She pressed her fists over her chest, reaching for the volcano inside her, but—
Shine hit a hard surface.
The shock threw her breath away, and she struggled to turn over, choking for air.
It was dark, complete blackness around her, and under her hands and knees was stone. Cold, reverberating stone.
“Kirin,” Shine said, tasting damp air—mountain air!
This was not her mountain, though. It felt off, filled with someone else’s magic.
Swallowing fear, Shine opened her eyes, searching for aether. Even in darkness there should be strands of it.
Were her eyes even open? There was such complete darkness. She thought she held her hand before her face, and yes, touched her cheek, but saw absolutely nothing.
The thought made her panic just a little, which in turn made her laugh.
Then tiny motes of aether appeared, drifting on some eddy through the blackness. She reached for them, and pain screamed through her, white-hot, peeling back her skin, cracking her bones.
Shine screamed—she knew she screamed: it burned in her lungs, and pure cold replaced the pain, freezing her, and she couldn’t move, she couldn’t blink couldn’t think couldn’t
—peace—
Peace.
Shine drifted in a slow-moving river of darkness, warm, comforting, held up by many small hands. Tender hands, gently caressing her, soothing her as she gasped for breath, slowly calming down.
A hand thrust up through her back and into her body.
Shine arched in surprise, but it didn’t hurt; it only ached like nausea drawing up and down her flesh, and she didn’t want the hand there, inside her; she didn’t want it, so she pushed—
Fire played around her. She was inside a bonfire, itching as the flames charred her hair, from scalp down her spine, along her arms and legs to her toes, but it was all right; she was fire; she knew fire; fire couldn’t hurt her—
A whip of pain sliced down her front, splitting her open from chin to groin, and stars spilled out, flaring and arcing: stars leapt up gleefully, shot away as if they could escape! Now they were free! Shine’s ribs pulled open like butterfly wings, and there her heart spun in a tight fist of molten rock—
She was sucked down, down, down into an ocean of salt, dragged through clinging weeds, her heels knocked on coral, and she breathed water that tasted like blood, but there were vents in the ocean, too, hot gasping trails of fire from the core of the—core of—
Shine sprawled limp against the rocky floor, exhausted, spent, too weak to open her eyes.
Her lips hurt, dry and cracked, and she breathed harshly. Shallow. Slow.
She was Night Shine Over the Mountain; she knew her name. She was a demon reborn, but her flesh was delicate. More delicate than a mountain’s flesh should be.
A dull thump-thump echoed in her skull. She thought maybe it was her heartbeat.
Kirin. Sky.
Her eyes shot open.
She closed them instantly, for it was too bright.
Spreading her hands, palms down on the cool rock, she moved them stiltingly. She explored. Her fingertips tingled with tiny licks of aether.
Shine flexed her hands, and flexed something else, too—a spirit muscle, a magic tendon—and pulled that aether into herself. It burned her fingertips, and she gasped.
Immediately she felt a slight reprieve from exhaustion.
This time when she opened her eyes, she could handle the fairly dim bluish aether-glow.
She was in a cavern, surrounded by the thin bars of a stone cage. The bars grew in a circle around her, arcing up to meet high in the middle.
Shine took a deep breath. She felt better. Her chest hurt, though, like a bruise wrapped her ribs from her heart all the way around.
When she managed to sit up, nausea rolled through her, and she broke out in a cold sweat.
Shine flattened her hands on the cool stone again, and this time pulled hard.
Aether flushed up from the mountain into her arms, brightening her on every level. Her skin felt like it was pulling apart, splitting from the inside, a dumpling with too much filling!
Stop! something growled.
She gasped, then laughed: she was a torch, brilliant in the darkness.
The light faded, leaving her eager and strong.
In the far corner of the empty cavern, a tiger crouched. I said stop.
Shine yelped and scrambled to her feet.
The tiger stood. Aether sparked off its body, like little scales constantly shed.
It was a spirit.
“Hello,” Shine said, her voice unrecognizably raw. “I am Shine. What’s your name?”
The tiger spirit snorted, and its fur rippled back from its head in a long shrug.
“Is this your mountain?” she asked. “Am I…?”
The barge. The ice on the Selegan. The eagle. Now this mountain.
This was one of the Living Mountains. Another sorcerer had her. Which had a great tiger spirit for a familiar?
“Where is your master?” Shine demanded.
Resting, the tiger said into her mind. You wore them out.
“Who?”
My sorcerer, A Dance of Stars, and Still Wind.
The sorcerers of the Second and Third Mountains. “Are you the Second Living Mountain?”
I am. But we are here within the First Mountain. What are you?
“A-a girl. I used to be a demon, though.”
Patience.
Shine frowned. “No. I have to get back to Kirin. I can’t wait. Let me out.”
They want to know how you were made.
“They were hurting me,” Shine said softly, as she realized it herself. The pain, the cold, the fire—it had been the sorcerers peeling her apart to discover how she worked. She shuddered. “Let me go. You don’t want them to keep hurting me.”
They can’t hurt you.
“They certainly can! They did. And I could die.” Shine gripped the stone bars of her cage.
The tiger spirit watched her steadily with wide blue eyes. Its broad face was bluish white, every hair shifting constantly, and it opened its huge mouth in a yawn. Fangs sparked with power. I am guarding you, it said, and lay down primly, staring at her.
Shine plopped to the ground again, drawing up her legs to her chest.
She didn’t have time to worry. She didn’t have time to be shocked. “Do you know if Kirin is here? Or The Day the Sky Opened?”
The tiger rippled in another shrug. Only you.
Shine wrapped her arms around her shins. She put her chin on her knees and stared back at the tiger. The certainty she’d always felt regarding Kirin was gone. Without the binding, she didn’t know if he was alive. Shine closed her eyes tightly, refusing to consider his death, or Sky’s. Or the poor Selegan River’s, who’d been struggling to defend them.
Could she draw enough power from the First Living Mountain to weaken the tiger, break the cage, and escape all at once? When she’d taken just a little bit, her fingers had caught fire. Would more burn her to a crisp? This was the problem with being new: she didn’t understand what she could or couldn’t do. She’d felt so massive when she’d renamed herself, but the sorceress had told her to be gentle with her body. And when she’d dragged at the aether just now, she’d thought maybe she’d pop like an over cooked dumpling.
But it was worth the risk. She had to escape and find Kirin again. Before these sorcerers killed her. Or worse—and she was certain there could be a worse.