Page 133 of Swords of Soul and Shadow (Gate Chronicles #3)

He looked up to see Eravin’s glittering midnight sword arcing toward Hallie. Skibs swung the shadow sword. Missed. Kase fumbled for his own, raising it only a second before Eravin’s sliced through Hallie’s skull. The strike vibrated through his arm and shoulder, aching horribly.

He groaned against the strain. Skibs pulled Hallie away, but Kase couldn’t get off his knees.

“Yrea va na tari!”

Golden fire blasted Eravin in the side, engulfing and knocking him sideways.

Hallie.

Kase’s sword flew from his hands. He scrambled toward it just as Eravin recovered enough to send more glittering black energy at her. Kase’s fingers gripped his shining sword, and he flung himself to his feet, launching at Eravin.

“No!”

His father’s sword, the one fabled to belong to a Yalven legend, blazed like lightning through the air, its arc aflame with searing white-gold.

In the second before the sword connected with his neck, Eravin turned, looking directly at Kase. His eyes were no longer solid black.

They were dark brown and unmarred.

Sad, anguished.

The shining sword sliced through muscle and sinew, bone and skin, black blood spraying Kase. It boiled. Kase screamed as it licked his skin like liquid flame. Eravin’s head rolled off his shoulders and his body collapsed forward, his blood like a night sky without stars, spilling onto the ground.

Kase fell to his knees. He dropped the sword.

Everything burned.

Everything blurred.

He couldn’t see. It had all happened so fast. His heart was going to beat out of his chest. Fire seared his insides like he’d drunk a gallon of acid. Whatever Eravin had punched him with earlier raged in his blood.

He was going to die just like his father.

A thousand memories, the worst ones, assaulted him as he knelt, his skin burning. The pain of breaking his arm when he was seven. The sickness that had taken both his grandparents. Each disappointed look from his father. A dozen near-death experiences with Eravin.

Just give in. Give in to the darkness.

The voice was small, soft, yet too familiar. He’d heard it before. It was the same one that always spoke to him in his darkest moments.

Ana’s betrothal dinner ending in a plan to run away. His father nearly killing him when they’d tried. The fire, his aching lungs. Ana bleeding and burning in his arms. Her sweater melted into her skin. Eravin slamming the door in his face.

It’s over. There is nothing you can do.

The Eudora mission, the storm, the stone statues, Ebba’s death, Hallie’s ruined hand, Zeke’s blood. Another slamming door, his dying brother on the other side. Skibs’ betrayal. Getting hit with the Cerl pistol in the Narden Pass. Hallie’s kidnapping. Correa’s torture. Achilles. Saying goodbye.

The weight of his failures bludgeoned him, crushing him into the stone beneath his knees. He couldn’t see. It was too dark.

You’re worthless, reckless, a waste.

Gray whimpered against black, a shadow puppet acting out every last thing that had chiseled cracks into his heart.

Hallie’s trembling lips as she stared at his ring. “I don’t want to marry you…”

Closing Harlan’s sightless eyes. “I…I love…”

Eravin’s black blood spurting from the place his head once sat. “We’re friends again, remember?”

Kase didn’t know if he was breathing. He couldn’t feel his lungs filling and contracting. He could only feel the pain.

Just let go.

Hallie

THE FIRE WAS TOO brIGHT to be natural. The ashamox was too thick. It was as if the Gate bled its life out into each burning gust. Hallie and Ben stood before it, unsure of anything but the improbability of what they needed to do.

“Do we put out the fire first?” Hallie asked, spinning Kase’s ring around her finger. She purposefully did not look at him, wherever he was. She couldn’t, not if she was going to do what she needed to do. One look at him would unravel any courage she managed to scrounge up.

Ben pressed his glowing hands to the ground a foot or two from the blazing archway. “It’s this Gate’s soul. It’s too weak. I don’t know if putting out the fire will do anything besides prolong its death. This one is unfamiliar. It doesn’t feel like the other two Gates.”

“What if I heal it? I don’t know the first thing about doing that with a soul, but it’s the only idea I have. Could you…I don’t know…maybe…”

She was at a loss. It didn’t make sense in her mind.

Nothing did. It would just be easier to put the Essence powers into the swords and return them to their respective Gates, but according to Saldr, they needed the soul that was locked inside this one to even do that.

Did they take the shadow sword Skibs had set aside and thrust it into the Gate?

Hack at the carved Zuprium bricks with it?

Navara shouted something behind them, and Hallie peeked over to see a wall of flames colliding with shadowy power. The whole thing rocked and bowed when hit, but it held.

Stars, why had that woman run away from being the Essence of Time? With that kind of power and skill, she would’ve been a far better candidate than Hallie. Anyone would’ve been better than her.

Time was a thief and a liar.

“Pour your power into me,” Ben said, holding out a glowing hand. “As if you’re healing. If we join our power, we might be able to stop the complete destruction. Then we can reassess.”

She didn’t have a better idea, so she clutched his hand and funneled all the burning heat she could into the connection. He winced, but he pressed his hand into the flames anyway.

Holding a single tendril and letting the others loose into her hand, she fought the urge to let it all go. It was easier this time, though, than the other ones. She didn’t have to fight as hard.

She opened one eye. How? How was she able to channel so much power into Ben without feeling the effects?

Last time she’d slowed time and caught him after he’d fallen from the dragon, she’d felt herself falling deeper and deeper into the black hole, unable to pull herself out or even slow her descent.

This time was different. She wavered, but she kept a grip on reality, the power pouring out of her in a torrent. It was endless.

“Stop!” Ben said, releasing her hand.

She cut it off with barely a thought.

Stars. Was it because she was in Valora?

Hallie wiped the sweat rolling down her face. The fire had dimmed. Not enough. Ben cursed. “What are we missing? The other Essences? Maybe if we give it the swords and our own powers? But we’d need the one Jagamot took, and Kase’s sword, too. It has Correa’s.”

Hallie pressed her palms to her eyes. She needed to think. Out of all her research and obsessive reading, she must have come across something, anything that could give her the answer.

She looked down at her hand, the one with Kase’s ring. The band glowed subtly. Odd. Was it merely reflecting the firelight? Or was it coming from within?

The ring was pure Zuprium, the gemstones little chips from the crystal clusters themselves. Ever since Kase had pressed it into her hand, it’d felt right—even after her rejection.

Kase’s goggles hadn’t survived saving Ben, but they hadn’t been her Relic to begin with. Her power craved freedom, but that would only lead to destruction—of what, whether that was herself or something else, she didn’t know.

But this ring. It had been given out of pure love, with all the promise of forever.

She couldn’t help the soft gasp that escaped her lips. It couldn’t be.

Saldr had said replacing a Relic was nearly impossible—but not completely.

This was the Relic she’d needed all along.

She would finally find it right when she was about to give her power up to save the world. But what now? How could she use the Essence within her to fix the Gate before her?

To control her power, she needed a Relic. Before Kase had given her the ring, she’d been lost in that power, burning like this Gate. What was the Gate’s Relic?

The swords. The other Gates needed those—the Nether and the Aurora. But this one? What had happened to its guardian? Had it ever had one?

She knew next to nothing about it, only that it had been ruined for as long as time immemorial. The state of the cathedral confirmed that.

“No!” Kase screamed.

Hallie looked up, heart in her throat, her hands filling with power. But that wall of flames Navara had thrown up earlier still held, keeping her and Ben from whatever was happening on the other side.

How long would it hold?

Could she get around it?

They needed to figure this out. Now.

What if the only way to fix the Gate and heal the soul of the god trapped inside was to give it a guardian, a Relic, whether that be find the original or create a new one?

How did one do that? They didn’t have time to search for the original—hunting it down could take years.

Could Hallie do something about that? Could she somehow reverse time and find the sword?

Her fingers tingled with the thought.

What were the consequences of using her power on that scale? Would doing that cause some other horrific fallout now, making any sacrifice she made worthless?

Would it be the same as resetting the Gate? She’d been against the Lord Elder’s plan because of the horrible ramifications it might cause. What if this did something worse?

“Hallie?” Ben asked, his voice interrupting her thought process.

But if she made a new sword…would the Gate even accept it?

“To fix this Gate, we have to recreate it, and we need a sword guardian! We don’t have time to find the old one—we’ll have to make one!” It was so loud in the cavern, she had to shout. The flames and energy and fight around them echoed off the walls.

Ben’s face paled. “How?”

Hallie wet her lips. “I can create Passages and heal. You can control the Gates. We can combine our powers to create a Gate on top of this one, then create a sword guardian as the Gate’s Relic. Like you did in Myrrai.”

Ben swore loudly. “But we don’t have all the Essence powers!”

“We have to try.”

“It’s not going to work!”