Broken Rule | Chapter 40
This post is chapter forty of my not-previously-published epic fantasy novel Broken Rule, which I'm serializing here on Steemit.
The story so far:
Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39
Jonas opened his eyes. He wasn't sure how much time had passed, but remembered enough of what was happening to keep himself perfectly still. The last time he had tried moving it had hurt, and that was important to remember. He cast his eyes down to the gory mess of his left thigh. The ragged end of a broken bone had ripped through the skin. Jonas wasn't sure he was reacting to that properly. If it had happened to someone else he would be sympathetic, he would be thinking, “That must hurt.” But it had happened to him, so that reaction seemed inappropriate somehow. Why wasn't he having a different one? Perhaps something had happened to his head during the fall. He had heard that the mind sometimes stopped working properly when the skull was broken and the brain injured.
It seemed such a strange thing, to have something as important as his mind protected by something as weak and fragile as a thin shell of bone. There was no excuse for a defense that poor. He'd have to use his spell to strengthen it. That thought made him pause. His spell? His hardening spell? The spell he used for castle walls? That was nonsense. That spell was for stone. But were bones and stones so different?
Almost without thinking, he began to hum. Could that be it? Could that be the pitch of his thighbone? Surely this was nonsense, but he began reciting the Minauran alphabet anyway, testing to see if his bones had more affinity for some symbols than others. Perhaps he was dreaming. It was only a dream that his leg was moving, the bone pulling back underneath the flesh, knitting together again. But even if it was a dream, this was a pretty good spell he was casting, wasn't it? Maybe if he practiced enough here in the dream he would remember it when he woke up. He had an arm he could try it on. And ribs, each rib could be another round of practice. Some of the pain receded. It wasn't completely eliminated, but he could breath again. The shooting pain had been replaced with a throbbing ache. He shifted his weight, and this time he didn't black out. That was promising. He sat up. It hurt, and his head swam for a moment, but it wasn't like before. And this wasn't a dream, was it?
Ruined stone was all around him, from both the palace and his beautiful Stone Woman. Beautiful Suzana, who had tried to set things right, but been cut down for her trouble. No, not Suzana. Stone. Just stone. And if he had been able to mend himself, he could certainly mend stone. Suzana hadn't been felled, it was merely damage to a statue. And there was more stone here, more stone to repair her.
Jonas began his spell again. The pain in his side made speaking difficult, and the dust in the air seemed to be collecting in his lungs. Every instinct told him to cough, but instead he chanted his spell. The broken parts of the Stone Woman became liquid and spread out among the ruins of the palace. The displaced stone blocks of the palace softened, and tiny rivers of stone oozed back to the Stone Woman. The stone came together, settling into the image that Jonas had in his mind. Not Suzana of course, but her likeness. Strong, powerful. But stone, not flesh. He would have to remember that. A stone statue could be repaired, as he was doing now.
Jonas poured his will into his spell, holding nothing back. She was whole again now, ready to do what needed to be done. He thought of riding her shoulder again, high above the earth, but the memory of the fall pushed that thought out of his mind. The Stone Woman twisted sideways and brought her knee up to her chest. Jonas wrapped himself around her ankle, blood still escaping from his thigh and running down her foot. This would be better. She brought her other knee forward and thrust herself upward, kneeling, with her hands on the rubble in front of her. She turned her colossal head to face the priest, who was marching toward the palace now.
The priest screamed something once again. Cradling a badly wounded left arm against his body, he held forth his right and fire roared forth. A column of flame three yards across streamed from his hand into the Stone Woman's right side, melting the stone away. The priest poured more and more energy into the flame until it tunneled all the way through burst forth from her back. Jonas had learned, though. Suzana would feel pain from a wound like that, but a statue would not. A statue could stand and fight. So she did. She rose up on her feet, standing tall amidst the rubble. She thrust her right hand into the melted section of her body, and dug inside. She pulled forth molten rock like a boy pulling mud from a stream, and hurled it across the plaza at the priest.
From the Stone Woman's perspective only a little bit hit him, but tiny droplets to the Stone Woman were globules of lava the size of melons to the priest. He went down, screaming incoherently now, trying instinctively to extinguish whatever was burning him. But the molten rock was no simple fire that could be put out, it was a real, tangible thing, and nothing that the priest could do could get him away from its terrible burning heat. As the priest writhed on the ground, the Stone Woman surged forward and fell again, purposefully this time. As she came down she drove her enormous shoulder into the ground where the priest struggled. Tons of rock smashed his bones and buried him. Jonas released his spell, turning that vital image of Suzana into nothing but a colossal, ruined statue. He let himself fall to the ground and settled on his back in exhaustion. Looking around at the destruction that he and Marek had caused in their fight, Jonas understood what it must have been like in the old days, to understand the kind of horrors that Good King Nicholas had tried to eradicate with the First Law.