Summoning Light by Babylon 5 Read Free Book Online

clenched teeth. Fire boiled into his hands, searing down middle and index fingers and thumbs, following the lines of the tech. He raised his shaking hands, determined not to scream for Galen's sake. Green flames blazed down his fingers, joined in the palms, sizzled across his wrists and up his arms. He was burning from the inside out.
    "Dissociate!" Galen was at his side. "Dissociate!"
    Wildfire seethed up his arms.
    Within the chamber of rock, the vortex of flames spread down the length of the chrysalis' threads toward its main body.
    He had to finish it. Before he lost the power.
    Elric found untouched threads of the chrysalis, urged the conjured flames outward along them. Across the mak, the house and training hall erupted in torrents of green.
    Fire seared up his arms to his shoulders, burned along lines of tech to his spine.
    Though he could no longer access them, he sensed the destruction of one after another of the devices he had planted across Soom, pieces of himself being consumed with burning green.
    Within the stone chamber, the heat built higher and higher. The metal surfaces boiled now, and inside, the green tongues of flame reached the main body of the chrysalis itself, the translucent golden piece of himself with which he had trained so long ago.
    The fire seized Elric, surging up his spine and into his brain. Soom's lands, its oceans, its volcanoes and magma, its heart – all became unreachable beyond the brilliant burning incandescence. Great flames spouted from the mak, engulfing each of his standing stones in a towering column of fire. Then the heat became unbearable, consuming every thought in a blast of searing greenness.
    A crystalline pain pierced directly through his skull into his brain, transfixing him. The next thing he knew, he was lying on the mak, the fire at last running out of him. The circle of flames roared high above. Below, the golden body of his chrysalis had vanished within a furious vortex of green. It had burned to death, he knew. He knew, for within him, something had died, something had shriveled to ash, leaving a throbbing, echoing emptiness.
    The green fire faded from his body, and the columns of flame surrounding the standing stones dwindled, revealing their charred remains, like the fossilized bones of some long-extinct creature.
    The rocky plain began to shake, and the tall stones slowly gained motion, swaying slightly back and forth. Galen fell to his knees beside Elric, shielding Elric with his body. One of the charred stones swayed past the point of return and toppled inward through the mist, this sign of his commitment to the Code falling silently, unremarkably. As it hit the mak, it disintegrated, throwing up a thick cloud of ash.
    The shaking increased, and with a sudden gust that felt almost like an exhalation, the plain on which the circle stood collapsed like a bowl. The standing stones fell inward one by one.
    Galen bent lower over him as great clouds of ash filled the air. But Galen could not shelter him from what had already happened within.
    When most of the dust had cleared, Galen straightened, allowing Elric again to see. The standing stones were gone, the ash of their remains filling the depression that had formed. The house was gone. The hall.
    Within him, where once a planet had been, there was now a great emptiness. He was diminished.
    Elric pressed a hand against the mak and pushed himself into a sitting position. Strangely, neither his skin nor his clothing was burned. The damage had been internal, not external. His body felt strange to him, as if he were missing limbs. Now he knew how Burell had felt when sections of her tech had become inert, and she'd been separated from a part of herself.
    "The ground here is unstable," Galen said. "We should move away. Can you stand?"
    Fear had brought Galen's face to life. Galen feared that Elric would die and leave him, as his parents had. Elric wanted to reassure Galen. He would be all right.
    Preparing to stand, he