The air trembled.
It began with a low hum, like a distant drum under the soil, then split into a roar. From the hollow where the alders grew, a white flash erupted: light that wasn't sunlight, bursting upward in a single violent bloom. The ground bucked under them. Sand and grass peeled away. Aros threw an arm in front of Gemma, shouting for the line to fall back, but the sound was already gone, devoured by the shockwave.
The explosion of light didn't fade, it fractured. Beams shot outward in thin, needle-sharp streams, crisscrossing the slope, striking the menhirs, the ground, the air itself. Wherever they hit, the air seemed to twist and shimmer like heat on iron. One of the soldiers screamed as a ray tore through his shield, splitting it like parchment.
"Fall back!" Talon roared.
The formation broke. Dust rose in clouds. The smell of iron and ozone clung to everything. Through the haze, Gemma saw Jori stumble sideways, hands clutching his head. He ran, not away from the light, but toward the dark side of the hill.
"Jori!" Gemma shouted, chasing him.
He didn't answer. His small frame darted through the brush, quick and sure, as if he knew exactly where to go. Gemma's boots slipped in the loose earth; branches clawed her arms as she pushed after him. "Stop! You'll get yourself killed!"
He didn't stop.
He ran with a strange, rhythmic pace, not like a child fleeing but like someone being pulled forward. The others shouted her name, but the sound blurred behind her. She kept running.
The valley tightened into a cleft of stone where roots clawed down the walls like veins. There, hidden behind a curtain of hanging moss, was a mouth of rock barely wide enough for a child to pass. The boy slipped through it, vanishing into the dark.
Gemma hesitated only a heartbeat before crawling in after him.
Inside, the world shrank to breath and heartbeat. The air was cold, thick with the scent of wet iron and decay. She called his name once, softly, and her voice came back wrong, shorter, thinner, like someone else's echo.
The light from outside faded quickly. She shaped a small ring of light in her palm and lifted it.
The tunnel widened after a few paces into a small cavern, low-ceilinged and slick with moisture. Her circle illuminated enough to see, and that was worse than the dark.
Bodies.
They hung from the walls, from hooks hammered into the stone. Some stripped of flesh, some opened neatly as if by a surgeon who had no interest in mercy. The light shimmered over faces she didn't recognize, eyes filmed white, mouths frozen in half prayers. The stone beneath her boots was sticky.
Gemma's pulse beat so loudly she thought it might draw attention. She turned, meaning to leave, to run, to scream for Aros or Talon or anyone, but when she pivoted toward the exit, he was there.
Jori stood between her and the way out. His hair clung wetly to his face, his shirt dark with blood that didn't look like his own. His lips were curved in that same terrible, knowing smile.
"See?" he said softly. "It's safe here."
Gemma stumbled back a step, nearly tripping over one of the hanging corpses. "What did you do?"
Jori tilted his head, almost amused. "What I had to," he said. "They screamed. They always scream. And then they stop. You don't know what silence really sounds like until you make it yourself."
Gemma swallowed hard. "You killed them."
"I made them quiet," he corrected. "There's a difference. The Light talks to us all the time, doesn't it? It never shuts up. It burns and sings and begs and bites. But when you take someone's light..." He lifted a hand, and for a second Gemma thought she saw it, a faint trembling glow under his skin, like candlelight seen through paper. "...you finally hear the world the way it's meant to be heard. Empty. Pure."
He took a step closer. She could smell the copper on him now, see the faint shimmer of something alive moving under his skin. "You feel it too, don't you? That little whisper in your blood. The hunger. It's not a gift, Gemma. It's a door. And once it opens…"He smiled wider, his teeth faintly luminescent. "…you don't get to close it."
Gemma's voice shook. "You're sick."
"Maybe," Jori said. "But I'm awake. The rest of you, Talon, Aros, even you, you still think the Light belongs to someone else. That it's a god, or a blessing, or a curse. It's none of that. It's power. Pure and sweet and indifferent. It doesn't care who holds it, only that it keeps moving."
He reached toward her face, slowly, as if to brush a tear from her cheek. She didn't flinch, but her light flickered violently in her palm.
"Do you know what it's like," he whispered, "to feel someone's faith leaving their body? It's warm at first, almost tender. And then it rushes into you like breath after drowning. Their hope becomes your pulse. Their fear, your heartbeat. That's what the Light is. It's the taste of life."
The corpses swayed gently behind him, stirred by a wind she couldn't feel. The cavern walls seemed to pulse with faint luminescence, as though his words were infecting the stone.
Gemma tried to speak, but her throat locked. "Why?" she managed. "Why would you do this?"
Jori's eyes gleamed brighter, feverish. "Because I can. Because someone had to prove it wasn't divine. The Priesthood lies, they cage what they can't control. But I found it. The raw part. The part that listens when you tell it to burn."
He took another step, closer now, and the bodies behind him swung in slow unison, their shadows rippling like a tide.
"You think you're chosen, Gemma," he said softly. "But you're just open. And once you're open, something else always finds its way in."
The light in Gemma's hand began to collapse in on itself, shrinking from a ring to a spark to a trembling point. The air tightened, as if the whole cave were holding its breath.
"Stay away from me," she whispered.
Jori grinned wider, and the shimmer beneath his skin flared. "You don't want that," he said. "You want to understand. And I can show you. I can show you everything they never told you."
He raised his hand. The air bent around it, light curving inward until even the glow from Gemma's palm was dragged toward him. The pressure made her ears pop. Her knees buckled. It felt like being pulled inside out, like the world was folding her toward him.
"Power," he murmured. "It's not meant to be feared. It's meant to be shared."
"Stop," she gasped, her voice cracking.
Jori's smile turned serene, almost kind. "That's the first thing they all say."
Her circle burst, light scattering like shattered glass. The shards of brilliance hung in the air for a heartbeat, then were swallowed by the dark.
And in that last instant before everything went black, Gemma saw the reflection of her own terror mirrored in his eyes, glowing like two tiny suns.