Billy by Michaelbrent Collings

Author:Michaelbrent Collings
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sword, sorcery, dragon, quest, wizard, arthurian, camelot
Publisher: Michaelbrent Collings
Published: 2014-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THE TWELFTH

In Which Billy Crests, and cannot Find Flame ...

Cresting had always been a pleasure. It didn’t sound like it would be: stretching out to nearly nothing, a line of energy that could circle the globe a million times and more, then finding yourself again, emerging from some fire source where you wanted to come out. But it was beautiful. Light and heavy all at once, with your senses jumbling in a mixed-up mess that made you see smells and hear colors and feel sounds, all warm and comfortable. It was coming in from the rain to find cookies and a hot fire waiting. Shaking off snow and drinking a warm cup of soup. Hearth and home when a cold wind raged outside.

This time, though, Billy felt none of that. Cresting was an effort. He felt heavy, like he was pushing his real mass, his entire body, through the small end of a funnel. And the warmth was very nearly gone as well. He almost couldn’t tell the difference between the earth’s hot core and its cold outer shell.

The furnaces of the deep had been quieted. Not completely, but they were in their last moments. Billy had to hurry or he might well be trapped within the frozen ground. Neither here nor there, neither Flame nor flesh, just a specter that did not even have the power to haunt other people, but screamed silent screams that only the rock could hear.

He pushed himself faster, forward, onward, upward. It was slow, slower, slower. The fires extinguished within the world, the circles that spun within themselves stopped as lava cooled and congealed.

He became aware of a new problem: even if he had time to get through this final Crest, he had to have somewhere to go. He had to have a source of Flame from which he could emerge. Every time he had ever Crested he had come out in a volcano or a fire or at the very least a pilot light from a gas jet. But now, as he pushed his consciousness out in that strange all-encompassing atomic chain, he sensed... nothing.

Nothing.

No flame at all.

The world was cold.

Entropy.

Even in his disembodied state, Billy could feel panic pull at him. He had no stomach, but he managed to feel sick nonetheless and wondered if he could barf like this. Would puking cause an eruption somewhere? Probably not – not without the heat the world usually created. Maybe a gas vent under the ocean.

He circled the world. Or maybe the world circled him. When you became pure heat, pure energy, everything seemed relative. Whether you moved through distance and time or whether time and distance moved through you became a thing that no longer mattered. All that mattered was that you wished to be somewhere, and then you were there.

Only in Billy’s case, there was no there to find. A few lingering flames that heated below the Earth’s crust – and even these flickered and died as fast as he found

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