I shake my head. “No, he’s too cosmopolitan, and he kept me too close for anything that far out. My experience with unpredictable terrain is all from Low Earth, and I haven’t dueled here before this week. So I’d really prefer better ground and fewer narrow switchbacks, because we know there’s going to be a fight.”
“So you’d rather fight on water?”
The reason Itsukushima Shrine is so famous is because at high tide—like now—the shrine gates and surrounding temple complex appear to float above the water.
This time my smile is wider. “Exactly so. Evram is, after all, a cosmopolitan mage.”
Nariel cloaks me while I do my work on the mountain, and then we head back down for low tide so he can cloak me again while I set up the anchor spell as tourists walk around.
Rather than doming off whole areas, he’s cloaking me specifically while he walks around right at my side, pretending to be exploring on his own, so people don’t walk into me. I snicker more than once at his acting, or his abrupt dramatic movements to take up more space when someone gets too close.
He also cloaks the land below the water, so Evram won’t be able to see the shapes of my spells through the waves. I burn them deep into the earth, below the shifting sand.
We retreat when the tide starts coming in, checking into another room at a fancy ryokan, partially because that’s all that’s available, and partially because if it’s my last night I might as well stay somewhere beautiful. Though I spend most of the time napping to recover from all my spellwork that afternoon.
I wake up to the sound of a notification on my phone but don’t move right away.
Nariel is lying next to me. I don’t know why. He hasn’t said anything more about my decision since the train. We’re not touching, but I can feel the warmth of him.
I just want to stay. More than almost anything.
Anything except magic.
I breathe deeply into my chest gone suddenly tight, squint my eyes against tears I don’t have more time for, and sit up to check my phone.
It’s a text from Ayaka that’s just the man mage emoji.
I send back a magic wand and look over at Nariel. He meets my gaze, and I nod once.
Go time.
We join the last late-night visitors at the shrine shortly before 11:00 p.m. The illuminated gate glows a fierce orange against the dark sky, reflected in the water where it now appears to be floating in the middle of the bay.
A gate that will mark the passage of this world back to magic.
One clear beacon in the darkness.
The shrine’s illumination will shut down for the night soon, but Nariel goes ahead and cloaks just the gate for now, making it appear dark, so the tourists start wandering off. I don’t know what hours the shrine workers keep, so he handles that too.
Once everyone has retreated, Nariel looks over at me. I’ve cast a spell for sight in the darkness, which apparently on angels causes them to be surrounded by a soft glow in my vision, a gentle blurring of light around the edges.
Not a white light though. Nariel is edged in darkness.
So it’s like my own personal fallen angel radiates tendrils of darkness that cast no shadows, while I gaze into the velvet pools of his eyes and catch my breath.
This is it. One last moment.
“I’m with you,” Nariel says, his gaze locked on mine. “All the way. Whatever you choose.”
One last, perfectly painful moment.
Everything I want to say feels locked in my throat, and it’s too late for me to be processing emotions, so I don’t say anything more.
It’s time to finish this.
I cast my first real spell of the night, a warding that will prevent casual observers from venturing closer. Nariel fades into the darkness as he adjusts the cloak, expanding it outward into a huge sphere covering the whole shrine and a substantial portion of the bay where the gate sits. Only anyone within his sphere will be able to see the world as it is.
Light returns with the illumination of the gate.
