Part Two:
THE CREST
They did not attempt the ascent again. Instead, they moved laterally along the dune, keeping below the line of the crest. The drop remained to their left. To their right, the upper slope rose in a broken procession of slabs and fused debris. The ruins radiated heat as though the fire had never left them, and they seemed to suffer it still. Yves and Midnight passed remnants scored by channels where metal had once liquefied and run like water before cooling into black seams. In some places it had pooled inside fractures in the stone; elsewhere it had streamed across carved surfaces and hardened there, filling ornaments, obscuring inscriptions and binding pieces together that had never been intended to touch. Whatever distinction had once existed between art and architecture had been burned beyond recognition, warped into mute contortions from which neither praise nor purpose could ever be reconstructed.
Lightning cracked overhead, just beyond the crest. Every burst rattled the air in Yves’ lungs, but none of it strayed this far down. He kept his Rothar ready regardless. He knew that another shield of shards would not protect them properly, not with how 
dismantled every ethereal defence the moment it took form.
The effective response would be not to withstand the lightning at all, but to take control of the rupture before impact. A capable Lightshifter would seize the chain while the break was still racing through it, and then either disturb its sequence or redirect its course. He might extract individual light fragments at precisely the right points to interrupt the progression before the rupture could continue. He might split the chain and scatter the two halves apart. Or, with considerably greater skill, he could fasten the advancing rupture onto another chain or cluster and give it a more convenient direction in which to spend itself. In less professionally dignified terms, he could catch lightning and throw it somewhere else. Difficult, certainly. Dangerous, obviously. But elegant. Efficient. Precisely the sort of sophisticated and spectacularly stylish solution the light spectrum existed to provide.
Yes, that would be the intelligent thing to do, and the impressive thing also.
Unfortunately, Yves was shit at pure light magic.
From Pond to Pen
Thank you for reading!
I have aphantasia, which means I rather lack visual imagination. For the longest time, I did not know that others can mentally visualise what they read. Even more bewildering and enviable is the fact that images automatically form in the minds of others as they read. This is something that does not happen for me, and I often wonder how others experience stories when reading about artefacts, magic, and battles.
Pages:
Pages: