A Burning Sea by Theodore Brun (i am reading a book txt) 📕

hot. Perhaps it was the heat off the other people since the hall itself was cool in the shade of all that stone. Beads of sweat prickled all over his body. He glanced at the necks of the guards in front. No one else was sweating, only him. The heat in him continued rising, becoming oppressive, his breathing quickened until he was almost panting. And when he looked back up at the reader on the platform, he nearly dropped his shield in his surprise.

The book was burning.

He blinked twice, not daring to rub his eyes for fear of some petty reprisal. Still the book burned with a flickering purple flame. He watched, spellbound. The singing priest seemed oblivious to the licking flames that rose nearly to his face, nor did he seem to suffer the flames’ heat, but when he opened his mouth again to sing, purple fire billowed out.

What strange trick was this? Erlan thought, but no one else around him seemed to take this as out of the ordinary.

His pulse thudded in his temples. Sweat was streaming off him now; the harmonies of the voices grew louder and louder inside his head, their volume rising to something impossible, intolerable. Yet how? Louder still and louder, till the song became a torment, a deafening, shrieking swirl of sound which he longed to shut out. He wished he could block his ears. Instead he saw more flames now, rising under the stone platform where the singers stood, each voice a hearthstone to this purple fire that did not burn. He felt terror now, horror, his discomfort creeping into a kind of nausea in his belly but soon spreading through his limbs. His left arm was shaking. He clasped the handle of his shield all the tighter to hold it still. The grip felt wet and greasy. He glanced down and saw, in confusion, that his left arm was soaked in blood. Blood streaming in crimson rivulets down his forearm, filling the cracks in his fingers. The scar across his bicep, the mark of the wound the Watcher had inflicted that had been so quick to heal, was split. His arm throbbed with new pain as if the wound were freshly struck. He felt the same in his calf, felt blood trickle down his leg to his heel and then the floor. The pain bit sharper. He clenched his jaw against it, forcing himself to stand steady, crushing his eyes shut to blot it out.

But there he found no respite. Instead, in the darkness of his own mind’s eye, he saw a vision both terrible and full of wonder. He saw no longer the great climbing pillars of marble, nor the soaring domes above him; rather he heard music – and such music – song and voices beyond description in their power and beauty, and yet one of them swelled from his own chest, filling him, bursting out of him like a sunbeam of morning. He saw mirrored surfaces bright as the sky, and towering walls and huge columns, glittering with jewels and sheathed in silver and gold. He saw a multitude gathered before a throne, each face iridescent and flawless, glowing like blades tempered in the heat of a smith’s forge-fire. They were all upturned towards what seemed like a throne but far bigger than any in which a man might sit. And when he turned to look with them, he found himself blinded. The very sun was there, the sun enthroned somehow, its light too pure to look upon. And then the vision suddenly rose away from him, or else he fell from it – falling and falling, his stomach giddy with the drop, and it felt like a memory, and the light rose away beyond sight until in place of the great golden throne room, dull grey and then dread black shadow came around him, fear and rage and bile and hatred filled his heart, a terrible weight of shame that dragged at his limbs, lower and lower and lower. . . into the abyss of abject darkness where no light could ever reach.

Erlan forced open his eyes.

He stood there still in the great temple, the people all around him now watching the patriarch standing by the altar, addressing the people again. But instead of escaping his vision, one terror replaced another. For there again were the purple flames, no longer a few flames burning here and there, but a great gushing cataract of fire cascading from above, tumbling onto the altar, swirling all around the old priest and the singers and the lesser holy men, hovering in a great roiling cloud over the congregation, yet they all stood there, their heads crowned in flame, oblivious, while the bank of fire rolled closer and closer to Erlan.

‘What will you do?’ the patriarch cried out suddenly. ‘Will you submit?’ He turned and flung out a burning arm. It seemed his finger pointed straight at Erlan. ‘Will you? Will you?’

The words rang with terrible force in his ears – the blood, the pain, the fire, all of it crashing in on him. He was mad, surely. He had lost his reason, certainly, every thought scattered but one. He had to get out. He had to escape that fire. He staggered sideways out of rank, barging his way between two other guards.

‘Stay in line, Northman,’ hissed Alexios, but Erlan was beyond caring what protocol demanded. He had to get out.

And then he was shoving past people, guards, patricians, senators, caring nothing that he marked each one with his streaming blood. He fled headlong, leaving a trail of muttered outrage that he should dare to break the solemnity of the ritual. But he was gone, gone. . .

To the left, he glimpsed daylight streaming through a smaller doorway. Gasping with relief, he ploughed through the crowd of attendants standing behind the great men of the city and at last reached the door. The doorkeepers stood aside, their faces a welter of alarm