“The mountain is trying to fall,” Neves whispered over the din.
I snapped my head around. “It’s not time.”
“I agree. We are not ready. It’s not time for the Spine to break.”
Fear lanced through me. “What do we do?”
Mistress Ophelia cocked her head. “Stop it.”
I gasped. “Stop it?”
Her voice was clear over the sound of the very earth below us shaking. “You’re the Breaker of the Spine. You command the magic in the mountain.”
“How do you know—”
Mistress Neves cut me off. “Feel it, child! You have got to learn your magic. Those walls you built with Vitas are meant to be merely a stopper, not an unbreachable fortress!”
“Stop the tremor, Kimber,” Mistress Ophelia snapped. “You saw the Triium. Now figure out your own magic!”
I dropped to the floor, slapping my hand on the cold tile of the entrance, and dropped all the magical walls I had put up.
The world burst into strings and clouds colored by the magic that was everything.
I could see angry red strings, pulling and twisting the ground. My magic was being drawn to the mountains at the edge of the city, and it was chaos.
It was also the Spine.
The mountain was angry, tense.
Pulsing.
This wasn’t the way the Spine should break.
My own magic, a soft cloud, assured me it should be broken in peace and tranquility.
What it presented now was not that—and if it were to fall, the druid world would not survive.
We would be angry. Hateful. Vengeful.
Lashing my magic to a string that was particularly violent, I let it rip my consciousness back to the mountain in a flash.
The anger here was overwhelming—I could feel my own anger rise. That was bad; I needed to be in control.
Stop!
It felt like I was yelling at the sky, and the words were sucked into nothing between the stars.
I gathered my magic around my consciousness like a thick, roiling fog in the heart of the spine, in the heart of the rock and the magic in the mountain.
Pulling it close to me, tight into me, I took a deep breath—or what I imagined was a deep breath—and screamed out the command again.
STOP!
The fog of magic burst like a firework outward. As fast as it could, it shoved the command into every rock and crevasse that stood in the Spine.
The shaking stopped.
There was no tapering off, no little tremors.
