Lightbringer (Empirium #3) - Claire Legrand Page 0,143

gown as if to suffocate her. Simon at the door, his face hidden in shadows as she stared him down.

You need to focus, Eliana. The Prophet’s voice grew firm. The more scattered your thoughts, the easier it is for him to find you, and therefore find me.

Eliana’s exhaustion was a chasm; soon she would tip into it. If someone else tries to kill me, I might let them.

He won’t let them. Nor will I.

I have the right to choose my own death.

No, you do not, the Prophet said. Too much depends on you. I know you didn’t ask for this burden, but it is yours nonetheless. Listen closely. We won’t have a better opportunity than this for you to enter the Deep. Ostia has been growing. The fabric of the empirium there has become thin and fragile. I think you can do it with one more try. I think you can finish your Gate.

I cannot go back to the palace, Eliana replied, looking out across the city at the distant turrets.

No. Chaos is spreading fast across the city. It’s too dangerous to go all that way. If you are injured, it could undo the progress we have made.

Eliana wiped her face and drew a shuddering breath. Instead, I must find another place where the empirium is thin. Another way into the Deep.

Yes, and quickly, the Prophet replied. When he grows bored of this culling, he will end it.

Eliana recited the facts she knew, each thought bringing a little more steadiness to her mind. In the palace, the empirium guided me to that place in the garden. A place where I could open a seam to the Deep. It pulled upon me, and I listened.

Perhaps that’s true, said the Prophet thoughtfully. Or perhaps it was you who guided the empirium. You who told it what you needed and where to take you.

Eliana shivered in her wet dress, the blood-soaked fabric already growing stiff. She uncurled her tight fingers. In her palms, her castings held a hint of warmth. I cannot be afraid of them. I must use them to help me.

Your castings are of you, the Prophet reminded her. An extension of your body, your mind, and your power, not a separate thing. It is yourself you must not fear.

As if that were an easy thing. Eliana half formed a useless rude thought, then tossed it away. Under the arbor’s leaves, the screams of Elysium rising to meet her ears, she breathed. There was a chill breeze that raised the hair on her arms. The roof was made of white stone, and she felt the age of it, how long it had lived in the earth before it was carved free. There was water in the leaves shivering overhead, and there was sunlight somewhere beyond the horizon, where it was morning instead of night.

Her palms grew hotter. Even with her eyes closed, she could see their twin flares, how they beamed to see her. She welcomed her power, cupped her hands around it, and in its vast brilliance, she found the river she had first made with the Prophet so many weeks ago.

Never step out of that little river. She recalled the Prophet’s words, ran over the grooves of their memory in her mind. Keep your feet cool and grounded, even as your hands begin to blaze. He cannot find you here, little one, not in these waters.

Feet in cool water. Mind smooth and hard as a stone. Fire in her hands and stars behind her eyelids. Her veins a web of light.

I rise

The empirium’s voice boomed inside her, singular and many. A wave threatening to crest, hungry for the shore.

I rise

I RISE

“No,” Eliana whispered. “I rise.”

Then she stood. She opened her eyes and looked once more into the eerie, silvered night. She watched Ostia’s light shift slowly in the sky and listened to the thrum of her power, how it moved through her body and into the air and back again. Her blood pulsed with the great ancient heartbeat of the world. A map of the empirium expanded before her, its brilliant vastness unspooling at her command. Cords of light rippling in an endless sea. Planes upon planes of shifting gold, and within them an infinite number of paths to walk.

A beat, a held breath. Something pulled at her—the tightness of a sky ready to split with lightning. Arabeth in hand, she found the path she needed and followed it back down into the Emperor’s city, the screams of the