Eona - Alison Goodman [213]
Ido yanked at the folio. “Give it to me!”
The end of the pearl rope curled and snapped across his hand. He forced his fingers beneath it again and ripped at the tight coils, his desperate strength sliding the folio down my arm to my wrist. With a grunt of victory he wrenched the folio free, the power unraveling out of me and pouring into his body.
I reeled from the sudden loss and crashed to the ground. The pearls swung out in a snapping circle, then wrapped around Ido’s hands.
He looked down at me, his eyes black pits of Gan Hua. “I do not need you anymore. I can hold this power by myself.”
I scrabbled backward. His body was silhouetted against the flames. Energy bathed his skin, casting him into shimmering silver light. The power of the ages, the power of all twelve dragons. And Ido believed he could hold it by himself.
I drew in a deep breath, hot air scorching the cavities of my chest, and found the pathway to the energy world. The platform around me warped and shuddered into the celestial plane. I flinched under the assault of blinding light and the writhing spectrum of color that leaped from the gold flames around the dragon pearls. Ido’s energy body swarmed with silver and black Hua. His seven points of power from sacrum to crown circled at a speed that blurred them into solid spheres of bright color: red, orange, yellow—and then the stunted green heart point. Never truly changed.
A wedge of darkness in all the bright fury drew my eyes to the purple sphere in his crown, the center of enlightenment. The black gap was still there like a deep wound within its spinning purple vigor. And it was getting bigger. The silver energy in his body pulsed and swelled, again and again. Every throbbing influx of power forced the gap wider and wider. Suddenly it split apart, a white-hot bolt of dragon Hua bursting from its spinning center.
“Ido, you cannot hold it,” I screamed. “Give it back to them. Let it go!”
His silvered eyes found mine. “I have it all, Eona! I am a god!”
“Let it go, now!”
His heart point exploded first. The green sphere burst under the pressure of the dragon power, a bright emerald flare that died into a dark hole in his chest. The orange sacral point was next, its flash cascading into his yellow delta, tiny exploding suns that left darkness in their wake. He writhed in agony as the blue and indigo points heaved and vaporized.
For a long moment, the split purple sphere in his crown spun with all the power of the world. Then it erupted into a blazing torrent of Hua, streaming into the waiting dragons. The roaring power engulfed Ido’s body in gold and silver flames. I saw him reach out toward me. Then he was gone, incinerated into a glowing spiral of ash and dust, our link severed into searing loss. The black folio dropped onto the platform, the white pearls rattling around its leather binding like dry bones.
The celestial plane snapped back into the earthly platform. I stared at the charred space on the wooden boards.
Lord Ido was dead, consumed by the dragon power he had craved. All that ambition and drive, gone. I took a breath, a strangled half-sob within it. We had been bound together through power and pain. And pleasure. But he had betrayed and tortured and murdered: he did not deserve my grief. Yet there was a part of me that mourned him—the part that had smiled at his sly humor, felt the slow touch of his hand and the thrill of his power. The part of me that had once thought he could change.
Lord Ido was dead, and even in death the man divided me.
I hauled myself on to my hands and knees and crawled to the dais. My true grief was waiting for me, sprawled on his side, breath so shallow that it hardly moved his chest. His eyelids flickered as I stroked his face, cold and clammy although his skin was reddened by the heat. He licked parched lips and opened his eyes. They were already dulled and unfocused.
“Ido?” His voice