Adept (The Essence Gate War, Book 1) - By Michael Arnquist Page 0,189
the flames. The blue fire spread hungrily to his hands and arms, writhing along his limbs like a live thing. In its wake, the healer’s skin blackened and cracked. Halthak stumbled to his knees, a look of concentration freezing his coarse features into a rictus of pain. The flesh began to heal beneath the licking blue flames. Halthak scooped sand onto his limbs, seeking to smother the spreading fire, but when the sand fell away the fire still remained, slithering over his figure to blacken new flesh. Halthak groaned and squeezed his eyes shut, and the skin knit shut and healed once more. The fire, however, was an implacable foe, and continued to crawl over him.
Amric roared his fury, throwing himself into his efforts until his vision swam and darkened at the edges from the exertion. Something cracked in the back of his mind.
Get out here, he panted at the presence hiding within him. He is killing them! Get out here and join me, or we all die, here and now! The only reply was a mindless, gibbering terror, distant and muted.
“Or perhaps another,” Xenoth continued in a hard tone. He flung out one hand and great gout of brilliant white fire erupted from it. The fiery display was blinding, and for a brief moment it lit up the wasteland around them in stark relief. Amric, squinting against the sudden illumination, was able to catch a glimpse of the sprinting form of Innikar, rushing forward with blades upraised, before the fire engulfed him in mid-stride. The Sil’ath warrior did not even utter a cry, so quick was his demise. The white fire flared once, dazzling and fierce. When it faded, Innikar was simply gone. His abandoned blades glowed and hissed in the sand, no more than warped pieces of metal, and the remains of the warrior’s armor were a blackened and shriveled mass.
Amric’s throat cracked and closed on a scream he had not even realized was his own. He saw Sariel and Valkarr approaching from opposite sides, their mouths open in horror. Xenoth turned toward Sariel. Without hesitation, she hurled one of her swords to spin in a glittering arc toward the black-robed Adept. The spinning weapon struck some invisible barrier in mid-air and ricocheted to the side, but Xenoth flinched away from it with a grunt nonetheless, and it saved her life. She had thrown herself to the side as soon as the sword left her hand, and another long breath of white flame seared through the space she had occupied a moment before.
Halthak uttered frantic cries of pain as the blue flames writhed all over him. Bellimar was still suspended in the air, bucking and convulsing, his scream becoming hoarse as it echoed on and on. Sariel rolled on the ground and came up in a dead sprint, running parallel to Xenoth. Valkarr did the same from the other side. The Adept tracked their movements with calculating eyes.
Something broke in Amric’s mind. The barrier that had cracked moments before shattered into razor shards, which then shattered into so much dust. He could not say for certain whether he drew forth the other within him and shook from it the blind, unreasoning fear that held it paralyzed, or whether it rose to meet him, buoyed by a rising explosion of power and vengeful fury. There was a jarring collision that shook him to the core as they joined, exquisite pain and pleasure interwoven in an instant, and the other suddenly filled his awareness. Before, when they had interacted, it had felt like two wary combatants circling one another, seeking some way to occupy the same space without breaking some fragile truce. There had been an impression of passing control from one to the other, a grudging relinquishing of self.
This time was nothing like before.
An alarmed part of Amric quailed at the sensation, at the permanence he felt in the action of merging; there would be no return to normality this time. That part of him felt dismay for what he had just sacrificed and loathing for the thing he had just become. In the end, however, that disapproving part of him was like a scholar clearing his throat at the center of a battlefield between colliding armies––just a small noise lost amid a maelstrom.
Power continued to surge and gather within him, building into a white-hot core that permeated his being until his very flesh tingled and he thought he might be incinerated if he drew upon more. Amric flexed