“Or what? What will happen, Dante?”
For the first time since I’d known him, Dante looked truly afraid. I could understand why. He’d just seen a woman bludgeoned to death for abandoning her faith in the Geist for something more tangible, something she could see. And now here I was, the woman he supposedly loved, questioning the very same gods who’d gotten her killed. But in my anger, I didn’t care.Good,I thought. Let him get a taste of terror for once. Let him be uncomfortable for the first time in his lavish life.
“Are they going to come back?” I asked, goading him. I trudged forward until I was in front of him. “Are they going to pop up again just to tell me not to speak of them this way? Absent for thousands of years of pain and suffering, and you’re worried that this is what’s going to bring them out? Just to, what? Smite me?”
I laughed, hardly recognizing the sound. It was cold, calloused, devoid of any humor or humanity.
“You know what, Dante?” I asked, a mocking grin on my lips. I raised my voice and shouted, as loud as I could, “Fuck the Geist!”
His lips parted, his eyes widened. Dante stared at me in silence for a few tense seconds. I clenched my fists at my sides, rage hardly subsiding despite how good that had felt. We waited, almost as if we thought something might actually happen. Then Dante’s shoulders fell, and his lip curled up.
“You are such a—”
A loud crack followed by a faint rumbling swallowed his reply. Both of us glanced around. Which each passing second, the rumbling grew stronger. No, not stronger.
Closer.
“What—”
Dante gasped and pointed up high beside me, eyes wide. I turned. The mountain above us was…melting? No, that couldn’t be right. I squinted and looked closer. The mountain wasn’tmelting, but the snow it had held at the top was falling, rolling and compacting as it sloughed off the side and came tumbling toward us.
“Avalanche,” Dante spoke in a whisper. Blinking, he roused himself from his stupor and grabbed my hand. “Run!”
Using our enhanced speed, we both took off running down the mountain.
The snow was so deep that the parts of it we didn’t slide on nearly swallowed our feet whole, despite running so fast, our toes barely touched the ground. Even at our top speed, though, the avalanche was gaining on us. And there was nowhere to go. The more we ran, the more mountain appeared below us. It was as if the descent never ended, as if there were no bottom to reach. The chaotic tumble of snow encroached upon us, closing the gap more and more with every passing second.
In a minute or so, it would overtake us.
“What do we do?” I cried over the roar of the avalanche. Dante didn’t peel his wild eyes from the side of the mountain, though I knew he’d heard me. “We could shift?”
“We won’t be able to hold it that long,” he called back.
“We could float?”
“We don’t have the time to meditate.”
Dante and I had learned, in our time since completing the eighth Trial, that through meditation we could achieve the effect of floating, just as we had during the test. Dante seemed to believe that with enough practice and discipline, we might some day be able to achieve something akin to flying, but so far, all we’d managed through hours of focus was a slight drifting upward. He was right; that wouldn’t help us now.
As we barreled forward, I called out a few more options, but Dante shot every one of them down with a valid and accurate counter argument. And we were running out of time.
“I don’t understand,” he screamed at the top of his lungs to be heard over the roar of the avalanche, as close as it was now. “What are we supposed to do? What’s the test?”
“We phase,” I called back, making a decision, even though I knew it wouldn’t work. It seemed to be our only option and the only one that would at least delay the inevitable pain of being crushed underneath a mountain of snow for as long as possible. He seemed to come to the same hopeless conclusion that I did and, a moment later, gave a firm, resigned nod.
I took a deep breath.
“On the count of three,” I told him. Dante nodded again, jaw clenched. “One…”
The avalanche slammed into a massive stone behind us, sending it skittering down the side of the mountain like a mouse scurrying away from a cat.
“Two…”
Dante set his expression into one of resolute determination. Was he letting go of his dream of the tenth Trial?
“Three.”
We stopped on a dime, turning to face the impending onslaught. I grasped his hand, and we immaterialized together right before the snow hit.
