Garden of Light: Beneath Devouring Eyes #1

Chapter 12 | Part 2

"Don't do that," Valens growled, and the aedificans's promenia sifted through the air.

Domi grimaced. "I did it again, didn't I?" There was another sound he now recognized: the sizzling and popping promenia made when a worldholder dissolved it. That sound now came from inside the amethyst tree.

Valens took the weapon from him, scowled at it as his promenia passed through the crystals, and handed the artifact back. "It is still mostly intact," he said in a grumble. "Please don't destroy it."

"I wasn't trying to."

"That works," Valens said, "by aiming the crystal end toward a creature you wish to strike. It will sense your intentions and your target and help you aim true."

"All right," Domi said. "And if this thing fails?"

"It won't."

"But if it does?"

The aedificans offered a tight smile as the two of them stepped into the snow and found Serenitas and her three alumnas waiting. "Then you should run."

***

This was not what the wondertales led Domi to expect a mighty sorcerous undertaking would be like.

Perched on a boulder in the basalt outcrop where they gathered, he surveyed the five worldholders below him. In the Holy Ovidiana, sorcerers always stood in a circle, arms stretched to the sky, as they murmured magical incantations.

The group before him loitered around like hikers on a rest break.

Valens lounged on the ground with his back against the stone, legs stretched before him and head back, like he had fallen asleep. Serenitas sat cross-legged on a low boulder, hunched over her knees, her black braids spilling around her to hide her face. Two of her alumnas slouched with their shoulders serving as one another's pillows, and the third lay sprawled in the snow.

Domi didn't understand why they weren't cold. He shuddered in the icy wind, and he was not sitting on the frozen ground like the others. All Valens said by way of explanation before ignoring Domi's questions had been, "Prometus." But Domi had prometus too, so why was he half-frozen while everyone else looked warm and toasty?

He had been left to puzzle over it alone as all five worldholders turned to their work.

Domi glanced up at the sky, breath stalling in his throat as it did every time he made the mistake of peering up at the damaged Trellis. In the borderlands this close to the night-side, the sun crouched halfway beneath the horizon, glaring over the edge as a thin crimson crescent. Overhead, the jagged fragments of the Trellis glowed a strange bluish green instead of gold, livid against the black, purple, and blue sky beyond.

All the storytellers said the night-side looked like this, that people in the distant wilds where the Trellis was more patchwork lived their whole lives beneath a sunless, bruised sky. He could not imagine such a thing. Until now.

The worldholders were making decent progress, so Domi hoped they would be able to leave this creepy place soon. It appeared to his untrained eyes like the repairs were almost done. Globules of melting Trellis no longer fell from the sky, fizzling out before reaching the ground. He had watched the cyan strands wend across the heavens for the past three hours, woven like fabric on a loom.

A strange sensation accompanied it. He tried not to concentrate too much on the promenia's singing and wavering distortions. The last thing he wanted was to do the only thing he seemed good at so far and dissolve the other worldholders' promenia by mistake.

But he found it hard to ignore what he sensed, in particular what he heard. First, a soft hum rose in the distance, which grew louder as promenia swelled on the skyline and then gathered in an gossamer disc above the three alumnas. He had no idea how they were calling the particles to them. However, as soon as the mirage-like distortion grew immense enough to cover the whole outcrop, it began to coil around Valens and Serenitas.