"No!" I cried.
Draulin shot me a withering gaze, something that said, "This is your fault, Smedry." Then she pulled out her sword and rushed at the Librarians. "Run!" she yelled at me. "Lose yourself in the forest!"
I just stood there. I couldn't carry Bastille with me, and I wouldn't leave her.
Draulin charged against an army of several hundred. That seemed a metaphor for everything that had gone wrong in this whole siege. But instead of making me feel sick or depressed like it had earlier, this just made me feel angry.
"Go away!" I screamed at the advancing Librarians. "Leave us alone!"
Something stirred inside of me, something that felt immense. Like an enormous serpent, shifting, moving, awakening.
"I want everything to make sense again!" I screamed. Saving Bastille had turned out like everything else. Draulin and Aydee would get captured because of me, and Bastille would remain in a coma.
I'd failed Bastille.
I'd failed the Mokians.
I'd failed the entirety of the Free Kingdoms.
It was too much. It seemed to well up inside of me. Rocks around me began to shatter, popping like popcorn. The tent behind me frayed, the bits of threads that made it coming undone and falling apart.
There had been a time when I hadn't known how to control my Talent. When I hadn't tried to. I went back to that time.
Alcatraz the First had named the Breaking Talent the "Dark Talent." Well, sometimes darkness can serve us, work for us. It welled up inside me, bursting free, rising above me like an enormous and terrible cloud.
Reports of that day are conflicting. Some people say they could see the Talent take shape, like an enormous serpent with burning eyes, insubstantial and incorporeal. Others only felt the massive earthquake I caused, shaking the ground all around, breaking enormous rifts around Tuki Tuki.
I didn't notice any of that. I was in the middle of what felt like an intense storm, spinning around me like a cyclone. It tried to get free, tried to rip completely out of me, and I held to it, clinging, trying to force it back inside.
Reports say it lasted only for the length of two heartbeats. It felt like hours to me as I struggled, both terrified and in awe of the thing I'd let loose. With a heave of strength, I pulled it back into me. In a second, it was contained.
I blinked, standing in the night. There were a dozen enormous cracks in the ground around me. The Librarians who had been running for me had been knocked to the ground.
Unfortunately, the fighting in Tuki Tuki was still going on, however. I wasn't done. I took the thing inside of me and suddenly knew what to do with it. I reached down, pulling the single remaining Bestower's Lens from the pouch at my pocket. I knelt beside Bastille, who lay on the ground beside me. I brushed back her hair and exposed her Fleshstone. It was crystalline and pure, translucent, like an enormous diamond set into the skin of her neck.
That stone connected all of the Knights of Crystallia together. I raised the Bestower's Lens and looked into the Fleshstone, willing my Talent to pass into the stone.
It refused to move. It seethed within me, angry that I had stopped it from destroying. I gritted my teeth, angry but I was feeling exhausted from all that had happened. I couldn't force it.
So I tried a different tactic. I need to trick it, I thought. Grandpa had to be tricked into thinking he was late so that he could arrive early. Aydee had to be confused by numbers so that she could add wrong.
What did I need to make my Talent work? I need to think it's breaking something important, I realized. Always, during my childhood, the Talent had acted to shatter, destroy, or break things that were very important to me or to those who cared for me. As I realized this, I found myself hating it again. But there was no time for that.
I focused on the Fleshstone, and I thought about how much I cared for Bastille. How important she'd become to me recently, and how if that stone broke, she'd die. The Talent - gleeful for something to destroy - snapped from me, but I raised the Bestower's Lens and channeled it, sending the Talent into Bastille's Fleshstone.
I felt an immediate draining within me as something very powerful was pulled through that Lens and sent into the stone on Bastille's neck.
It sapped me, sucked away what strength I had left. Everything went dark, and I collapsed.
CHAPTER 8 + 1
Three hours later, the sun rose over a broken city.
I sat up in my bed, looking out the window. Tuki Tuki was in shambles; many of the huts had collapsed. Broken spears, bits of metal, and shards of glass lay peppering the lawns of fallen homes. Bits of trash blew in the wind.
There were no bodies, but I could see blood. The bodies had been removed.
“Ah, lad, you're awake."
I turned to find my grandfather sitting in the chair beside my bed. I was in the palace, one of the few buildings that hadn't fallen during the earthquake.
"What happened?" I asked softly, raising a hand to my head. It throbbed.
"You saved us," he said. He seemed . . . oddly subdued. For my grandfather at least. "My, my, lad,” he said. “That was something incredible you did! I'm . . . not even sure what it was, but it was something incredible indeed!"
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"The Librarian weapons fell apart,” Grandpa said. "In the middle of the battle. Every gun, grenade, cannon, robot, everything they had. It all just . . . well, lad, it broke.”
I could hear drums. The Mokians were having a celebration. How could they celebrate when their city was in shambles?
Because they still have a city, I thought. Broken though it is.
"How are you feeling, lad?" Grandpa asked, scooting his chair closer to me.
"Fine, actually," I replied. "Tired. No, exhausted. But remarkably good."
"Well, that's great. Fantastic, in fact! Excellent to hear." He seemed hesitant about something. "I don't want to push, lad, but . . . do you mind me asking what you did?"
"Well," I said, "I knew that the Fleshstones on the necks of the Crystin are all connected. And once, when using the Bestower's Lenses you gave me, I loaned someone else my Talent. So I figured . . . well, if I gave my Talent to all of the Knights at once, while they were fighting, it would work for them like it did for me. It would destroy the weapons of the Librarians when they tried to fire.”
My grandfather seemed disturbed. "Ah . . ." he said. “Yes, very clever, very clever."
"It wasn't supposed to be clever," I said, grimacing. “It just kind of . . . happened. But it looks like it worked."
"Oh, it worked," Grandpa said. "Maybe better than you thought . . ."
"What?" I asked.
"Well, lad, here's the thing. You didn't just break the weapons of the Librarians who were fighting here. You broke them all, every weapon being wielded by a Librarian anywhere in Mokia. In one moment, they all shattered, broke, fell apart.” Grandpa raised a hand to his head, scratching at the fluffy white hair there. "They've retreated, called off the war, and gone back to the Hushlands. The Mokians have named you a national hero.”
I sat back, stunned.
"Already the news is spreading through the Free Kingdoms," Grandpa said. “This is the first time the Librarians have been turned back from taking a kingdom they were besieging. It's being called a miracle. You're a hero, lad. Everyone is talking about it."
“I . . ." I felt odd. I should have felt like celebrating, jumping up and screaming for joy. But I still felt troubled and worried. Something inside of me had changed. Being forced to confront my conceptions of what was right and what was wrong, who was good and who was evil, had changed me.
I didn't want to celebrate, I wanted to hide. The world was a scary place. My Talent terrified me suddenly, even after I'd used it to save so many.
"Lad," Grandpa said. "Do you know when the Talents . . . might come back?"
I felt a chill. "What do you mean?"
"None of them work anymore," Grandpa said. “Me, Kaz, Aydee . . . no more Talents.
They're gone."
Hesitantly, I reached out and touched the bed frame, engaging my Talent. But nothing happened. It wasn't like before, when I felt reluctance within me. Now there was just a void, an emptiness where my Talent had once been.
I let it out, I thought. It can't be! I contained it, kept it from destroying! I pulled it back in!
But I'd done something else. I'd . . . well, somehow, I'd broken the Smedry Talents.
"I don't know,” I said. "I don't know anything."
"Ah. Well, then, lad, you should rest. Rest indeed . . ."
*
When I next awoke, I had a stream of visitors. Aluki, Aydee, Kaz, then countless Mokians wishing to show their appreciation for me saving their city.