I told you this was supposed to be a storage facility," Lonnie said, holding the wounded soldier's head up and dabbing at her sweat-streaked forehead with another strip of cloth she'd ripped from somewhere underneath her armor. "Deep breaths," she said to them. "Come on, stay with me. We aren't out of this yet."
They groaned, skin pale and clammy, but had stopped bleeding all over the floor and all over Lonnie's lap thanks to the tourniquet and cauterization. The door banged again, hard enough the hinges rattled.
"They've already started working together," Glimmer said. "We have to go."
Lonnie and Rogelio helped guide the injured soldier to her feet. She looked ready to pass out one moment until she got her bearings, then Lonnie traded places with another soldier and took up a position with two others at the rear, between Glimmer and the door.
Glimmer took her cue, made for the stairs, and climbed. The others molded and moved with her like a cadre of static electrons. The incessant banging—and soon enough, splintering—sound against the door from behind urged them to hurry the fuck up, and Glimmer balanced that with the need to make sure they didn't push the injured soldier to the point of collapse. Rogelio didn't have a second arm with which to carry them comfortably, and throwing them over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes probably wasn't safe either.
Glimmer was on the same page with Lonnie about that one: they were all getting out alive if she could help it. The ones left still left breathing, at least.
They got to the second level—it too filled with chests brimming with apeirons—when the door burst. The sound of it rang up from the ground floor. Glimmer and Lonnie exchanged knowing looks while the grunts at the front whined in shock. The sound of thralls flooding the lower levels roared up at them like a fast-approaching torrential flood.
"Keep going!" Lonnie barked the orders to those at the front. "Don't stop and don't look back!"
Glimmer pushed magic to her hands. The thralls were close enough their screeching and scrambling was deafening. Lonnie and those with her at the back rattled off burst fire. Glimmer spun and held out both hands, eyes flaring neon as a large rune rotated before her palms. The rune pulsed and a stream of unbroken white-hot magic streaked past the back line and blasted the thralls surging up the stairs.
"The war engineers had the right idea fortifying this place," Lonnie said. Advancing backward up the stairs without missing a step, she put three rounds into one thrall then kicked another down the stairs when it got too close. It fell back, taking a handful of its peers with it as it tumbled down. "It's contained and the stairs are narrow, but that makes it easier to defend since we have the high ground."
That was probably the only reason they'd made it this far without getting caught, honestly. Glimmer used the confined space to better augment her magical attacks. She planted flame runes on the walls and ceiling overhead, stuck stasis runes on the stairsteps underneath, and blasted lightning at a clumped-up wall of thralls impossible to miss. They'd get caught in the stasis, too slow to get out of the way while the flame runes next to and above them burned them to a crisp.
All they were doing was buying time. Time to survive just a few more seconds. Time to get up to the top of the tower in a final bid for rescue. Time that was quickly running out.
The thralls had only one goal, and that was to get to them. Shoving disabled or debilitated brothers and sisters off the stairs, or even grabbing them and tossing them toward Glimmer and Lonnie in an attempt to strike them, all of it was fair game. They didn't fight like traditional, rational combatants. They didn't even care for their own safety.
It was almost a surprise when they got to the top level. As soon as they burst through, every soldier in the group threw grenades back through the doorway. They exploded as the last of Glimmer's stasis and fire runes went off. Competing against the shockwave looking to escape the interior was a challenge, and Glimmer twined six consecutive runes on the door to hold it for as long as possible, making sure to reinforce the hinges and stonework surrounding the opening, too.
Lonnie was back at the injured soldier's side, lowering her to the ground against a nearby parapet with Rogelio's assistance. She was still conscious, if not clammier and more soaked through with sweat than before. Glimmer guessed it wouldn't be long before she went into shock.
Everyone else took a defensive position while she got situated, holding lines of sight that would allow all of them to cover the door with overwhelming crossfire as soon as the first thralls burst through. The door slammed from the inside. It was only a matter of time, and once the thralls got through again, there was nowhere else to go. Glimmer had to end this now.
Using so much magic earlier—the teleportation spell, the runes up the turret, clearing the fog the first time—drained her already. She couldn't let up. Not when they were so close. She stumbled to the center of the rooftop and stared up at the fog dome overhead.
She centered herself and stretched her mind. The surging mass of thralls was there past the door—she could feel them. They reached down the tower and surrounded the whole compound. She could also feel the chests upon chests of apeirons inside the tower, too. So many of them, it was like a constellation of stable suns ready and waiting for release, twined within the tower like a central core.
Using them would be crazy. Hell, feeling around the stockpile was risky enough, like feeling around a floor laden with shattered glass in the dark, barefoot. But then again, she rationalized that what she was about to attempt with the Beast was even riskier.
"Hold onto this," she said, yanking her PDA off her arm and handing it to Lonnie when she came over. "I might not have it in me to even speak once I've started, so you'll have to talk to Kyle or whoever is on the other end of that line once the signal connects."
Lonnie took it from her. She glanced at the screen and at the blinking icon still searching for a signal with a frown. Glimmer pulled some of the magic from the apeiron stockpiles, drawing it out like a nervous seamstress might unspool radioactive twine from a coil.
Someone had plunged a syringe of adrenaline into her. That was the only explanation for how lit on fire she felt the moment she took from the reserve—and so little of it, too. Cold electricity danced and arced in ribbons across her body, and every hair on her body stood on end.
No, she thought, stuffing the energy back inside when it pooled at two points inside her shoulder blades and started to spill out from there. Not here. Not yet. She had to use as much of it as she could. Channeling this much power without properly radiating the excess was mortally dangerous, but she'd only get one shot at this and it had to count.
Lonnie's eyes went wide at the display. Glimmer looked down at her hands and her body; she glowed with such concentrated magic the aura itself was almost fully opaque. When she felt as if holding the magic in even a moment longer made her liable to explode, Glimmer dug her heels into the stone underfoot and threw an open palm up as if to push away the sky.
Power exploded from her palm. A beam of energy wider than she was tall shot forth. It hit the dome with a heady impact that rattled her bones, pulled her mind from her body, and had her touching something impossibly large and violent.
Despite knowing what she was doing—despite anticipating what she'd meet—she recoiled in horror when the rest of her caught up to her rational mind and realized what she'd done:
The figure before her was massive and ponderous. Like a mountain that had taken notice of a singular ant crawling upon its surface, it turned to regard Glimmer, pushing the weight of its full attention onto her.
She had touched the Beast.
