Hell, I probably didn’t even need the diamond stealth mask,she thought as she ploughed on.
Behind her, Idan and Molan breached the chamber doors, their forms wreathed in the incandescent fire of Sacran fury.
‘Keep moving, Sheba! Focus on sinking that blade into him!’ Idan roared, his blade severing the torso of a towering spirit.
Sheba scrambled over the altarium and, with a shudder, bent over the fetishized, hexed monarch, dagger in hand.
She recited the Paladian incantation Zavier burned into her memory, preparing to plunge the hilt into her mark.
The chant seemed to awaken the sleeping, half-skeletal King.
He stirred, thin-skinned eyelids flinging open, his maw, with rotting teeth, opening into a scream.
Saitoni lunged upward as far as his chains permitted, his jaw unhinging to release a roar that carried a concentrated hex drenched in glowing spectral flames.
The blast hit her hard.
Her mask changed form, heated by the spell work gust, melting, not off her face but into it.
Sheba gasped as it dissolved, the diamond particles absorbing into the pores of her skin.
She braced for agony, but strangely enough, there was no pain.
Moments later, her reality fractured, and her consciousness expanded.
Her mind became a hyper-processor, parsing time in a nonlinear rush, viewing the fall of empires and the birth of stars in the space between heartbeats.
It also heightened her senses; she perceived the trajectory of a falling dust mote and the echo of a scream from a century ago.
Sheba sagged to the ground, still clutching the short blade.
Her vision turned a milky, pearlescent white, her eyelids fluttering in a rapid-fire trance as the entire bloody history of the Sacran lineage downloaded into her brain.
She discerned the second Idan jolted as she fell to the rocks and stones below.
‘Sheba?’
His roar echoed through the mausoleum as he fought wave after wave of wights to get to her.
Breaking through, he dropped to one knee beside her.
Molan appeared seconds later.
‘What in Devansi hell?’ Mo muttered.
Idan’s fingers grazed her cheek, tracing the final shards of the diamond mask as they dissolved beneath her skin.
She was slipping away, pulled into a deep, visceral trance, a descent into archaic memories and ancient incarnations so primal they predated the stars themselves.
‘It’s theDraquisvisor, it’s melding into her!’
‘Fokk.’
‘Sheba!Suhunka ya so bakc suwa sare! Return to us now!’
Idan’s growl cut through the cacophony, the Sacran incantation vibrating in his throat to anchor her soul to the present.
She blinked, and the pearlescent glow withdrew as the wild echoes, continuum, and time-jumps in her mind subsided.
