Chapter 35 | Part 3 | The Vision

She reached on the fourth night because the Beacon wouldn’t let her sleep.

The hum had changed. Not louder. Different. A frequency shift that sat behind her left eye and pulsed in time with her heartbeat, a rhythm that had nothing to do with her body and everything to do with whatever was happening on the other side of the barrier. The shift started at dusk and climbed through the evening hours like a tide coming in, steady and patient and unstoppable.

They’d camped on a stony plateau. Aldric had chosen the site for elevation. Balin had built a small fire in a depression between rocks, shielded from the wind and from the grey cloaks who were still somewhere south, still patient, still irrelevant. Dulint sat against his pack with the Beacon wrapped and humming at his back. Xandor had fallen asleep sitting upright, his staff across his knees, his breathing steady in the way old men breathed when their bodies overruled their minds.

Maris sat at the edge of the plateau and looked northeast and felt the frequency climb.

She didn’t announce it. Balin would have tried to stop her, with his hazel eyes and his careful hands and his belief that her body mattered more than what it could see. Aldric would have recorded it. Dulint would have watched.

She closed her eyes and reached.

The barrier met her halfway. It had been thinning for days, the membrane between this side and the other growing translucent to the Beacon’s frequency, and when she pushed through it now the resistance was less than half of what it had been the first time she’d tried. She slid through like a hand through gauze and the vision opened.

Stone. Black stone. A tower built from it, ancient and functional, rising from a landscape of volcanic ridge and dead forest. She’d seen fragments of this place before, through the static, through the cost. Now she saw it whole. The tower stood at the edge of something, a boundary within a boundary, a place where the already-wrong landscape became wronger still. The air around it tasted of ozone and copper and the particular staleness of an environment where nothing had decayed in centuries because nothing alive remained to begin the process.

He was inside. The dark elf. She felt him before she saw him, his frequency resonating through the tower’s stone like a tuning fork pressed to a table. He was afraid. Not the diffuse fear she’d felt before, the background hum of someone who had been afraid for so long that fear had become architecture. This was sharp. Immediate. Something had changed.

Three figures with him. The two small grey ones, close, watchful. And someone else. Someone tall and armored and radiating a frequency the Beacon couldn’t read, a void where a signal should have been. This figure stood at a distance from the others, and the distance was deliberate, and the deliberation had a quality Maris couldn’t name but could feel: the quality of someone who had already decided something that everyone else was still debating.

Then the fire.

It came from above. Not from inside the tower. From the sky. From something in the sky, something massive that the vision couldn’t resolve into clarity because its frequency was older than the Beacon’s calibration, older than the barrier, older than the framework the Beacon used to interpret what Maris’s mind received. She saw wings. She saw fire. She saw the tower’s stone crack along fault lines that had existed since it was built, waiting for this specific heat, this specific force.

The dark elf was moving. Not running. Being moved. Pushed forward by the armored figure, toward the barrier, toward the thing the tower had been protecting or containing or pointing at, she couldn’t tell, the distinction between those functions dissolved in the fire and the heat and the wings.

FIRE.

The word wasn’t thought. It was experience. The vision became the fire. Maris was inside it, not watching it, her frequency tangled with his, her body registering the heat that his body registered, her fear layered on top of his fear, the two fears harmonizing into a single chord that the Beacon amplified until it was the only thing in the world.

The tower was burning. The stone cracked. The thing with wings banked and came around for a second pass, and in the half-second when it crossed between the fire and the sky Maris saw it clearly: vast, scaled, burning from within, ancient in a way that made the tower look recent. It moved through the air like it owned the air. Like the air was a space it had vacated temporarily and was now reclaiming.

The dark elf was walking through the fire. Not burning. Not because the fire couldn’t touch him. Because the crystals at his belt were absorbing it, four black points drinking heat and light and converting them into something his body could survive. The armored figure was behind him, pushing, directing, and the void where her signal should have been was growing, filling the space the tower had occupied, becoming the new architecture of the moment.

Maris screamed.

Not in the vision. In the world. Her body screamed because her body was the thing that paid for what her mind received, and the cost of this vision was more than any previous cost, was the full price of clarity.

She was on the ground. Stone under her back. The sky above her was the real sky, stars, cold, correct. Her body convulsed. Her hands clawed at the rock. Blood from her nose, both nostrils, thick and fast. Blood from her left ear, warm, sliding down her neck. Blood from her right ear. And from somewhere she couldn’t locate, a heat behind her eyes that resolved into wetness, red wetness, blood pooling in her lower lids and spilling down her temples.

Dulint was above her. His hands were under her skull. His face was stone and panic in equal proportions.

“THE TOWER IS BURNING,” she said. The words tore out of her. Not voluntary. “HE’S WALKING THROUGH IT AND SOMETHING WITH WINGS, SOMETHING OLD, IT CAME FROM THE SKY AND THE TOWER IS GONE AND HE’S BEING PUSHED TOWARD THE BARRIER AND THE WOMAN, THE TALL ONE, SHE KNOWS, SHE ALREADY DECIDED—”

Her body seized. Her spine arched. Dulint caught her head before it hit the stone and Balin was there, his hands on her shoulders, pressing her down, his voice saying words she couldn’t hear because the Beacon’s frequency was still screaming inside her skull, still broadcasting the signal from the other side, the signal that said: fire, wings, forward, now, now, now.

The seizure lasted eight seconds. Maris counted them afterward by the bruises on her tongue where she’d bitten it. Eight seconds of her body translating the cost of vision into movement, her muscles contracting and releasing in patterns that had nothing to do with her nervous system and everything to do with the barrier’s frequency passing through her like electricity through water.

She went still. She breathed. The stars were above her, cold and distant and unconcerned.

“Maris.” Balin’s voice. Close. Scared. His hands were still on her shoulders. “Maris, can you hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“Don’t move.”

“I’m not moving.” A pause. The blood was drying on her face. Cooling on her neck. Pooling in her ears, muffling the world. “I wasn’t moving when it started either.”

Aldric’s face appeared above her. He’d crouched. His grey eyes moved across her face, reading the blood, calculating the cost. “How bad?”

“She can’t tell yet.” The distance language. Automatic. The shield between Maris and the thing that was eating her from the inside out. “Nose. Both ears. Eyes, she thinks. The seizure was new.”

“Eyes,” Aldric repeated. Not a question. A data point.

“The tower is gone.” Maris closed her eyes. The afterimage burned behind her lids: fire, wings, stone cracking, the dark elf walking through it. “He’s alone now. The tower is gone and something destroyed it and he’s being pushed forward. The armored woman. She’s pushing him toward the barrier. She already knew this would happen. She planned for it.”

“Planned for the fire?” Xandor was awake now. His voice was the voice of a man who’d been woken by screaming and was trying to sound like he’d been awake all along.

“Planned for something. She wasn’t surprised. She was ready. When the tower burned, she moved him forward. Not away from the fire. Through it. Toward the barrier.” Maris opened her eyes. The stars swam. Balin’s face was a blur above her, young and afraid. “Whatever just happened over there, it was the beginning of something. Not the end.”

Silence. The wind moved across the plateau. The fire in its depression had burned low, orange coals pulsing like a heartbeat.

“When?” Dulint asked.

Maris shook her head. The motion sent pain through her skull in waves. “She doesn’t know. The vision doesn’t come with timestamps. It could be happening now. It could have happened yesterday. The Beacon’s frequency shifted at dusk, so.” She swallowed blood. “Recently. Very recently.”

Dulint stood. He looked northeast. The horizon was dark. Stars and nothing.

“Can you walk?” he asked.

“In the morning.”

“Can you walk now?”

Maris lay on the stone with blood drying on her face and the afterimage of fire behind her eyes and the Beacon screaming in her skull. She thought about the dark elf walking through flames with four black crystals drinking heat and an armored woman pushing him forward and something with wings burning the sky open above them.

“Give me an hour,” she said.

Nobody argued. Balin’s hands stayed on her shoulders. The stars turned overhead in their slow, indifferent circle. The Beacon hummed, directional, insistent, pointed at a burning tower that might already be ash.

Maris lay on the stone and bled and waited for her body to decide whether it would carry her or not.

End of Chapter 35.3 —> 35.4: The Map That Bleeds: The Fire