Book One – Chapter 2

Whatever had happened here, it had been cataclysmic. The heat had been so intense, it had not merely destroyed whatever structures had crashed into ; it had changed the nature of the ground that received them, layer upon layer beneath the surface. held more than the evidence of that violence. It preserved it. Heat still bled upward through twisted stone and glass, where it collected beneath buried slabs and inside cavities sealed by fused debris. Pressure accumulated there until it forced its way out in sudden eruptions. Above the surface, those rising currents collided with the warped winds that spilled back from the monolith field behind them. The two forces warred against one another without reconciliation; heat pushing up in violent bursts, wind striking down to tear them apart.

Yves was right there, where they met. He felt the burn through the soles of his boots, against his face and inside his lungs. The air was hot like fire and sharp with suspended glass. Every breath carried both sensations deeper. By the final stretch toward the crest of the dune, the ruins had become too hot to touch without blistering his skin. Even through cloth, even though leather, even through all the careful and tediously expensive precautions of a wizard who had tried very hard not to be killed by geography —

Midnight stopped, at the ridge several meters ahead of him. One moment she was climbing, the next her body compressed towards the ground, and then she sprang aside. A bolt of lightning struck right where she had been, the next hit where she landed. Yves’ shield met it instead. He conjured the shards in the same instant Midnight moved; a jagged fan thrown between her body and the crest. The impact turned the entire structure white. Every shard flared at once, their edges erased beneath intolerable brilliance. The collision screamed through crystal and stone. The sound pierced his ears. The shockwave struck his chest a fraction later, and the pressure tore the breath from his lungs. A third bolt followed before the first glare had cleared from his vision. It burst against the shield and split it open. Blazing fractures raced through its lattice. The conjuration tore in a violent spray of shards that spun across the slope. They trailed brief streaks of silver-white light that became immediate targets. More lightning bolts ruptured towards them.