The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [247]
Again a spasm passed through his body. His flesh seemed to ripple like the stone walls of the Etherion.
“I don’t—” he said, but the rest of his words were pulled away from his lips.
Grace blinked. Xemeth’s arms seemed to be growing longer, stretching away from his body and toward the demon. He tried to pull them back.
He did not succeed. The gold rays still reached from his hands to the demon. His fingers elongated to impossible proportions, stretching thinner as they did.
Xemeth screamed. “I cannot let go!”
His words were weirdly distorted, the tones shifted downward like the whistle of a receding train. Xemeth’s arms were a dozen feet long by then, and his fingers were so thin they merged with the rays of light plunging into the demon.
“What’s happening to him?” Vani said, her expression one of horror.
Even as she spoke, Grace understood. The cry of the demon—it hadn’t been agony. It had been delight. Sareth had said the morndari craved blood. The demon had starved in its prison for more than two thousand years. And now it had tasted blood of unfathomable power.
“It’s pulling him in,” Grace said. “And Xemeth doesn’t have enough control over his power to stop it.”
Xemeth’s arms stretched to spindly strands twenty feet long, as if the gold rays were lines the demon was using to reel them in. His screams wavered strangely. Now his head was being drawn toward the demon with the rest of him, his neck and shoulders elongating like his arms to grotesque lengths. Twenty feet. Thirty. Fifty. His scream still rang out, but he couldn’t possibly be alive anymore. Such distortion would kill a man in a second.
And what does a second mean when you’re being pulled into a black hole, Grace? Time stops, and a second is forever.
Gagging, Aryn averted her gaze. Falken pressed her head to his chest. Melia’s visage was solemn, and both Beltan and Vani stared with a mixture of revulsion and fascination.
The liquid sound of Xemeth’s scream seemed to freeze as the moment of his agony extended into infinity. Only his legs remained on the balcony. His body above the waist had become a slender rope, snaking its way along with the golden rays of magic toward the demon.
In the blink of an eye it happened. Like a taut wire suddenly freed at one end, Xemeth’s form snapped away from the balcony, whipped through the Etherion, and was reeled into the shapeless shadow.
Flash.
He was gone.
“Xemeth …” Vani murmured, her face hard, yet touched by sorrow all the same.
“Did you …?” Beltan licked his lips. “Did you know that was going to happen?”
Vani shook her head. The assassin had only been trying to gain them some time; she couldn’t have known that Xemeth’s newfound magic—the power he had always craved—would be his undoing.
There wasn’t much debris left in the Etherion. Only a few pebbles, and in bright flashes even those were consumed. All at once the far wall of the Etherion bulged and burst outward in a spray of white stone that swept quickly into a spiraling course toward the demon. The blood of Orú had strengthened it; the demon was going to rip the Etherion apart.
We have to get out of here, Grace started to say.
Another voice spoke first.
“I am so weary, my sister. So terribly weary. I can dance no more.”
“Melia!” Falken cried out. “No!”
Grace jerked her head up in time to see Melia let go of the column to which she had been clinging. Eyes shut, the lady rose into the air. Her small body rolled, until she lay upon her back. Then she drifted away from the balcony, circling with the other debris toward the center of the Etherion.
“Falken!” Beltan shouted. “Hold on to Aryn!”
It was too late. Like Melia, Aryn rose into the air, her eyes shut.
Aryn! Grace tried to shout across the Weirding. Aryn, can you hear me?
But the only answer was from the shadow attached to Grace’s life thread. It pressed around her, close, smothering. Grace was too tired to resist anymore. Her eyes drooped shut.
No, that’s what it wants you to do. It wants you to give in to the shadow