The Elementals; Fire

Chapter 32

I opened my eyes to see that I couldn't have been swallowed by the darkness for  longer than a couple of seconds. It turns out that I had most likely face planted the ground, and for a moment I just laid there. It was completely silent around me, and it was eery. It had gone from a heavy storm, screaming and shouting, to nothing in a matter of seconds, and my brain hadn't adjusted yet. I listened out that movement around me, and that itself wasn't a problem, because the shouting started back up again. What was actually surprising though, was it was various different shouts of my name. I groaned, the new loudness bringing on a headache. I rolled over, looking up at the now clear sky, before the view was interrupted by my mothers face looming over mine.

"Layla? Are you alright? Answer me!" I groaned again, squeezing my eyes shut. In that moment, I remembered where I got my loud gene from.

"Yes mother, I'm fine" I slowly sat up, and looked at everyone who was surrounding us and it took me a few minutes to realise there were no Shadows around.

"Where are they all?"" No one answered me, and I thought they didn't want to tell me, but it turns out they just didn't know.

"When we saw you up there, I had an inkling you were going to do what you did which was explode, so I shouted for everyone to all to draw in closer, and pointed to you in a subtle enough way so the shadows didn't notice. They were too busy surrounding us, thinking they had us cornered, but we were fighting them off pretty well. It got to a point where you were burning so brightly, it would've taken an idiot to not realise what was going to happen, but again the shadows still didn't notice. I was the first to start the wall, creating blocks of Ice, then Talia built her walls of mud, and finally, Roman blasted air towards the back of that, as a fail safe." Luka explained. I just stared at him in shock, shock at myself for doing something so stupid that could've have seriously hurt them all.

"How did you know that was going to hold?" He just shrugged, frowning.

"We didn't" I blanched, and I had never  felt so cold in my life.

"I am so sorry" I felt myself gulp hard as they all looked at me confused, but their faces started getting blurry from the tears that had started forming.

"What're you sorry for, Layla?" Talia asked the question, whilst everyone continued looking at me. I took another deep breath, having to force myself to speak out loud to them what I had almost done.

"I could've killed you all, I didn't even think I just acted, and that one small slip could've destroyed everything" No one said a word, and I hung my head in shame, unable to look at them, but then the weirdest thing happened, they all started to slowly chuckle at me, one by one. The drained feeling that had submerged me disappeared a bit, as the normal sizzling started back up again.

"What's so funny?" I looked at my dad, who'd also started chuckling, and stared at him hard, unfortunately it didn't phase him one bit.

"I don't know why everyone else is laughing, but I'm laughing at the fact that you're apologising for doing the only thing that might have saved our lives." Ilkeston at him, not understanding what he meant, but Roman stepped in and answered my un-asked question.

"Layla, we were managing to defend  ourselves, but at any moment they could've transported behind one of us and killed us straight away, but with you getting rid of them all as quickly as you did, you made that possibility vanish. Oh and besides that, you may have quite possibly saved the world from a Shadow take over."