Dark Horizon: The Lightbringer, Book 5 by Jake Stone

Author:Jake Stone [Stone, Jake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bad Wizard Books
Published: 2024-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

Thirty

Connection

Her weight is enormous.

Between the gravity of her fall and the mass of her armor and body, it feels like I’m catching a six-hundred-pound gorilla. And in a way, I am. She’s a battle saint encased in dense titanium. Even so, I manage to hold onto her, cringing as my shoulder almost pops out of the socket.

When I heft her up over the edge of the bridge, straining with all my might, I fall back onto my back, panting.

Holy shit, that was tough.

I stay like that for a while until, finally, I muster the strength to sit up.

When I do, I see her staring at the other side of the bridge, her body leaning forward as if she’s straining to reach it. The view of it is clouded under a veil of smoke and darkness. She hangs her head in despair. “No …” she whispers.

Atia has never been one to show her emotions, but at that moment, she breaks. Whirling on me, she grips me by my gorget and gives me a shake. “Why!” she demands. “Why did you do that?”

I turn away, too ashamed to meet her gaze. “I don’t know. It’s hard to explain.”

“Try me!” she demands, her voice cracking with tears.

“It was the light,” I tell her.

“The light?”

“Whenever someone I love is in danger, the light rises within me, and that’s what happened here.”

She releases her grip on me. “What are you talking about?”

“When I touched the chain, it sent me back into a painful memory.”

“I know,” Atia says. “It did that for all of us.”

“But mine took me back to Dardekum,” I tell her, “back to the cave, back to⁠—”

“When Rachel sacrificed herself for us …” she says.

I turn away in shame. “I tried to help her,” I say through my tears, my hand balling into a fist. “But just like before, I failed.”

“And in your desperation, the light burst out of you.”

“I thought I had it under control,” I say. “But the vision was too vivid, too real. It was as if the bridge was tormenting me with it.”

Atia glances down at the bridge, at the surrounding chains, her hand rising up to touch one but stopping just short of doing so. “The bridge of remembrance,” she says bitterly. “It was a test.”

“And I failed,” I tell her.

After a while, she cools off, glancing over her shoulder at me. “So, that’s it,” she says, sounding numb. “They’re gone from us. To who knows where?”

I meet her gaze, my heart breaking, the words almost too hard to mutter. “I … wish I knew.”

“I do.”

When I turn around, I find our guide standing behind us. His black robe sways in the dusty wind, his face still concealed under the brim of his hood.

“What happened here!” I demand, pointing at the ground as my regret turns to fury. “Why did the bridge break apart?”

He glances thoughtfully at the smoking chasming. “I thought it would be obvious to you by now,” he says. “The bridge was the link between

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