Page 229 of Keldori By Daybreak

Fana, far in the distance now, screamed my name.

A light flickered at the Rift, and then burst.

I only had a half-moment to try to shield my eyes from Fana’s attack. The light, brighter than the sun itself, filtered through my fingers, and the force of the explosion threw me backwards.

I landed hard on my back, and the air went out of my lungs.

Blind, unable to breath, and perfectly vulnerable, I gasped at the sky. Spots burst in my vision. Ringing in my ears drowned out all sound.

I waited for Ciarán to tear into me the way he had Ferrin, but the claws didn’t come.

The world shifted as it came back into focus, and I rolled onto my stomach, trying to gather my bearings.

Behind me, the ice had opened up to reveal dark waters that separated us from the Rift. The ice Mom had put up to protect the doorway had been blasted apart by Fana’s magick, and Skal surged on the air that billowed over the bay.

It electrified the surface of my skin and filled my lungs with every labored breath I took.

Up ahead, a dark mass writhed on what was left of the ice beneath us. Ciarán shuddered and shrieked, his four claws grasping at the air, like a dying spider.

Rotsbane couldn’t survive in the daylight, I remembered. They were creatures of hunger and shadow, and Fana’s magick had built the sun.

“Wren…” Ciarán gasped in my head. “Please…”

My grip tightened on the scythe, and I blinked, still trying to clear my vision as I stepped closer.

The shadows that clung to the rotsbane rolled like steam, revealing the mishappen skeleton that lay beneath.

“My Grimguard,” I whispered. “My Ciarán.”

Hesitating was selfish. Ciarán was in agony. The sun would rise soon, and his pain would increase. There was nowhere to hide from its light on the ice.

But maybe I deserved a moment to be selfish after everything, after seeing what Ciarán had been reduced to.

I tightened my grip on the scythe and raised it over my head.

Entropy was the theory of chaos. The universe was falling into disorder because disorder took less energy. Less magick.

It was why heat dispersed in a cold room. It was why metal left in the rain rusted. It was why Skal turned Magicians and Nightmares inside out, and it was why Skal now rushed from Keldori into Skalterra.

The higher the entropy, the harder it was to reverse what had been done, because chaos was the natural order of the universe.

I dropped the scythe to my side, and Ciarán whimpered in my head.

Entropic reactions were hard to reverse. It would be near impossible.

But I’d managed worse odds than that before.

Skal was powered by sheer will. I was the most stubborn person I knew, and if the people of Skalterra believed me to be a god, then I would show them a deity.

I would force the universe and its laws of entropy and chaos to bend.

My magick had made this world, after all.

Maybe that was why it was so easy to siphon the magick flowing on the air out of Keldori now. It flurried around me, turning the morning twilight bright as it poured into Skalterra.

Ciarán’s rotsbane croaked feebly at the magick.

Quill, when he’d been experimenting in the strath, had found a way to purify Skal. Gams said he’d used himself as a conduit to change it, to make it so entropic transformations of human into rotsbane were no longer possible.