The Count Stops

Rishi heard both opposing pairs draw breath.

Heat and weight pressed against one side of him. Wind and drowning cold gathered on the other. Above both, the Loom’s four eyes watched the distance between his hands, his feet, and the wounded core.

He listened through the Living Staff.

It still has to draw before it can strike.

The pull gathered toward the core.

There.

Rishi drew on the light in his blood.

Radiance tightened behind his ribs and spread through him until it shone from his eyes and mouth. It did not soften the burns along his arms. It gave the pain a boundary.

Destroy the machine.

He crossed the grate through the narrow pause before the sectors vented.

Rishi drove the Living Staff into the deepest fracture, then struck again before the crystal’s note could fade.

The note dropped lower.

He stepped close. The heel of his hand drove force into the cracked shell. An elbow followed, carrying radiance and the dark current he had learned to hold without letting it rule him.

Light flashed across the crystal. The dark current pressed beneath his skin, unable to follow the blow.

No flesh. No way in.

The floor pulled sideways before his last blow landed. His hand passed over the crystal.

The shell buckled where he had struck it. Through falling shards he glimpsed dense light, deeper within the prism. The remaining facets closed around it, and the pull through his staff continued.

Rishi moved away from the core.

Sirael stood beyond him, her swords lowered, her eyes fixed on Maeril with an intention that was not her own. Rishi put himself in that line. Thiarel, still a white lynx, prowled across the other approach.

The water eye opened.

Cold brine filled Rishi’s throat without touching his lips. His lungs tightened around it. He could neither draw breath nor cough the water free.

“Breathe, Rish.”

Her counter-pattern turned around him. White runes caught the spell, split its pressure, and opened a space no wider than a thread. Rishi dragged air through it. The false water broke apart.

The cold remained. It settled deep enough to shake his arms.

Sirael moved.

She showed Rishi one shoulder, drew his staff toward it, then flowed through the opening his answer made. Thiarel lunged from the other side. Sirael slipped between them before claw or wood found a clean angle.

She reached Maeril.

One sword cut low. Maeril turned too late, and the edge opened a line across her thigh.

Shallow.

The second blade entered beneath her raised arm, where it should have driven through cloth and flesh. It struck without weight and slid free.

Maeril brought her staff up. Steel glanced past her cheek, close enough to take a strand of hair. Another edge crossed her shoulder and barely broke the skin.

Sirael had won every angle. Her own hands denied the command its killing force.

Molten metal fell between them. A bright drop struck Rishi’s shoulder and spread beneath his robe; another burst across his forearm. He locked both hands around the Living Staff while the heat ate through cloth.

Thiarel took a heavier fall across her flank. Her lynx body twisted, and a woman’s cry tore through the animal sound in her throat.

Maeril threw herself aside, but fire crossed her boots and calves. A streak smoked along Sirael’s bracer. Another splashed one of Seamwarden’s limbs.

Rishi smelled burned cloth, singed fur, and hot iron.

He looked up as one eye narrowed on him. A cauterizing lash snapped toward his throat. Rishi turned the staff in one close circle and sheared it aside, leaving a smoking line in the grate beside his foot.

Then wind and earth rose together.

Stone tore upward through the gaps below. Fragments spun beneath the dome, struck the walls, and returned from angles the body could not follow.

Rishi planted the Living Staff.

A rock found the side of his head.

Light vanished from his sight before pain reached him. His inner radiance went out. He struck the grate and knew nothing.

Maeril reached toward Rishi through the flying grit. He lay beside his staff and did not move. Stone battered Sirael and Thiarel away from him. Debris rang against Seamwarden’s bark.

“Seamwarden! Help him!” she shouted.

The white rings shook around Maeril.

Hold. I have to reach him.

She kept the marks aligned through the first impacts. Another blow tore them apart. Pale sparks scattered through the storm, taking their protection with them.

A gravity-thread hooked toward her through the gap. Maeril lifted both hands to close a counter around it.

A stone struck her forearm. Another drove into her ribs. Grit blinded her before the pattern met.

The thread caught her.

It tore her from the grate and flung her across the sphere. Her shoulder hit first, then her hip, then the side of her head. Her staff struck iron and spun away.

She lay still. Across the grate, Rishi blurred and came clear again. She could not lift her head.

A lash of dry heat reached for the joints in Seamwarden’s body. They raised a hand and turned it aside as Rishi had done with his staff. Raw force broke the lash against the dome.

Their spellfire narrowed, flickered, and vanished. Light faded beneath their bark as they crossed the settling debris to Rishi.

Maeril saw one wooden hand press over his heart. Her sight darkened before she could see him move.

Warmth entered Rishi’s chest.

He woke on his back with a burned throat, blood in one ear, and every hurt returning at once. He drew a breath. His fingers found the Living Staff before his sight cleared.

Seamwarden stood over him, unsteady but upright.

Beyond the warden, Maeril lay crumpled near the wall. Her chest moved. Once. Again.

Alive.

Rishi began to rise.

Seamwarden faced the core. Pale radiance fell from their raised hand and burned a narrow channel through the broken shell. The light in their own runes faded as they fed the strike with their vitality.

The Loom counted Rishi’s breath.

It counted the healing hand that had returned him.

Then it looked at Maeril.

Rishi saw the lightning gather. He pushed against the grate.

“No.”

The bolt crossed the sphere before he could stand.

It struck Maeril where she lay.

Her body arched against the grate. Blue-white light passed through her neck and chest. The smell of scorched wool reached him a heartbeat later.

Maeril fell still.

This time her chest did not move.

Thiarel hit the core.

The white lynx crossed the grate in two bounds. One claw tore through a fractured facet. The second pulled a shield-sized plate away and exposed the tighter crystal within.

Lightning from the killing bolt still crawled along the iron bars. It climbed Thiarel’s fur and gathered around her raised paw.

She drove it into the exposed heart.

The Loom stuttered.

One eye failed to light. It flashed twice instead, out of time with the other three. The grate missed a beat beneath Rishi’s feet.

He stood.

Maeril lay between him and the wall, one hand open beside her.

Rishi forced one breath into order and looked at the Loom’s exposed core. One clean strike. Then I can reach her.

He turned toward the machine.

Sirael stepped into his path.

Her sword passed where his throat had been. Rishi caught the second blade on the staff and turned it aside.

“Sirael.”

She answered with steel.

He knew the lift of her shoulder, the shift of weight before a cut. The compulsion dragged those familiar movements a fraction out of time. His first counter passed wide.

He could not strike through her to the machine. He could not look past her without seeing Maeril dead on the grate.

“Let me past. Please.”

Sirael’s blade came again. The flat struck his ribs and shoulder hard enough to turn him.

He turned with it and guided her momentum sideways, stealing her balance without breaking her arm. As she stumbled, he drove the butt of the staff toward the point beside her neck that should have emptied the strength from her limbs.

He missed by less than a finger’s width. She stayed between him and the core.

All four eyes turned toward Thiarel.

The four elements braided into a ray, death running beneath them. Thiarel twisted away as it struck, but the edge caught her flank. Heat and frost seared her fur. Wind and weight dragged her claws along the grate until they nearly tore free.

She held beside the exposed core, still a lynx, smoking and shaking.

The Loom chose lightning again.

Seamwarden lifted both hands. Their runes caught the first forming branches and drew them toward their body.

The four eyes changed alignment around Seamwarden’s answer. The current slipped free of the warden’s grasp and divided in the air.

Thiarel’s white shape collapsed beneath one branch. The elf hit the grate unconscious, burned hair spread across her face. Another passed through Seamwarden’s sternum focus. Their limbs locked, smoke rising from their bark, but they did not fall.

Lightning caught Sirael in front of Rishi. Both swords left her hands. As she folded beside them, the last branch struck him.

Every muscle seized. His teeth closed on blood. For one white heartbeat, he could see the bones of his hands around the staff.

He went down on one knee.

His fingers did not open.

The Loom vented the grate.

Boiling steam swallowed the chamber. Rishi drew one breath and felt it scald his throat. His arms shook when he tried to rise.

Across from him, vapor hissed against Seamwarden’s body. The warden drew some of its corruption into their runes and remained standing.

Thiarel and Sirael had no defense against it.

Their skin reddened. Thiarel’s body jerked once. Sirael’s fingers curled against the iron and went slack.

Rishi planted the staff and pushed.

His leg did not straighten.

The four eyes began another count.

Seamwarden looked from the fallen sisters to Maeril, then faced the core Thiarel had opened.

They spoke one word in Druidic.

Radiance gathered in their palm, white and steady. The Loom pulled at it. Filaments along the dome shifted. The four eyes changed their light, searching for the angle that would bend the spell away.

Seamwarden held the line.

They gave the smallest push.

The bolt crossed the steam and struck the heart of the machine.

Seamwarden fed it from themself. Light left the runes along their arms and chest. Their sternum focus faltered, then flared as they forced more vitality through the beam.

The inner crystal split.

White fire drove outward through the broken shell. The core ruptured from within. Shards struck the dome and rained through the grate.

The four eyes went dark.

The count stopped.

Seamwarden swayed once.

They did not look at the wreckage. They turned toward Thiarel and spoke again.

A thread of warmth crossed the iron between them.

“Thiarel. We need you.”

Thiarel coughed.

Her hands found the grate. She dragged herself onto her knees, stunned and shaking, but alive.