A harsh intake of breath came from beside her. Wickham was staring at the ground. “By God…” he whispered, his voice shaky, “Do you feel that?”
He felt it too. His own intuitive connection to the earth was hearing the same song. In that shared, unspoken moment, a flicker of understanding passed between them. And in that moment, Elizabeth knew what she must do.
While the land’s presence hummed around her, she plunged her resonance back into the void at the Blight’s heart, at the space where they had made it retreat.
The heart of the Blight was a horrifying, absolute absence where life and magic were supposed to be. It was a hole in the world, and its only instinct was to pull everything into its emptiness. Its hunger was infinite. They could never fill it. Not on their own. But the land could.
A memory flashed in her mind. The battle at the signal station. She recalled the overwhelming moment she had reached beyond herself and pulled upon that deep, ancient power. It had been a force far greater than their own, a primal magic strong enough to make the Blight recoil. That was the power they needed now.
“Our own power is not enough. We must give strength to the ancient earth magic,” she said, “We must give new life to the land, new life to every hill and field, every stream and stone. It is the only way. The land must be made to heal itself and scour this poison out.”
Wickham, who had been staring at the ground, looked up at her, his eyes blazing with a fierce excitement that mirrored her own. “Yes,” he breathed, his awe giving way to a grin as he gestured not just at the ground, but at the horizon. “This is the place. The great ley lines all intersect beneath this city. A strong enough pulse from here could radiate outward along every one of them.”
A note of incredulous hope entered Darcy's voice. “You believe we can save more than just this city.”
“But how? How do we awaken the land?” said Georgiana.
Elizabeth’s gaze moved between them all, the missing keystone of their strategy crystallising into a point of truth. “The Blight thrives upon despair, division, and all that is broken; it thrives upon the failings it just sought to exploit within us. It faltered the moment we found our way back to each other. And therein lies its weakness. We will give the land the opposite of its poison. We will give the land our unity, our hope. Our magics, perfectly intertwined.”
Darcy picked up the thread of her thought without hesitation, his voice filled with the weight of the revelation. “Our magics, intertwined, and then multiplied by the power of the Concordance.”
Wickham nodded slowly. “The ancient magic is stirring beneath our feet. It is tinder awaiting a spark. But we must seize this moment before the void can reassert its hold.”
By some unspoken impulse, all eyes turned to Darcy.
“The Blight has fed on what is broken. Let it now face what is whole,” he answered, with all his quiet strength behind it.
A resolute nod from Georgiana was followed by a grim one from Wickham. Then Darcy's eyes found hers, a silent question and a final confirmation.
Closing her eyes, Elizabeth reached out to the shimmering pathways of the bonds that connected her to them all.
The response was overwhelming.
She felt Georgiana's magic first, a cool, silver influx of pure healing that sought to soothe the chaos rather than strike it. Almost at the same instant, Wickham's power surged into her, a stubborn surge of earthen magic, the untamed strength of stone and soil. And then Darcy. His was not a flow, but a foundation. Astructure of absolute will and crystalline discipline that met the incoming flood, lending it strength, giving it form and purpose.
The sensation was breathtaking. The four magical energies collided, merged, and intertwined within her. It was not the destructive fury of Buxton; it was not even the harmonious power she and Darcy had wielded alone. This was something else entirely. Something vaster. More human. More alive. It was the fierce, protective love of a brother and a husband, the boundless compassion of a healer, and the wild defiance of the earth, all woven together by the resonant, spirited heart of a woman who now trusted her own power.
It was a symphony of souls, amplified a thousandfold by the intense Concordance that bound her to the man she loved. All combined, they were so much more than the sum of their individual strengths. They were an ancient power of their own, an anthem to the tenacity of the human spirit.
And holding that impossible, breathtaking power for a single, perfect instant, she looked at Darcy, and together,as one, they plunged it into the heart of the world.
Elizabeth felt it first as a trickle, then a stream, then a raging torrent. It was as if a thousand rivers, a thousand storms, a thousand suns, a thousand forests, had converged. And then, as their combined magic surged downwards, it connected with the ancient earth song beneath their feet.
And then Elizabeth felt something else. Something extraordinary, something transcendent, something that shattered the boundaries of her own individual perception.
The effect was instantaneous. And cataclysmic.
It was as if the fabric of reality, the veil between what was possible and impossible, had dissolved. As if her consciousness had expanded, beyond the confines of her own physical body, beyond the quarry, beyond the blighted hills of Newcastle. She was everywhere. And nowhere. She was part of everything.
She couldsee. Not with her physical eyes, but with some new magical sense. She could see the ley lines, the lifeblood of England, as vast, shimmering rivers of molten golden light, crisscrossing the land, from the rugged, snow-capped, peaks to the gentle, rolling, fertile downs, from the coasts to the flat, misty fens. It was her intuition, her resonance for the land and its living things,magnified.
And she could see the Blight. Not as localised, isolated patches of decay and despair, but as a sentient and utterly malevolent presence. A creeping darkness spreading inexorably across the land, choking the life from the ley lines, poisoning the earth, extinguishing the spirit of England.
She saw it as an intricate, horrifying web of festering wounds, of blocked, corrupted arteries, of blackened magical node. It threatened to consume everything, to plunge England into utter desolation. The sheer scale of it, the true, devastating extent of the Blight’s corruption, was almost too much to bear.
But then, she felt Darcy’s hand tighten on hers, a reassuring gesture of shared purpose and shared courage.
“Do you see it?” he whispered.
