Just like when he transformed his hunger into healing.
Watching it play out in real time makes me realize that there’s more to our essence. I spare a glance at the rest of our mates and then the rest of us stop holding back. Not one at a time, not in sequence, but all at once, like Jade's surrender gave us permission. Fire and balance and contracts and death pour into the space between us and I can't tell where one ends and another begins. My wall between life and death dissolves and instead of torment it feels like completeness, and I know the others arefeeling the same thing because I can feel them feeling it, every boundary gone, every reserve surrendered, six people becoming something that none of us have language for.
Skye holds us together at the center. He doesn't control it. He facilitates it and it’s that step that completes the combination, twisting our auras together until it becomes one essence made up of six.
We turn toward Dmitri, and for the first time in three centuries, his face shows genuine fear. But, we don't reach for him. We reach for the pool.
The combined entity extends itself toward the consumed essences with invitation. Freedom, offered to souls who haven't had a choice in centuries. The pool responds immediately, thousands of trapped essences stirring beneath the surface, pressing upward, answering the call. They remember. Slowly, painfully, through centuries of dissolution, they remember who they were.
"THOSE ARE MINE!" Dmitri screams, his composure shattered, his darkness lashing at the pool.
"They were never yours," we say, the voice combined of all six of us at once. "They were prisoners. And we are setting them free."
The consumed essences break the surface. Thousands of them, rising from the pool in streams of light that carry the ghost of colors they had in life, every essence type that Dmitri eliminated over three centuries, every person he consumed. They rise and as they separate from the pool they begin to remember themselves, individual presences blinking into awareness after centuries of compression, realizing where they are and what was done to them.
They turn toward Dmitri.
The attack comes from inside his own power. The essences he consumed, the foundation he built himself from, turning againsthim with the fury of the long imprisoned. They tear at him from within as we press from without, and his form begins to crack. The darkness splits along fault lines that correspond to individual stolen lives pulling themselves free. His power, built by accumulation, is being dismantled one soul at a time.
He fights back with everything he has, lashing at the escaping essences, trying to hold the pool together through sheer will. But there are too many and they are too angry and they have been waiting too long. For every soul he recaptures, three more tear free. His form destabilizes. The darkness cracks wider. Three centuries of consumed lives compressed into a single vessel of power and hunger and fear, coming apart at its foundations.
The fear I exposed is eating him from the inside now, the truth he's been running from for three hundred years finally catching up, and the souls he built himself from are tearing themselves free one by one.
18
Skye
Thedarknesscontinuedtoscream and swirl around us until it became nothing, shadows slowly disappearing. We stood there for several seconds, in disbelief that that’s all it took for Dmitri to fall apart but I wasn’t going to continue standing there, waiting for something else to happen. We climb out of the tunnels and into daylight and for thirty seconds I let myself believe it's over.
The corruption is gone from the courtyard walls. The shadows that clung to every surface when we descended have evaporated, leaving clean stone and clear air, and the students gathered inthe courtyard stare at us with expressions caught between terror and desperate hope. Dante is standing at the center with his staff planted, his aura burning steady for the first time in weeks, and when he sees us emerge he closes his eyes with a relief so profound it makes him look like a different person.
We’re all exhausted from what that took from us and I'm standing through willpower alone, my bonds stretched so thin between my mates that they feel like they might snap if someone breathes too hard.
But we're alive. Dmitri is gone. The pool is empty. The souls are free. Except… it just feels too easy. I open my mouth to say something to Dante, something about the tunnels, about what we found, about what it cost, and that's when the ground beneath us shudders.
The tremor starts deep and rolls upward through the stone like something clawing its way to the surface. A crack splits the courtyard flagstones from the tunnel entrance to the eastern wall, and from the crack, darkness pours out.
Not the slow creeping corruption that Dmitri grew through the sanctuary's foundations. These are fragments, pieces of the darkness we absorbed in the chamber that didn't stay absorbed. Splinters of Dmitri's essence that broke free during the detonation and found the cracks in the tunnel system and raced upward while we were climbing out. They move with a different kind of purpose than before, with the last vestiges of the intelligence that animated them, scattering across the courtyard and surging toward the dormitories where the rest of the students are gathered.
"No," I say, the word coming out hoarse. "No, we ended this."
"It's not him," Harlow says, his death-sight already tracking the fragments. "It must be residual. Pieces that broke loose. But they're still dangerous and they're heading for the students."
The fragments hit the barrier contracts Ambrose built around the dormitories, the impact sending a crack through the closest one. Ambrose flinches like he's been struck, his hand pressing against his chest where the contract is anchored. "I can't reinforce them," he says. "I don't have anything left."
Students scream behind the barriers. Faculty members throw themselves between the darkness and the dormitory entrances, their essences flaring with whatever they have left. Dante's divine pulse slams outward and catches the nearest fragments, dissolving them, but there are too many and they're spreading too fast and he can't be everywhere.
I reach for the bonds between my mates and try to pull us back into formation, trying to find the combination we held in the chamber, but there's nothing to grab. We're depleted. The combination took everything we had and what Dmitri's absorption didn't drain, the climb out finished. We're six exhausted people standing in a courtyard watching the remnants of the thing we killed tear toward the people we swore to protect.
This is what Dmitri meant.If I burn, you burn with me. He didn't need to fully survive the chamber. He just needed to leave enough of himself behind to finish what he started while we were too spent to stop it.
"Anyone who can fight, get to the barriers!" I shout, my voice carrying across the courtyard with an authority I don't feel. "Anyone with combat ability, we need you now!"
Students and faculty move. Some of them are barely functional themselves, drained by days of corruption, but they throw what they have at the fragments pouring through the cracks. A water-type channels a wall of pressure that slows a cluster of shadows long enough for Dante to dissolve them. Two earth-types raise stone barriers across the courtyard entrance. A fire-type, the girl whose sparks Stellan taught to control, stepsforward with her hands shaking and her jaw set and burns a fragment out of the air six inches from a younger student's face.
It's not enough. The fragments keep coming, flowing up through the crack in the flagstones, and for every one we destroy another two emerge. They're drawn to the students, to the fear and the essence, exactly the way Dmitri's corruption was drawn to vulnerability.
"I can help."
