I squeezed my eyes shut and collapsed to my knees.
The burning ebbed, but there was no relief, as it shifted to a feeling of my insides being scraped out, emptied… I didn’t even know.
My body was shaking, I could feel my power slipping away.
And then I was choking, my breaths becoming so labored, I felt my pulse slowing.
I keeled over onto my back, staring up at the black magic eating at the streaming Fuel Core.
Slipping away… it was all slipping away.
I was slipping away.
I couldn’t… I couldn’t breathe.
My chest hurt, a sharp pain that was stabbing and stabbing.
I lifted my hand to it, but my energy was gone, and it just dropped back down onto the rough stone.
It would be okay.
This was all just part of the plan.
The terror of it, all these sensations… they were nothing.
It wasn’t fully real. Not for me.
It wouldn’t matter.
It didn’t.
It…
I…
Blackness took me.
17
~Evira~
Krestaz.
The largest volcano in the supernatural world.
A confirmed entry point into Sanctus that Ambrose and Ketheron had determined.
From the outside, it was a monstrous black mountain of swirling ash and clouds with lava streaming down in controlled rivers across its flanks. Jagged peaks of obsidian jutted out from the cracked ground around its base.
That was the only part most people ever saw.
Not this area that we were gathered inside now.
The volcano’s inner chamber.
The floor was black and charred stone with molten veins pulsing in the walls.
And in the center was a crater filled with thick, swirling lava that went all the way down—the volcano’s core.
