Fire Weaver (Fall of the Fey #1)

Chapter 12

Carmel felt as though she was being pulled into the fire and for a moment she hung, suspended in darkness. In those few seconds she felt at one with her element, unionised with the heat and light, before she was flung into a room of stone covered in skins just like the hall in the Nine Ladies that the Draco had been forced to inhabit. She thought she had accidentally taken herself there for a moment before her mind registered the intricate carvings that covered every wall, and the corpses.

They were surrounding her friends, attacking them, and dodging back before they got hit. When they were hit they would just get back up and keep attacking. All the while they made horrible sounds as though they were in pain and those with vocal cords that still worked were screaming to be freed. This was the power of the necromancer, she thought to herself, the power to pull someone's soul back into his or her rotting flesh.

She could only catch glimpses of her friends through the writhing bodies. She ran to the opening as quietly as she could to raise the alarm, they had decided to flash a light three times in rapid succession as their 'help' signal. She saw the returning signal before she turned back to the horror that she was trying desperately to block out. When she did she realised that one of the dead wasn't fighting, instead he was standing to the side watching her, his head cocked to the side with a hideous smile playing on his pale blue lips.

'What do you think you are doing?' A voice whispered through the air around her. 'Do you think you can stop this?'

She couldn't see his lips moving but she knew somewhere deep in her bones that the voice was coming from him. She trembled like a leaf caught in a strong wind but stood her ground. She would not be cowed.

'I will save my friends.' Her voice was strong even though all she wanted to do was curl into a ball in terror.

She heard disembodied laughter before the voice challenged: 'than do it.'

Carmel felt the fire pour through her veins, the familiar pull of her power, which she drew on and felt her flames burst out of her skin, she could see out of the edges of her eyes that her flames were a deep iridescent blue that illuminated the hall. The heat coming off of the dead bodies burned, illuminating them in a dark light that was different from the heat that surrounded her friends. She fed it, making them so hot they burst into flames. She heard someone cry out in fear over the din of the fight but ignored it. As the dead men and women started to burn they screamed in the agony of the fire.

The bodies disintegrated into ash in a matter of seconds but the terrified sounds they made rang through Carmel like a horrible song that she couldn't turn off or block out. The man who had smiled at her continued to stand untouched and unworried by the burning of his un-dead army, he stood unnaturally still, his smile growing ever wider until it seemed to cover the entire lower half of his face. She stared back at him, the flames that made her face danced in the slight breeze and in turn made her expressionless face look serene and God-like.

'What is the reason for this?' She asked him her voice, soft and musical, echoed through the hall.

'I am but a servant to my master.' He replied. He started to laugh hysterically but cut himself short and his expression fell into the same smile he had worn a moment ago as though it had never changed. 'Perhaps one day you will meet him.'

The body crumpled to the ground and she saw one of her friends rush over to him. She knew that the body was dead and could sense, rather than see, the heat of the man's soul as it fled into the night so she didn't move, and could not have, even if she wanted to. She felt herself collapse to her knees but disregarded it as a non-issue. She had things she needed to do. She had to make sure her friends were okay. She fell forward and heard someone call out her name but she couldn't respond. She couldn't move.