“What happened that made these lergals reappear?” I heard Zael’s voice.

  “Somewhere a boundary of reality was breached, and we got some new old ‘guests.’ And obviously, someone skilled appeared who knew how to properly summon this thing.”

  “Or maybe they were hiding somewhere all this time, biding their time?” Zael suggested.

  “They need to feed when they enter the world of the living… And when they feed, they infect with darkness. You can’t mistake things like that, I would know.”

  “Or maybe they broke through the Void pentagrams we recently discovered. Elza warned that anything could come through those. Right?”

  “Right,” I heard Mom’s voice.

  “When I heard Lora and Calypso’s story about feeling a strange vibration in the forest after the fights with the kernals, I immediately thought it might be lergals, but I couldn’t find any confirmation. Lergals hide very deep underground; they’re hard to find on your own since they don’t really leave a trail.”

  “And there are several of these things wandering around Forland now?!” Mia couldn’t help exclaiming.

  “At least one more. Honestly, even one lergal is enough to cause a local apocalypse and wipe out all Forland. I don’t know how many escaped from the first pentagram… At least a couple, by my estimate. And we’re lucky that Calypso eliminated the third one so quickly today. Well, ‘lucky’ isn’t quite the right word given Lora’s injury, but the lergal could have infected many more…”

  “Can we maybe stop talking and actually do something?” Calypso cut in.

  Lora is in bad shape. She won’t last much longer like this.”

  “I’m thinking…” the Mentor said quietly.

  “What are you thinking about?! We need to act!..”

  “I don’t know how to help her,” Ilforte said louder.

  “I’m thinking… Don’t interrupt. If anyone has ideas I’m listening. We have ten minutes at most. Her heart won’t hold out longer than that.”

  Calypso cursed again.

  “Can we heal her magical Spark by temporarily extracting it from Lori?”

  “I tried,” Elza sighed.

  “But I can’t get close enough to her, and spells don’t work from a distance. The lightning disrupts my magic. Her Spark has already started burning out; in that state, it can’t be extracted.”

  “What if we somehow release this excess power from Lori? If we rid her of the excess magic? Would that help?”

  “How would we release it?” Ilforte asked.

  “That’s exactly what I’m racking my brain over. Yes, it would partially help, because we’d be able to stabilize her magical Spark and buy time to heal Lorelei, but how to release that power…”

  “Become a conduit?” Elza suggested. “Ground it?”

  “How?” Ilforte repeated.

  “For that, you’d need to hold Lorelei’s hand for several minutes, or at least somehow touch her skin with your skin. And concentrate at very high levels of magic. And I can’t even touch her right now I get knocked back instantly. Let alone hold on for several minutes while actively casting spells. You can’t do it, Elza, and I certainly can’t, due to my light magical structure.”

  “What does it mean to become a conduit?” Calypso immediately clarified.

  “To pass someone else’s magic through yourself,” Elza said.

  “Release the excess energy somewhere, pass it through yourself… This technique is used by greater demons; it was originally invented by them.”

  “The technique!” Calypso said demandingly.

  “How do you become that kind of conduit?”

  “It’s a very dangerous technique for anyone who isn’t a greater demon…”

  “We don’t exactly have a choice right now.”

  “It’s a complex technique, you don’t know it…”

  “Then teach me, damn it!!” Calypso shouted.

  “And fast! I’ll add some of my own techniques to immediately stabilize Lori’s magical Spark completely and apply an antidote. But I need to know the basic conduit technique! Don’t drag this out!”

  I couldn’t see Calypso at that moment, but his voice was such that Elza didn’t argue or try to talk him out of it — she just started speaking quickly, explaining the technique. She must have been staring at Calypso like he was a madman who dared to yell at a greater demon.

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  “Got it,” Calypso nodded briefly when Elza finished explaining, and commanded:

  “Everyone back off, quickly. To a safe distance.”

  He himself, on the contrary, stepped right up to me, ignoring the lightning bolts rushing toward him.

  “What are you going to do?” Ilforte asked tensely.

  “I said back off!” Calypso barked.

  No one argued with him anymore, and the Mentor quickly herded everyone several meters away from us.

  Meanwhile, Calypso took off his gloves and shoes and walked toward me barefoot. He also removed one of his dangling dagger-shaped earrings, enlarged it slightly, and began scratching something directly onto his palm while slowly approaching me.

  He hissed from what was clearly very intense pain, as a bolt of lightning literally struck his body, but he stayed on his feet and kept coming closer. The lightning kept lashing at him, but Calypso stubbornly walked toward me.

  It hurts… I know how much it hurts. And I know what the consequences can be. I desperately wanted Calypso to stop right now and stop putting himself in danger, but I couldn’t even ask him with my eyes to leave me alone, let alone with words or any mental message.

  Meanwhile, Calypso scratched a golden spiral onto his wrist with the dagger, murmuring incantations. I couldn’t understand what he was mumbling; I only caught individual words ‘…ilúnari… eruál…’ — these words echoed in my head after Calypso’s voice.

  A golden spiral was appearing on my wrist too, as if Calypso was simultaneously drawing it on me as well. The skin burned there, but the pain throughout my body outweighed it many times over, so the pain from the emerging rune felt almost like a light tickle.

  Calypso carefully placed his foot on this runic spiral on my wrist — not pressing down or putting his weight on it, but maintaining skin-to-skin contact. Lightning bolts whipped through Calypso in a vortex, racing up his leg and straight to his right hand — on whose palm Calypso had also scratched something. I spotted some glowing rune with three spirals, like a triskelion.*

  [*Author’s note: A triskelion looks like three curved lines joined at one point in the center; the symbol represents the power of the sun, or more precisely its three phases (sunrise, zenith, sunset). One of the meanings of the triskelion is the attainment of inner balance, equilibrium, harmonization of a person’s energy centers.]

  Calypso’s palm began glowing with bright, pulsating golden light. It also clearly illuminated his face, contorted with obvious pain. But despite the pain, he continued speaking incantations and making strange gestures with his hands. At first I didn’t quite understand the purpose of these movements, but then I realized that Calypso was forming some kind of energy… weapon? It was… something between a bow and a slingshot… Or a crossbow? Let’s just call it a bow. A sparkling golden one, made of solid dense energy that Calypso seemed to be drawing directly from me.

  The bow was enormous… Taller than a person. It must have been hard to even hold something like that — I can’t imagine how Calypso managed to lift it above his head with one hand. Lift it — and pull the glowing bowstring back with all his strength using his right hand, the one with the triskelion-like symbol still glowing on its palm.

  Calypso didn’t take an arrow from anywhere or nock one specifically — it appeared on its own, huge, bright blue, crackling with lightning. A heavy mass of energy that had taken shape. That’s what Calypso released — straight up into the air, into the sky.

  The arrow flew high and exploded there in a flash of lightning, forming a small storm cloud in the sky.

  Calypso didn’t stop there. He kept loosing arrow after arrow; the bowstring rang with a nasty sound, a drawn-out twang that hurt the ears.

  Another arrow flew into the sky… And another…

  I don’t know how hard it was to draw the string of this strange bow, but judging by Calypso’s bloodied fingers, it wasn’t easy. And the more energy arrows he loosed into the sky, the more blood ran down his hand.

  At some point, drops of blood began spattering the ground around us, running from his fingers down his wrist and dripping from his elbow. Calypso’s face grew paler, but he stubbornly stayed on his feet and kept loosing arrows into the sky, where a full storm cloud had now formed and was growing and flashing with lightning with each new arrow.

  And I… was getting better. With each arrow loose, it was like pieces of poisonous energy were leaving me. The excess darkness was rapidly departing, my body temperature was starting to drop. I could breathe a little easier, and I was able to turn my head to see Calypso better.

  He was completely focused. On his forehead, a golden spiral rune glowed brightly — I think Polly had mentioned such a rune appearing when Calypso and I merged auras to strike at the kernals. And judging by the burning on my forehead, the same rune was on me now too.

  Tears were still streaming down my cheeks, but I no longer wanted to scream from the pain, and my body was no longer twisted as if by a red-hot cord. I lay exhausted on the ground, unable to move or even blink.

  I just watched Calypso, who kept loosing sparkling arrows into the sky. He did it very quickly, with practiced movements. Blood ran in a thin stream down the arm he was using to draw the string, but Calypso stubbornly kept loosing arrows into the air, and the sky above us was now covered with black clouds.

  The bow was gradually shrinking along with the arrows, and I was feeling lighter and lighter. The unbearable pain was leaving my body, replaced by sheer exhaustion and emptiness.

  At some point, I took a shuddering breath and felt that it was done — all the excess magic had left me.

  Just before that, the last blue-sparkling arrow had flown upward, and the sky above our heads opened up — thunder crashed, lightning flashed blindingly, splitting the sky in two, and rain poured down in buckets. The downpour was so heavy that I was instantly soaked, but I didn’t care.

  I was only watching Calypso. The energy bow in his hands disappeared — no more excess magic needed to be drained from me. Calypso swayed slightly and carefully lifted his foot from my wrist, where the golden spiral was still visible. He was deathly pale, breathing heavily. His arms hung limply at his sides, fingers covered in blood. He glanced at me, but his gaze quickly unfocused.

  “Cal…” I whispered, barely moving my lips.

  That was all I could manage, but at least I could finally make a sound.

  Calypso didn’t answer and didn’t react to me at all, because he swayed again, his eyes rolled back, and he started falling to the side. He would have collapsed flat on the ground if Elza hadn’t rushed to him at that moment and softened his fall.

  She was unleashing a volatile mix of curses for pushing himself too hard and thanks for saving me, all at once. Though I don’t think Calypso heard any of it, since he seemed to be in a deep faint and wasn’t reacting to anything.

  “He’s in a coma,” Elza shot a look at Ilforte, who had rushed over.

  “But in this case, that’s actually a good thing. It'll be easier for him to cope with the pain this way. He had to channel too much poisonous dark magic through himself…”

  I didn’t hear anything else, as I slipped into merciful oblivion myself.