I didn't know if all I had was even going to be enough. But I wasn't going to stop here. I couldn't… not after coming so far.
The first row reached me and I stopped thinking about the last row entirely.
White flame came off me in a sheet this time, not a jet, a low wall of it thrown flat across the stone in every direction I could push. The nearest creatures went up the way the others had, thrashing, clawing at their own scalps, and for one clean breath the dark actually pulled back from the light of them.
Then the ones behind crawled over the burning ones and kept coming.
'…Of course they did.'
That was the trouble with a flood. Set the surface alight and the water underneath doesn't so much as notice.
So I stopped trying to hold a line and started moving instead. Feather Step took me sideways out of the first snare of hair before it closed, one stuttering shift of the world and I was three meters left of where the trap had shut on empty stone.
