The pounding in my head is impossible to ignore. Every pulse of blood against the swollen insides of my skull rattles hard enough that I might think my heart has replaced my brain. Then outside sound bleeds in. There is a clanging sound as something heavy and metal falls a dozen feet to the ground; it echoes through the earth. The rasp as sand slides away comes next, a slow hiss.

Light returns as my shell of black sand begins to fall apart around me. Vaguely, I am aware of the incredible power that the sand has absorbed. The explosion was magical, at least partially. Pain finally arrives.

As the shell of sand slides away, my bare and burned back is exposed to the baking air. I gasp, trying to breathe, and find my lungs scorched. My body shakes as if shivering, skin appearing and pushing aside the ruined char across my exposed back. Even for all the pain, I only feel part of it.

I try to blink away the blindness, but find only my left eye can see anything. It hurts to move, hurt to breathe, but I force myself to. Through the blinds of crimson hair, I see a charred leg lying on the ground. It takes me a second to realize that it is my own: I can't feel it at all.

Another banging sound bounces around the torn apart space as more of the building's skeleton collapses no more than twenty feet away. With one good eye, I look around, finding a hellscape of blue fire smoldering on scorched earth. The club is no more than a husk, the trees and grass around it entirely gone. Black sand pools around me, the momentary shield that I managed in the final second as I recognized the danger. My presence spreads out chaotically, exacerbating the collapse.

In my arms, I hold Jasper, my chest pressed against his back and my arms wrapped tightly around him. The power of the throne, the boosting potential my brother warned me against using, continues to sizzle the air around the two of us. Without it, I don't think I could have grabbed him in time.

Jasper doesn't move, and with my ear pressed to his back, I can't even hear him breathe. I try to pull away from the man, try to turn him over so I can see his face, but find myself stuck. A tug of pain in my stomach forces me to notice the long rail of metal speared through me. A piece of rebar, crooked and bent by the intense heat, pushes through my spine from behind and cuts all the way through me to end up embedded in Jasper. I smile bloody down at the piece of metal; it is probably why I can't feel my charred legs.

Despite the burned air, I can't help but scream as I slide backward along the bent piece of metal. Without my legs, the task becomes terrible and long. After twenty seconds of torture, Jasper and I fall away from each other as I flop to the scorched concrete like a fish. I reach out, not letting him fall over, using the sand around us to bring him to me.

What might have happened if I hadn't been able to turn him away from the building in time? Even with the shell of sand, the blast still burned me raw.

Jasper slowly turns over as my spine begins to put itself back together. I can't wait for it. Clawing my way forward, I approach him as he lies still on the ground. Remnant fires flicker all around us, the world dark beyond the fickle light. A bloody trail follows me and my useless legs. I lean over him as he lies on his back. Jasper's hair moves in the silent wind, his eyes closed, and a slight frown on his face. If it weren't for the bar of metal sticking out of his stomach, I might imagine he was sleeping.

For an instant, the world doubles as I reach out toward him. Despite my hand touching his nice shirt, leaving bloody fingerprints on the red fabric, I feel a hundred miles away. There is a tugging on my soul as the power of the throne begins to wane. I'm slipping away.

A murmur falls from my lips as I reach out to him. Perhaps I beg for time, for mercy; I don't know. He isn't breathing. His heart isn't beating. The black sand rattles as my soul is dragged away from the material world, surging forward in a desperate attempt to fix things. Then, I am gone.

Galdis always found the sirens that the authority uses to sound like wailing. Not any wailing either. As she rides in the motorized carriage that cuts through the air above crowded streets, she remembers one patient in particular. The girl's screams had been so high-pitched and steady that they sounded exactly like the blaring enchanted horns attached to the top of the emergency carriage.

Out the window, she sees it as the flying carriage rounds a corner. The towering bronze buildings of the city give way to a flatter area, one where smaller buildings and the occasional garden decorate this corner of Booktown, or, at least, they had. A column of smoke taller than even the greatest towers of Faeth stretches high into the air in a massive plume. An entire section of the city lies bare, more than six buildings blown to bits in the aftermath of the explosion. Emergency units move around down below as the carriage flies over the wreckage, slowly making its descent. As they near the ground, Gladis gets her first look at the ghostly flames throwing off all the smoke. For how much smoke soars into the air, she expected to find an inferno. Instead, only the last embers of fire still burn.

Doctor Parsins taps her arm as the carriage lands, motioning at the mask he wears over his face and indicating she do the same. She can't hear anything he says over the clarion call. Gladis straightens her ruffled white and green robes before putting on the mask as Parsins indicated. A moment later, the sliding door to the carriage is moved out of the way, and an officer outside helps her out.

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"Thank you for coming, Mother," the officer says as he starts to lead her away.

Men and women dressed in the official uniform of the Faith Authority run this way and that, moving both wreckage and people away from the still burning flames, while others do their damndest to snuff the flames. Most of the people limp in the direction of the officers, soot and slight burns on their faces, terror in their eyes. A scan few of them can't move on their own and need to be dragged. A smaller group of those are taken off to the side, where a man in similar clerical robes to Gladis checks them. So far, seven have had sheets laid over them.

"Show me where I can be most of use," Gladis tells the man. She thinks he might be a lieutenant in the authority, but she never bothered to learn the officer insignias.

"Of course, Mother." The man nods to him as he continues to usher her on, leading her right past a group of injured men and women huddled beneath woolen blankets and staring blankly out at the world. One of them, a girl of no more than ten, cries as her mother looks down at her with a blank stare. "Most have minimal injuries. We have clerics already attending them. Before I take you to them, I need your help with something. We need you to identify someone."

"Take me there," Gladis says.

The officer, a man named Dessal Camper, hurries on. The heat rises as he leads her further toward the center of the destruction. A line of officers, more than twenty, stand in a bunch just a little further on.

"Move it! Move out of the way, I have a Holy Mother here!" Lieutenant Camper shouts as he shoves the bewildered officers aside. He leads her through the crowd, and when they reach the front, Gladis comes to understand why so many were simply standing here with their weapons in their hands.

The bare and rectangular skeleton of a building continues to stand against all odds. Framed by the metallic bones is the figure of a woman, mostly naked, with pale skin covered by soot and scorch marks. Crimson hair falls over her face like a waterfall of blood, only one dark eye visible through the locks that drift in a slight breeze. In her lap, she holds a man in a delicate embrace, a piece of twisted metal sticking out of his abdomen. Gladis thinks the man might be a stonespeaker at first glance, but it is hard to tell given all the dirt covering him. The slight flickering of the man's life force is the furthest thing from her mind as she takes in the scene as something far more sinister crowds it out. From the back of the woman, two reptilian wings rise into the air, stretching more than thirty feet to either side. Hovering above the wings, eleven long and jagged spears of night revolve, grinding out a hissing whine as they slowly turn to face her.

"Stay back," Lieutenant Camper warns, laying a restraining hand on Gladis' shoulder.

She realizes that she has taken a few steps forward and allows herself to be pulled back to the rest of the group. Hot air fills her lungs as she takes a steady breath.

"You needed my help?" Gladis asks.

The lieutenant nods forward. "You can see the souls of the living, can't you, Mother? We need to know if that man is still alive before we move forward. The woman hasn't responded to us. We don't know if she is holding him hostage or not. Those weapons have tracked us when we tried to approach. I can't go forward with anything other than force."

"The man lives," Gladis proclaims. "He is still alive, though barely. He needs assistance at once."

"What even is that thing?" one of the officers in the group asks another.

"A human," Gladis says off-handedly. She takes a moment to straighten her robes once more, steeling her resolve.

"I thought they were a myth," the same officer mutters.

"Careful, Cads, she'll eat you if you let your guard down," another officer jokes, jostling the first.

"Enough out of you!" Lieutenant Camper yells, putting his finger into the face of the officers. When he turns back to face the holy mother, he finds her gone, having already started to walk forward.

"Don't follow," Gladis calls back to them. She doesn't dare to turn her face away from the pair on the ground ahead of her, from the slowly spinning spears tracking her every step. The weapons rattle as she continues to draw closer. When she is just six steps away, one strikes down faster than she can track, crashing into the ground less than an inch in front of Gladis and embedding itself.

"Goddess, protect me," Gladis prays, making the sign of the word in front of her chest. She swallows her fears, making certain that her voice comes out steady as she speaks.

"I need to reach him," she says. Past the spear in front of her, the human woman doesn't move at the sound of her words. The human continues to sit, still as a statue, looking down at the injured man lying across her lap. "I can heal him," Gladis says. "But I have to touch him to do it."

The woman makes no sign that she hears Gladis' words. The holy mother stares into the woman's one visible eye. The black and red orb looks down at the man, unblinking, unmoving. Yet, Gladis thinks she sees something motherly in the gaze. She takes a chance.

Gladis takes another step forward, stepping into the cold shadow cast by the wings sprouting from the human's back. She prepares herself to jump back if another weapon should strike, but the attack never comes. Step after step, she draws nearer until she finally reaches the pair.

Her hand stretches out, white light blooming from between her fingers as she runs them through the air over the man. He is so close to death. His insides are pulverized by the concussive force of being so close to the explosion. Somehow, his heart continues to beat, but not in the way Gladis might expect. The organ squeezes in an artificial rhythm, as if some force were contracting it from the outside. The lungs move in a similar way, being squeezed one second and forced open the next. Throughout the cardiovascular system, holes in arteries and veins don't bleed; the tissue is squeezed and held shut by some power Gladis can't detect.

With a touch of her glowing hand, the piece of rebar running through the man vanishes. The open wound doesn't bleed. The blood vessels constrict against the air to stop the rush. So near, Gladis can see the face of the woman when she looks up. There is a slight smile on the human's face as she gazes down with vacant eyes.

"You did well," Gladis tells her, though she doubts this creature can hear her words. "I will take it from here."

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