Aleira Brightleaf's Arc

Chapter 13 of 18

The lava sealed the breach, but the danger was not gone. Aleira pressed her ear to the crusted wall and heard it—chanting, faint, from far across the wastes. The retreating necromancers had not scattered blind. They followed something. She turned to Morwenna, who stood clutching her skull staff, white eyes wide. "They still know where we are," Aleira said. "They feel your magic. It calls them." Morwenna's shoulders drew in. "The beacon. My magic. It never stops. It leaks. It leaks even when I am still." She backed toward the throne. "They will come back. Twenty. More. They always come." Hazel looked up from where she sat, her wand loose in her hand, leaves trembling in her hair. "Can she just... turn it off?" "No." Morwenna's voice cracked. "It is what I am. Dead magic. I cannot be quiet. I cannot hide the smell." She hugged the staff like a child. "There is no way. No way." Aleira knelt in front of her. She had kept this frightened girl's secret for weeks. She had chosen her over the throne once already. "Listen to me. The scent comes from the staff, doesn't it? The green fire. That's what they track." Morwenna nodded, quick and small. "The staff. Yes. It burns. It always burns." "Then we drown it." Aleira pointed at the lava crust behind the throne, still glowing where Morwenna had cooled it. "Push your magic into the fire. All of it. One last time. Bury the light in the lava and let the stone swallow the scent." Morwenna shook her head hard. "If I empty the staff, I have nothing. Nothing to hold the lava. Nothing to fight. I will be bare. Bare in front of the living." "You'll be hidden," Aleira said. "They can't track what they can't smell. Silent is safer than armed." For a long moment Morwenna only breathed. Then she raised the skull staff. Green light poured from it in a thick stream. She aimed it at the crust and forced everything out. The fire on the staff guttered. The skull dimmed. The green flood sank into the molten wall and vanished under a black skin of hardening rock. The chanting outside faltered. It broke into confused voices, then faded as the necromancers lost the trail. Silence returned. The skull staff sat dead in Morwenna's hands, gray and cold. She stared at it, empty and shaking. "Gone," she whispered. "It's gone." Hazel let out a breath. "They can't find us now." Aleira nodded, but her eyes went to the wall. The lava that had blocked their only exit was hardening fast now, robbed of Morwenna's fire. It cooled into solid black stone before her, thick and sealed. The necromancers were blind. The throne was hers. And she was locked inside a tomb of rock with no magic left to break it, and no way down to the world above.