The water evaporated into nothing. The brilliant blue light died. But to her fading horror, the font didn't shatter. The spell had twisted. Instead of destroying the basin, the ritual was pulling the energy inward, transforming the font into a lump of pitted, impenetrable rock. It was solidifying, freezing the Tumi inside its very heart.
No. Her mind wept. How? She was the keyholder. It was supposed to be gone.
Her knees buckled, her body completely spent. She collapsed onto the damp earth right beside Cisco, her fingers reaching out to touch his cold hand. Through the trees, the heavy, thundering pound of Spanish hoofbeats vibrated through the dirt, but the conquistadors were too late. The font was sealed.
Quri let out one final, anguished sigh as the last of the life left her body. The tears on her cheeks felt freezing cold against her skin. The darkness didn't just fall over her. It felt like the very stone of the font was hardening inside her chest, locking her secrets and her sorrow away in an eternal, heavy silence.
* * *
The severed wireof the memory reconnected with the force of a splintering charge.
Flash tumbled right back into Francisco’s pounding, dangerous reality. The boundary between centuries dissolved. He was the scholar-soldier who had abandoned his platoon, his oath, and his God, his lungs still screaming with the gritty smokeof a burning empire. He was out of his mind with a manic, consuming love, sprinting through the tangled branches because Quri was the only thing that mattered.
“Quri!”he screamed, his voice cracking with a five-hundred-year-old terror.
He saw her outlined by the font. He lunged forward to protect her from the hoofbeats at his back, and then the silver knife flashed in the moonlight.
The wet, sickening tear of muscle and flesh ripped through his ribs. Flash gasped aloud in the modern glade, his hand instantly flying to his side as the haunting agony tore a ragged cry from his throat. His knees buckled, sending him crashing into the damp grass. The shockwave of the memory didn't just strike him. Through their Shadowguard bond, it rippled outward, dropping Fly, the rest of the team, the Reavers, and the rescued Shadowguard to the dirt around him like men hit by mortar fire.
Flash lay trembling, his face pressed to the dirt, unable to untangle the centuries. His hand was clamped over his ribs, expecting to feel the hot, thick crimson of his own lifeblood spilling out over his fingers, painting her blessed ash-drawn chakana.
Memory jumbled and overlapped. He could still feel her hands on his face. He could still taste her mouth, pulling the pain and sorrow right out of his chest, her desperate words echoing in his ears.Jae, my heart…Cisco, courageous and mine.He had learned those words just to love her. He had died in her arms with her native Quechua on his lips.“Quri…qammi sunkuy kanki.”You are my heart.
Beside him, Lechuza was sobbing, the weight of the ancient grief fracturing her modern composure. Flash forced his eyes open, his gray gaze finding hers through the gloom. The profound, unvarnished sorrow of his dying breath still vibratedbetween them. The blood on his shirt had vanished, and their chakanas had ignited in a blinding clash of gold and blue light, but the emotional shrapnel remained embedded deep in his chest.
She had owned the trauma. He had remembered the sacrifice.
But as Flash watched, his vision still blurry from the psychic backwash, the liquid swirl slowed. Right before his eyes, the gray stone hardened once more, freezing the silver blade back into its impenetrable tomb.
The font remained sealed.
In the center of the glade, Fly was on his knees, his hands buried in his hair. The Visionary genius had mapped the negative space, forced the confession, and calculated every parameter. It should have balanced the ledger.
"Fuck!" Fly slammed his fists into the dirt, his voice breaking with raw, unbridled fury. "Fuck! Fuck it!"
He threw his head back, screaming at the canopy, his brilliant brain spinning its wheels in the mud. "What am I missing?What am I missing?"
Flash couldn't answer him. He could barely breathe around the ghost of the wound in his side. The modern warrior in him wanted to compartmentalize, but the soul of Francisco was still suffocating under a centuries-old tragedy. They had dug up the worst night of their lives, bared their bleeding souls, and it still wasn't enough. The sheer magnitude of the psychic trauma was venom, rapidly shutting down their nervous systems. A cold, heavy paralysis froze him in place and meant days, if not weeks, of recovery.
Recovery they didn't have time for. The apocalypse wasn't going to pause for them to heal. North’s body was dying, and they had maybe days left to retrieve his soul from the Veil.
"Get it together," Tex’s voice rasped from somewhere in the shadows, but the command was hollow, a dying echo. Tex didn't move. Like the rest of them, the team leader was pinned to the earth by the catastrophic backwash of the savage trauma.
Then, the air in the gladevibrated. A low, resonant hum rippled through the damp grass, lifting the suffocating weight off Flash’s chest just enough for him to turn his head.
Twister was standing.
He was human, his combat boots planted firmly in the mud, but the veil between worlds was tearing open around him. A luminous, ethereal imprint of a massive swan ghosted over his physical frame, wings of pure, blinding white light unfurling from his broad shoulders, an elegant, arched neck cast in silver luminescence overlapping his own throat.
Twister closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let out a sound that shattered the gloom of the glade, a crystalline, melodic cry that pierced directly into their minds and bodies. The sound called across the glade, carrying a strange, intoxicating warmth.
Flash’s eyes widened as his eagle senses mapped the source of the magic. Twister’s swan frequency was acting as a magnet, reaching deep into the soil of the glade and pulling up the latent, residual energy trapped there. It was the raw, explosive power Lechuza and Flash had left behind when they had previously consummated their bodies and their souls in this very spot, a fragmentation of pure life force and eternal bond that had saturated the earth.
Twister’s song channeled that wild, bonding energy and refined it into a localized wave of absolute restoration.
The melody washed over Flash like a warm, rushing river. The moment the frequency struck his skin, the mystical agony in his ribs dissolved into nothing. The leaden paralysis in his muscles melted. Beside him, Lechuza stopped sobbing, her chestrising and falling as the venerable grief was gently cradled and quieted by the swan's melody. Across the clearing, Easy and Tex pushed themselves upright, their eyes clearing, their exhaustion completely wiped clean as their central nervous systems were forcefully recalibrated by the latent power of the bond.
The song faded into a soft, ringing silence. The ethereal white feathers overlapping Twister's body dissolved back into the dark night air. He stood there, breathing heavily, but his eyes were sharp. They were all whole again. They were fully healed, their bodies humming with a vibrant, restless energy.
