The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [257]
But I don’t know how, Jack.
Nonsense! Of course you know how. You are a runelord—I made you one myself. The Stone must obey your commands. Now do it!
There was no more time. The tendril reached Travis, coiled around him. He felt his being start to dissolve as everything good that he had ever been was stripped away, leaving only the bare, blackened bones of his darkest memories. Trying to wake up Alice, her skin like ice. Fleeing the Magician’s Attic as Jack faced the wraithlings alone. Realizing Max had betrayed him to Duratek.
Finally, he understood. That was how the demon did it, how it drew people to it, and how it finally consumed them. It dug through the layers of their lives, excavating the pits of their souls, exhuming all the worst moments of their lives. And with only such dark remains left to them, who would not wish to surrender to the void?
The black tendril tightened around him, scraping away the last bits of comfort he clung to, leaving only calcified relics of pain. The faded clapboards of the Illinois farmhouse the day he left it forever. The look of madness in Max’s fevered eyes as fire took him. Beltan lying motionless in a pool of blood beneath Castle Spardis. The bare patch of freshly turned earth he could see from his bedroom window.…
No.
The word was barely a whisper in his mind, but he hearkened to it as if it had been a shout. No, he wouldn’t let that be his only memory of her—the tiny form flung into the damp, worm-rich soil on that gray Illinois day. Her crooked smile, her elfin laughter, her small body snuggled in the crook of his lanky arm as they read a book. No matter what had happened afterward, he would not forget those things. He would not.
I love you, Big Brother.
I love you too, Bug.
It was so terribly hard. His fingers were nearly transparent; he was already fading away. With his last spark of will, Travis gripped Sinfathisar, touched it to the dark tendril of the demon, and made his choice.
“Be rock.”
It was less than a whisper. However, Jack’s voice spoke the words in his mind, and a hundred other voices echoed them in a resounding chorus: the voices of all the Runelords who ever had lived, speaking now as one through him.
BE ROCK!
Brilliant silver-green light blazed into being, burning through his hand. There was a shriek that was not a sound—a shrill unsound of agony that pierced his mind before it abruptly ended. The violent wind ceased.
Then, along with a distorted chunk of black stone and everything else in the Etherion, Travis fell toward the marble floor thirty feet below.
85.
“Hold!” called out a clear voice of power.
Invisible hands seemed to grip Travis, stopping his descent. Below him, countless tons of stone crashed to the floor of the Etherion with shattering force, along with all the other flotsam that had been caught in the demon’s spell. A sound like a hundred peals of thunder combined into one echoed off the remains of the blue dome above.
The thunder faded, and a few remaining pebbles skittered on the rubble below.
Drifting in midair, Travis craned his neck. He saw the others floating as well, their faces as stunned as his own. Lirith, Durge, and Sareth hovered in a knot to one side of Travis, while some distance in the other direction floated Aryn, Beltan, and Vani, as well as Falken and Melia. Melia was glowing a brilliant blue, her hands pressed to her temples, her face lined in concentration.
Panic rose in Travis’s throat—last he had seen Grace, she had been on the floor of the Etherion. Then he sighed as he saw her drifting not far beyond Melia, awake and alive. The force of the demon must have pulled her into the air just before the end.
“Very well, Melia,” Falken bellowed, spinning slowly head over heels and getting tangled in his faded blue cloak. “You can set us down now. Just do it slowly.”
“It’s really not quite that simple. I’m either holding you or I’m not. There isn’t exactly an in-between.”
Falken groaned. “What do you mean there’s not an in-between.