The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,425

great beast’s demesne, he extended an open will with his open right hand, offering partnership, not mastery.

And the black came roaring from the night upon him—charging over the horizon and into Dazen’s undefended, wide-open eye. Dazen lay supine, exposing his belly to the snarling maw of the great wolf Death.

Here am I, Death. Let us walk together one last time, and fight each other no more.

The beast paused, snuffling at his bloody open hand, even as the magic filled Dazen’s eyes and made his bones hot within him.

A shiver passed through him, from the crown of his head, down his spine and hands, which burned hot with blood, and to the heated soles of his feet, rooted in the blood that connected skin to tower.

Without the scent of fear inflaming its predator’s nose, but accepted, respected, the great black beast calmed. Then its power entered him.

Even at Sundered Rock, he hadn’t drafted so much. He drew and drew, taking all the dark night into his soul. He drew, lancing those darkened memories for all his own old poison, all the hatred and envy inside him, all the cruelty of taunting victory he’d unleashed before. He connected the darkness above with the old darkness within, though each was punctuated by its celestial lights. He was beyond fear now. How could he be daunted? He could give no more than everything in him, and that was exactly what he planned to do.

He threaded his fingers tight through the beast’s mantle and then with a yell of defiance, Dazen slapped its flank: Take all this, and go! Go!

The black luxin leapt toward the horizon like a war hound on a lead seeing a cat and leaping to the hunt. It nearly tore Dazen’s arm off. He could only nudge it this way and that, directing his fraying will toward the Chromeria.

It took all the excellence of Dazen’s superchromacy to maintain the exact tone. The slightest flaw would mean madness or agonizing death or the obliteration of memory and self or even time.

Even the descending starlight eroded the black as they flew across so many leagues, and Dazen had to cushion every quantum that infected his streaming black, had to split it away from the stream and push more power into it, like a sprinter shrugging off battering rain, forging through buffeting winds—and he lost precious luxin continuously as he did it, a hundred times a second. Dazen could feel the black unraveling in his grasp, like the southern lights dancing across the sky, defying his control.

And as the magic unraveled, it unraveled him. He braided the open cords together again and again, weaving them tight with fingers that felt a million paces away. He himself was dissipating, losing awareness altogether into the cold dark, but he pulled himself back to consciousness again and again.

This was for Karris. This was for Kip. This was for Marissia. This was for mother. This was for Gavin. This was for Sevastian . . .

He couldn’t fail them. He couldn’t fail them again.

But then he was there. He couldn’t see the islands, he couldn’t see anything, but he could feel the entirety of Big Jasper and Little Jasper both, those shapes he knew and loved so well. He could feel the physical and magical shapes of the bane, each one extending overlapping bubbles of control far beyond themselves. No red drafter could draft red within the red bane’s bubble, nor green in green’s, nor yellow in yellow’s, and so on.

Dazen didn’t have enough time or will or magic or life left to obliterate the bane. They were too far away, too dense, too numerous, too different from one another.

The control he would need to find the seed crystals themselves was far too fine for his skills. Father had always told him he needed to develop his fine-drafting skills, but Dazen had always ignored him, believing more was better: always the hammer, never the tweezers.

There they lay: all the bane, everywhere around the islands, like leeches clinging to the Chromeria’s face. He could pierce those bubbles of drafting control easily with the black, but to find five single figures—these so-called gods?—in the few seconds he had left? To find the bane’s hidden seed crystals?

It would be like trying to pick a lock with a feather duster.

His will, thus overextended, began to fray apart now in hopelessness. The black he’d flung so far dissipated into the amorphous clouds as the magic finally pulled itself away from his fingers.

And then he