Gods, give me strength. I am so afraid.
Teren now takes a lit torch from one of his men. He turns to me. The sight of the fire sends a greater terror through my veins. My struggles turn frantic. I’d fainted when the doctors removed my left eye with fire. What kind of pain must it be to let fire consume your entire body?
He touches his fingers to his forehead in a formal gesture of farewell. Then he tosses the torch onto the pile of wood at my feet. It sends up a shower of sparks, and immediately the dry kindling catches fire. The crowd erupts with cheers.
Rage surges through me, mixing with my fear. I’m not dying here today.
This time, I reach deep into my mind and finally grasp the strange power I’ve been searching for. My heart closes desperately around it.
The world stops.
The flames freeze, their trails of fire left painted, unmoving, stripped of color, hanging black and white in the air. The clouds in the sky stop floating by, and the breeze against my skin dies. Teren’s smile wavers as he whirls around to look at me. The crowd stills, confused.
Then something rips open inside my chest. The world snaps back into place—the flames roar against the wood. And overhead, the bright blue sky collapses into darkness.
The clouds turn black. Their outlines take on strange, frightening shapes, and through it all, the sun still shines, an eerie, bright beacon against a midnight canvas. The crowd screams as night falls on all of us, and the Inquisitors draw their swords, their heads tilted upward like the rest of ours.
I can’t catch my breath. I don’t know how to make it stop.
In the midst of the darkness and panic, something moves in the sky. And just like that, the black clouds twist—they scatter into a swarm of a million moving flecks that swirl across the sky and then dive down, down, down at the crowd. A nightmare of locusts. They descend on us with merciless efficiency, their buzzing drowning out the people’s cries. The Inquisitors swing their swords uselessly at them.
The flames lick my feet, their heat searing me. It’s coming for me—it’s going to devour me.
As I struggle to keep away from the flames, I notice the strangest thing. The locusts come near, then pass straight through my body. As if they aren’t really there at all. I watch the scene before me—the insects pass right through the Inquisitors too, as well as the crowd of people below.
This is all an illusion, I suddenly realize. Just like the phantom silhouettes that attacked Father. None of it is real.
One Inquisitor has staggered to his feet, his eyes burning from the smoke, and points his sword in my direction. He lurches toward me. I find my last reserves of strength and pull as hard as I can against my chains. Hot blood trickles down my wrists. As I struggle, he draws closer, materializing from a sea of locusts and darkness.
Suddenly—
A rush of wind. Sapphire and silver. The fire at my feet flickers out into curls of smoke.
Something streaks across my vision. A figure appears between me and the oncoming Inquisitor, moving with deadly grace. It’s a boy, I think. Who is this? This boy is not an illusion—I can sense his reality, the solidity of his figure that the black sky and the locusts don’t have. He is clad in a whirlwind of hooded blue robes, and a metallic silver mask covers his entire face. He crouches in front of me, every line of his body tense, his focus entirely on the Inquisitor. A long dagger gleams in each of his gloved hands.
The Inquisitor skids to a halt before him. Uncertainty darts across his eyes. “Stand aside,” he snaps at the newcomer.
The masked boy cocks his head to one side. “How impolite,” he mocks, his voice velvet and deep. Even in the midst of chaos, I can hear him.
The Inquisitor lunges at him with his sword, but the boy dances out of its path and strikes with one of his daggers. It buries itself deep into the Inquisitor’s body. The man’s eyes bulge—he lets out a squeal like a dying pig. I’m too stunned to utter a sound. Something in me sparks with strange delight.
Inquisitors see the battle and rush to their fallen comrade. They draw their swords at the boy. He just nods at them, taunting them to come closer. When they do, he slips through them like water between rocks, his body a streak of motion, blades flashing silver in the darkness. One of the Inquisitors nearly cuts him in half with a swing of his sword, but the boy slices the man’s hand clean off. The sword clatters to the ground. The boy kicks the fallen sword up into the air with one flick of his boot, then catches it and points it at the other Inquisitors.
When I look harder, I notice that other masked figures flicker among the soldiers—others dressed in the same dark robes as the boy. He didn’t come here alone.
“It’s the Reaper!” Teren shouts, pointing at the boy with a drawn sword. He starts heading toward us. His pale eyes are mad with glee. “Seize him!”
That name. I’d seen it before on the Young Elite carvings. The Reaper. He’s one of them.
More Inquisitors rush up the platform. The boy pauses for a moment to look at them, his blades dripping with blood. Then he straightens, lifts one arm high over his head, and sweeps it down again in a cutting arc.
A column of fire explodes from his hands, slicing a line across the platform and dividing the soldiers from us with a wall of flame stretching high into the blackened sky. Shouts of terror come from behind the fiery curtain.
The boy approaches me. I stare in fright at his hooded face and silver mask, the outline of his features lit by the inferno behind him. The only part of his face not hidden by his mask are his eyes—hard, midnight dark, but alight with fire.
He doesn’t say a word. Instead, he kneels at my feet, then grabs the chains that shackle my ankles to the stake. The chains in his grasp turn red, then white hot. They quickly melt, leaving my legs freed. He straightens and does the same to the noose around my neck, then to the chains binding my wrists.