The Rifts of Psyche by Kyle West (i love reading .txt) 📕

Serah’s features as well, but even so, she took the lead and found a path through what seemed like a trackless waste.

They wove through a narrow ravine carved from a swift-moving stream tumbling down the rocks. Serah walked quickly, jumping from rock to rock and setting a brutal pace. At times, she’d stream an antigrav disc or two to bridge the wider gaps, holding them long enough for everyone to cross. Even Fergus was starting to get winded.

“Surely, we can break here for lunch and refill our canteens,” he said.

When his deep voice echoed off the ravine’s side, she placed a finger to her lips. “No. We can do that later. We still have ten kilometers of this to cover.”

“Ten kilometers?” Cleon asked. “Seriously?”

“We’ve already done that, and it’ll take another couple of hours with this pace.”

“I’m pretty beat,” Lucian said. “Maybe just a short break?”

“No.”

Fergus watched her suspiciously. “What are you hiding?”

Her only answer was to keep moving.

“That’s not a good sign,” Cleon muttered.

“Serah?” Fergus called.

Serah stopped, her face whipping around. “Quiet!”

When Fergus spoke again, he was quieter, if only marginally. “If you would just explain—”

“Guys . . .” Cleon said, pointing up.

Lucian didn’t know how he had missed it before. In a cleft of rocks right above them, below a stunted tree, lay a pile of eggs, each about the size of a human head.

He hoped it wasn’t what he thought it was.

They practically ran the rest of the way. No one complained. They couldn’t put those eggs behind them fast enough.

They went around a final bend with about a kilometer left that seemed to end at a steep drop-off. The fading light meant they had an hour or less to get out of this canyon and seek shelter.

Lucian kept looking over his shoulder, expecting to see or hear wyverns following. But the canyon remained silent save for their footfalls. They dashed from rock to rock and forded the stream multiple times. It was a race against time to get out of here before it got too dark.

Once they arrived at the precipice, Snake Rift stretched before them. True to its name, it zigged and zagged every which way. It was smaller than the Deeprift, at least half of its width. Even so, the rift’s walls rose hundreds of meters above and below. There didn’t seem to be a clear way down, though Lucian spied a trail on the opposite side of the rift.

The question was, how to get there?

“Can you tether us again, Lucian?” Fergus asked.

The mere idea made him want to groan. “I’m starting to feel tapped out.”

“We all are,” Serah said. “We need to get out of here fast.”

“What about your anti-grav aura?” Cleon asked. “Too far to leap?”

Serah nodded. “I don’t have the ether for that, even for one person.”

Lucian saw there was no choice. “I can tether everyone over one by one, like last time.”

“I don’t see any other way,” Serah said. “It’s getting dark, so we need to be . . .”

At that moment, a great whoosh rushed over the ravine. Lucian looked up to see not a wyvern, but the passing of a long, wooden hull. It was there and gone in less than ten seconds.

Lucian could only stare, his mouth agape. Had he really just seen that? Judging from the others’ expressions, they were similarly shocked.

But before anyone could say anything, shrieks filled the evening air.

The Zephyr had just kicked a hornet’s nest.

“We’ve got to move!” Fergus shouted.

There was no time to consider options. In seconds, wyverns would be upon them, and not even the Orb of Binding would be able to save them if there were anywhere as many as Lucian was expecting.

The only option was escape. Once again, Lucian would have to reach for the Orb, despite his exhaustion. Everyone’s lives depended on it.

Lucian reached for his Focus, setting anchor points on all four of them. There simply wasn’t time to do things safely by streaming them across one at a time; it was either this, or death. He streamed a single focal point across the rift, at the largest boulder he could find next to the trail. He began streaming, magic burning through him in a nonstop torrent, building up the power of each of the tethers. Far more magic was needed than he had expected. His vision started to fade, replaced with a world of blue and white lines. He didn’t have time to question it, nor to even feel fear. He had to make this work.

“Hurry it up, Lucian,” Cleon said.

His voice seemed to come from another world. And still, the four tethers needed more magic, more tension. The world fell away, until all that was left was the Orb burning in his consciousness like a shining blue sun. And beyond that sun was something else. A familiar fear he never wanted to feel again.

That presence reached out for him. You would kill yourself for them? Save yourself. I can show you that which you seek.

Lucian ignored the voice, siphoning the surrounding ether emanating from that sun. He couldn’t question what this place was or what exactly he was seeing. He got the feeling it might be the ethereal field itself manifesting before him.

He screamed as the surrounding energy infused inside him. He redirected it all into the tethers. Surely it should not take this much magic, but for the first time in his life, Lucian was creating four separate streams. Each additional stream, he knew, became more expensive to create and maintain. A quadrastream took sixteen as much magic as a single stream. He was doing something that the Transcends of the Academy would deem impossible for almost any mage, and he was doing it without experience.

But he also had no choice. Time seemed to slow as the blue reality faded. Lucian felt his body return to the Shadow World, his reality. His mind snapped fully back to the ravine. No more than a few seconds must have passed, but now every