Imperial (Insight #8)(59)
“Shove it. I know damn well as soon as I leave here, you will manifest another image of her to toy with these people,” Vade said with a nod to the three in the room.
“Not people. Not at all.”
Vade glanced to the frozen images of the room, then back to Fielder. “Right, they are your karma...looks like they were faring well.”
There is a call to kings that bellows within their core. It is the sound that brings us all to the round room. That call began to ring.
Vade and Fielder locked eyes.
“Someone is in a fuss,” Fielder stated. “Awesome, now I get to tell them all at once that the great King of Anger struck my petal, then we can have a jolly old time trying to understand why.”
Vade only offered a glare. He wasn’t afraid, but I was. He was walking into a room of seven, and three of the six beyond him were known adversaries.
“See you there,” Fielder stated as he vanished.
That second, the rest of us appeared in the springs, moved there by Vade himself.
Rasp collapsed to the floor and Mazing rushed to his side. I swayed, but I was not near as weak as I was before.
“What the hell is going on?” I said to Vade.
“You’re asking me that?” he said with disdain. “Let me catch you up, my sweet rush. You were supposed to speak to your Fated; instead, you set him free to fight. Considering that Rasp is on the floor weak as hell, you should know what the consequences of that were. And if that was not a fun enough-filled afternoon for you—you decided to invade Fielder. He is no fool; he knows you were in that room. Now I have to walk into a circle of kings. No doubt they know I’m weak because they have struck my Fated. I wonder how this is going to end, Glory.”
“I didn’t let him go to fight you. I would never hurt you,” I said as my wrath made my voice tremble.
“Yet you do every day. I failed you. I failed the Creator. He should have picked a better king for you, a better man.”
My eyes were wide, my mouth open with shock. How could he say such a thing? He stared at me, pleading for something I could not grasp. Before I could tell him that the metallic energy he dreamed about exists, that Silas was watching those souls, he vanished.
Rasp stood.
“How bad is it?” I said to him as a sick feeling came to me.
“It’s not as bad as he made it out to be,” Rasp said. “He’s just protective. It was the echo that hurt our lines. It stopped too quickly to have occurred in real time. Someone stopped it before it became tragic.”
The echo was the voice of the dead. They lived on a different frequency than reality and often could speak of the future. I was grateful that whatever could have happened was stopped, but the risk of it happening again was far too great to ignore. I had to handle Silas. I had no choice.
“Go to them, to the Fated. Do whatever you have to do in order to make them stronger. Move mountains,” I ordered, knowing that even if our Fated had dodged death moments before, they had to be weak, there had to be chaos in The Realm at this moment. “Mazing, go with him.”
They started to argue, but I raised my hand to stop them. “Mazing, dare not walk with shame, for your heart knew from day one what was rightfully ours.”
“Why are you telling me goodbye?” she asked with wide eyes.
“We all know where Vade is right now. It would take the Creator Himself to get us out of this alive. Those Fated will not perish with us, for we have not gone to them, not connected. You will go now, and use your last moments showing them what we are supposed to be.”
I now understood why Vade had not spoken to his, why he had not told me to call all mine home. He was protecting them, ensuring that the kings would not find a full victory with our end, that they would forevermore face our essence in one form or another.
Rasp and Mazing vanished.
With a shaking hand, I touched the spring and Silas’ image consumed it. He was at the point where the Veil and The Realm met, and he didn’t look good.
Chapter Fifteen
This was going to be hard, the hardest thing I had ever done. I sucked in a deep breath and let the springs carry me in. I manifested a half-mile away from Silas. I couldn’t bring myself any closer, not yet.
He looked exhausted. Though his skin was still perfect, his clothes were torn, his hair was disheveled, and any glow in his eyes had faded.
He was walking away from me, staggering along the field he was in. Then all at once, he stopped and threw his head back and roared.
The skies opened at that instant, and his body became weightless as it bowed backward. That armor around his soul started to break away, and as it did masses of dark smoke billowed from his core, flowing into the sky. That flow went on forever. His body would twitch as he roared in obvious pain; this evil was ripping him apart.
It took all that I had not to stop it. I knew it wouldn’t make much sense for me to do such a thing, stop the pain, when my intent was to smite him.
A powerful, gleaming light poured from the open sky and cradled him as if he were a mere infant. The screams stopped then. His eyes closed as he dangled in the air in a fetal position.
The entire act had left him all but nude. His back was bare to me, and there were gaping holes in his pants.
The light intensified, and as it did he became more aware. He stretched out in the air, inviting the light in. The warm light he basked in pulled him to a standing position just before the ground and slowly spun him as if to ensure that each part of him were cleansed.