Ertai - Beginnings of Phyresis

Unlike the power he'd tapped to bring Predator in for a crash landing, Ertai discovered this dark energy, in its pure form, felt cold. His body felt flooded by ice, and the cold spread rapidly through his chest and down his legs. It did blot out the pain of his injuries, and for that he was grateful.

With a snap, the surge of power ceased. Ertai pushed up on one elbow and saw the laboratory was hip deep in mist. Each breath he exhaled made sparkling ice crystals in the air.

Belbe appeared, swimming out of the fog. She looked disheveled, her hair awry.

"How do you feel?" she asked.

"Wonderful." Ertai flexed his hands, formerly crumpled like a bundle of broken reeds. "I feel like new-no, better than new."

He hopped off the slab and patted himself all over. His burns were gone. His ribs were healed. Even the bruises from the beating Predator's sailors had given him were gone.

What about his mind?

He held up a finger on his right hand, and a tiny flame appeared at the tip. Ertai extended the next finger and made the little flame leap to it, and then the next finger, and so on. It was an elementary magical exercise, one he could do since he was a small child.

By the time the flame had jumped to his fourth finger, it flickered and turned orange, then red. It dropped down to his pinkie and became purple. When Ertai transferred the violet flicker to the thumb of his left hand, the tiny flame went jet black.

He stared at the black flame.

Belbe watched him. "Are you all right?"

Ertai snuffed the flame with his other hand. "It's nothing," he said. He'd never seen the finger flame change color before. He was suffused with dark energy, true, but he'd created a yellow flame and not willed it to change. That it did so by itself was disturbing.

***

Nemesis, Chapter 6