Part of the power. That was what she’d seen. Part of the power as she’d been part of the pillar. She shivered, and pulled back until she hung above the Vellum as if she soared above the City.
If she stretched thin as a wraith along the skein of power lines, would that be enough to feed the power away?
The city wrenched again, more violently than before. The Smith Tower swayed, from central Seattle came the sound of shattering glass and the scent of fire. She dropped her pen and it skittered away until Landon caught it. He returned it to her and their hands met. His Gift.
Fi there beside her.
No way could she do what she was considering on her own, but she’d never asked anyone for help before. She met Landon’s gaze with a question.
“Do whatever you have to, Vallon, but do it soon. I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”
He must have seen the desperation in her eyes, or felt it in her grip. Fi scrambled closer.
“I’ll help, too.”
Vallon kept one had free and Landon held the other. Fi placed a hand on her both of theirs as Vallon -reached- deep once more.
This time two presences rode with her—deeper than she had gone before. She stretched herself out along the veins of power. Stretched herself further with Landon and Fi’s gifted power. She stretched so thin she thought she might disappear, but Landon was there, whispering encouragements in her ear.
It wasn’t enough.
She sobbed over her vellum. Grief bubbled through the earth. The magma chamber bubbled and grew—larger. Larger. Larger.
It blew in a terrifying wave of power, blasting up through the tunnels, destroying the soil, forcing earth upward, upward toward the sky.
The rumbling was a cacophonic stereo of outer and inner ears and she could not allow this to happen. Could not let her city be destroyed. Or Fi. Or Landon. Or any of the others.
Vallon arrowed through the soil to the heart of the magma. She reached out and gathered the immense power. Drank it in and fed it out to Landon and Fi, let it circle and cool through their veins and return to her where she stretched, stretched further and sent the power out to the world again. And more. And more again.
Like a single, long circular breath of a saxophonist. Like Rebecca Murdoch’s pillar.
The explosion faltered. But she could not stop her inhalation of power. She drew more to her, and her fingers flew over the vellum.
The power to reinvent the city. The power to destroy Seattle and more. The power to send the entire west coast into the ocean, and she had to find something she could do with it.
She drew the magma core under a mountain. A familiar mountain: Rainier, with its peak in the clouds and its feet in the mountains. Its heart far underground.
The magma shimmered and glowed as the power found it. As she drew power from its heart, and then bound it through Fi and Landon to herself.
Her flesh burned as the power fed into her. As she grew to immensity, as she grew until she felt the shift of the tectonic plates on her skin. The roughness of mountains like calluses on her heels. The whole of the northwest, the whole of the U.S.- the continent - and—she--it—they were one.
The world stopped as she considered the wonder. So completely united, there was no longer any Vallon to protect or surrender. There was no rejection or acceptance. There was just ‘be’, the power coursing through her veins as she fed it out through the soil.
[Vallon?] Fi’s voice. Yes, Fi was with her here in this strange place of warmth and being.
[Not Vallon. We.]
She used her pen and sketched, and, like a person moving a swollen limb, using all her power she shifted and the world shifted, too. Landon fed her untapped silver power. Fi fed her the long-time love of friends.
Vallon screamed as the magma core’s power tore like a foreign body through her-its-their flesh. She fell as the core came to rest at its rightful place.
She lay, double vision looking up at the blue sky above the shattered towers, and at the cedars and spruce swaying on the flanks of the smoking mountain.
Then her consciousness snapped her back to her body and she was small again. So small and alone. Fi and Landon collapsed beside her, such precious friends.