Marine veered toward certain trees and startled the birds and animals into running away, but she always kept going in the same direction.

  “Is she going toward where you said the magic was?” Yann asked Anríq.

  Anríq nodded. “I can’t detect anything anymore, but Marine must know this Island. Maybe she knows where we can find it.”

  The group fell into the same line except that Marine went in front this time. Her whimpering sobs drifted back through the line.

  Eliska wound up included in their group. She should have stayed behind. She didn’t want to be a part of this, but she supposed she had to be whether she wanted to be or not.

  Omer collared Yvan again. He kept blurting out, “Get away from me! Don’t touch me!” but he didn’t say it to Omer.

  Yvan kept swatting invisible Darklings and whimpering in terror. All those sounds set Eliska’s teeth on edge. This was the absolute last thing in the world she needed right now.

  Marine crossed the plateau to its farthest edge. The group passed a few wrecked buildings on the way, but fire didn’t destroy this landscape.

  Eliska couldn’t tell what did destroy it. The buildings just seemed to crumble into ruins with stones fallen out of their walls and rooves caved in. None of the windows had glass in them anymore. They yawned into vacant rooms devoid of all life.

  The few bones lying around didn’t seem to lie any closer to the buildings than to anything else. Eliska didn’t see any pattern to the destruction—not like the other destroyed towns and cities she’d seen.

  Marine broke down sobbing her guts out every time the Watch passed any building. She folded onto her knees, buried her face in her hands, and her shoulders quaked in misery.

  The Watchmen hung back and left her alone in her despair. Only Yann tried to comfort her.

  He squatted down next to her each time this happened, put his arm around her shoulder, hugged her, and eventually encouraged her to stand up and keep going.

  Eliska’s stomach twisted in knots watching this. She should have been the one to comfort Marine. Marine obviously felt as bad about this as Eliska did about taking Barsali’s Darkness.

  Eliska couldn’t go near Marine. Being near anyone right now made her skin crawl.

  After the third building, Yann stayed by Marine’s side even when she went in front of the rest of the Watch. He skipped the interval and put his arm around her whenever they even saw a building.

  He kept her moving to the edge of the plateau. She stopped there and collapsed onto her knees again when she saw the countryside spread out below.

  Eliska didn’t see anything unusual about it. It looked exactly the same as the plateau with just as many bones, half-dead trees, and just as many ruined buildings. Some of them looked like houses.

  Yann squatted down next to Marine. “Do you want to go down there?” he asked. “We don’t have to. We can go somewhere else.”

  She didn’t answer. She raised her streaming eyes to the valley floor spread out before her and her expression hardened.

  She forced herself to her feet, marched sideways to the other edge of the plateau, and found a tiny footpath winding down the cliffs to level ground below. Eliska wouldn’t have been able to find that footpath. Marine must have come to this Island before.

  She made it to the bottom and set off across the flat countryside. Eliska didn’t see anything Marine might be heading for. There was nothing here but more of the same.

  Marine didn’t stop at every building this time. She pressed forward without any encouragement from Yann.

  She eventually stopped in front of a pile of rubble lying in a huge mound. She buried her face in her hands again and sobbed for a long time before she could bring herself to look at the wreckage.

  “The Temple was here!” she wailed. “This was the Temple where I did my training! I spent years here! I knew everyone here!”

  She started walking sideways to circle the wreck site. Only Yann went with her. He stayed close to her in ways no one else could.

  Eliska, Anríq, and the Watchmen stood back watching. Eliska tried to look away. She didn’t want to see Marine’s devastation.

  Eliska couldn’t have coped with seeing everything she loved and cared about destroyed. Marine and the Watchmen were all so much stronger than she was.

  Eliska thanked Heaven she lost everything before she remembered it. She never knew what she lost. That would have been too much.

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  Marine kept going in the same direction. She kept sobbing and going on about everyone who lived in the Temple and all the things they used to do together.

  Those memories made her cry now. Would she ever be able to laugh about them again?

  A different kind of sickness stabbed Eliska through the middle. She would gladly take all that pain away just to make Marine feel better.

  Eliska would have gladly taken Barsali’s pain away, too—and everyone else’s. She already considered herself a wasted husk of a human being.

  She would have carried it all to spare these people from the slightest discomfort—but she couldn’t do that.

  Marine made it twenty feet from the Watch before she saw something in the rubble mound. She screamed and charged the ruin.

  She scrambled over slabs and boulders. Yann followed right behind her.

  Eliska, Anríq, and the Watchmen raced over there and climbed up, too. Eliska dreaded what they would find.

  By the time they got there, Yann stood alone on a boulder looking down at Marine. She’d lowered herself into a space between some giant slabs of wall that had fallen to either side.

  They left a ten-foot gap of ornately tiled floor. An older man with a downward curving handlebar mustache lay on the tiles.

  Blood stained his grey tunic with the gold cross embroidered on the chest. Dried blood saturated his pants and splattered his face. A pool of blood discolored the tiles underneath him.

  Marine sobbed in loud gasps while she tried to pick him up.

  “Don’t….” he husked. “Don’t…..my dear child…..please……don’t touch me…..”

  “I have to!” Marine shrieked and burst into fresh sobs. “I have to….take you somewhere…..I have to…..heal you…..Brother Matherus! Answer me! Don’t you dare die on me!”

  She cast a desperate glance around, but when she saw Eliska and Anríq standing behind her with the rest of the Watch, Marine broke down even more.

  She lowered Brother Matherus onto the floor, bent over him with her arms around him, and sobbed into his neck.

  He shut his eyes and a blissful smile spread over his lips. “I can die contented,” he whispered, “now that I’ve seen you one more time.”

  “You can’t die!” she wailed. “I can’t live without you! You’re all I have left!”

  “They’re all gone, my sweet girl,” he half-whispered. “The other Templars are all dead. You’re the last one.”

  He pried his eyes open and forced himself to focus on her. Her tears only seemed to give him more peace.

  “You have to listen to me, my love,” he croaked. “You’re the only one left who can carry out our mission.”

  “I can’t!” she roared. “I can’t do this without you!”

  “You have to,” he whispered. “The Voyant….he keeps getting stronger….and he’ll keep getting stronger as long as people like us let him get away with it.”

  “I can’t stop him alone!” she cried. “How am I supposed to do this by myself?”

  Brother Matherus’s eyes skimmed the group standing behind her. “You aren’t alone. You will continue. I know you will.”

  He dragged his gaze back to her. Even moving his eyes took all his effort.

  “You have to listen to me, my dear child. Listen to me very carefully. The Voyant is hunting for someone—someone who will kill him, take his power, and replace him as ruler of the Coil.”

  Marine choked a few more times, but those words definitely got through to her. Her sobs faded. “But that means….”

  “He’ll never stop until he finds and kills the person he believes threatens his rule. That’s why he attacked the Temple. He sent instability to destroy the Temple, kill everyone inside, and strip us of our magic. He took all our power. He may have thought the person he seeks was in our Temple. I don’t know. I only know it’s up to you now. You have to find this person. I don’t know who it is, but whoever it is must be a powerful magic-user if they can defeat the Voyant.”

  “But….how am I supposed to find the person?” Marine stammered. “I can’t find out anything about the Voyant’s plans. If the information about the person and how to defeat the Voyant wasn’t in the Temple….” Her eyes shot up. “Was the Temple’s knowledge lost with the Temple itself? Did the Voyant destroy all the Temple’s knowledge, too?”

  “We stored a bolus knowledge in the Layers,” Brother Matherus rasped. “Our scrying visions showed us the instability moving on the Temple and we took measures to protect our knowledge. You need to find it and access the information. Then you have to find the person and protect them at all costs. If you have to, you can give the person your own magic to help them defeat the Voyant. It’s the only way. Whoever this person is, they’re the only person alive who can defeat the Voyant. The rest of us are just collateral.”

  “But how do I find the information?” Marine asked.

  Brother Matherus opened his mouth to answer, but at that moment, a seizure gripped his body all over.

  His face twisted in a horrible grimace before he collapsed, went limp, and stopped breathing.

  “NO!!” Marine shrieked. She pounced on him, grabbed his tunic by the shoulders, and tried to lift him. “NO!!!”

  She yanked at him a few times. When he didn’t respond, she folded over him, threw herself down on top of him, and burst into loud, bitter sobs. Her whole body shook.

  Eliska gulped down a lump in her throat.

  Yann jumped down onto the floor next to Marine, squatted by the dead man, and rested his hand on her back while she poured out all her anguish and loss. He didn’t try to stop her.

  Neils turned away first. He shut his eyes, compressed his lips to stop them from trembling, and turned around to face the other way. Then Omer did the same thing.

  The barren landscape offered no possibility of anything different. Every direction presented the same view of death, destruction, and hopeless waste. The Watch would find the same thing no matter where they went.

  Without warning, Marine shot off the dead man’s body and rocketed to her with an enraged roar.

  She stood there flexing her fingers and bellowing down at him in hysterical fury. Then she spun around searching for something to attack.

  Yann backed off. The noise drew Neils and Omer back to looking in her direction—and everyone saw the Voyant glowing with light.

  He stood on another enormous boulder across the Temple ruin. He perched high above the party watching them from a distance.

  Marine scrambled out of the gap much faster than she should have been able to in that dress. Yann climbed up to follow her.

  She scaled the nearest slab, cast one frantic look around, and seized another rock from the crack between this slab and the next.

  She hurled the rock at the Voyant and yelled at him, but the rock just vanished into his halo.

  She wheeled away and lunged for the closest thing she could lay her hands on.

  She ripped Yann’s glaive out of his hands, raised it over her shoulder, and threw it headfirst at the Voyant.

  She threw it with expert precision and it sailed straight and true with surprising force. It would have killed an ordinary man if she threw the weapon at him like that.

  The glaive stabbed through the halo and the landscape exploded in a deafening boom.

  The rubble and boulders that used to be the Guardian Temple erupted off the ground, revolved through the air, and then started to fall.

  End of Chapter 19.

  ? 2024 by Theo Mann

  I post new chapters of The Corrupted Coil series on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday PST.

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