The Schism (The Broken Prism Book 4) Read online

  As they departed the forest, they were confronted with another wide field, stretching out in all directions as far as the eye could see. But right there, straight ahead of where they were standing—perhaps only a few thousand yards away—was the end of the ley lines.

  Hayden could see the aperture that would take him home.

  “Looks like we made it!” Hunter exclaimed, visibly relieved.

  A surge of wild hope flooded Hayden, and with it, something inside of him broke—the last barrier between his brain and the distortion.

  It was so abrupt that Hayden could almost hear it, like a physical snap of sound inside his head. The burning sensation flooded his mind, overwhelming him and bringing him to his knees. A horrible scream rent the air, loud and continuous. Hayden covered his ears with his hands and wished the person yelling would just shut up or die or something.

  Then he realized it was him.

  Even having the realization, he couldn’t stop. The pain in his head was blinding, agonizing, his mind racing with thoughts and images that didn’t make sense, no thought tracking the previous one, all of it disturbing and dangerous. Colors exploded before his eyes until he could barely see in front of him.

  Hunter was kneeling down in front of him, shaking him by the arms and shouting something at him that he couldn’t hear over all the screaming. Finally he abandoned the attempt and drew his knives, turning to face something Hayden couldn’t see as he took off running towards the aperture.

  Hayden knew, vaguely, that he needed to follow—that he had to stand up or something bad would happen, but his thoughts were so disjointed and strange that it was hard to remember anything that mattered. He finally brought himself to his feet and managed to stop screaming, but only because his voice was just about gone from overuse. His head still felt like ten-inch spikes were being hammered through it in all directions, and he staggered a little and heaved all over his shoes before forcing himself to look up.

  Apparently all the yelling had drawn the attention of a few monsters, because Hunter was battling a four-headed hydra while trying to avoid a gorilla that was taller than he was, which had enormous, jagged teeth that spiked past its chin—obviously a hybrid creature of some sort. For some reason Hayden’s only coherent thought was that there must be a lake somewhere nearby in the forest behind them for a hydra to be here, and that cold water would feel nice right about now.

  Another pulse of pain washed through him as he looked up and saw a thirty-foot long dragon flying overhead, cutting a wide, slow circle through the sky, waiting for an opportunity to dive to the ground and snatch up Hunter in its jaws.

  Hayden staggered forward slowly, each step causing him horrible pain. Twice he had to stop and vomit within the span of about a minute, but he was determined to join in the battle so Hunter wouldn’t steal all the glory, though he wasn’t sure why that mattered just now.

  Hunter was fighting like he did this every day—which admittedly, he probably did. One of the hydra heads struck at him like a cobra, and he leapt into the air and used the impetus to kick off of the head and run down the monster’s neck, slashing with his machete as he went, though he didn’t actually sever any of the four heads. He stumbled a little as the hydra turned, but righted himself in time to throw himself onto his foe’s torso, at the place where all the necks came together. He swung the machete in a high arc and then stabbed furiously into the hydra’s chest, piercing the heart and killing it.

  The dragon dove for him and he rolled, simultaneously avoiding the massive gorilla-hybrid that was trying to grab at him. He caught sight of Hayden trying to hobble towards the carnage and yelled something that Hayden couldn’t hear over the horrible throbbing in his head. Waving his machete around to ward off the gorilla, he reached into his backpack while still wearing it and threw something at Hayden.

  The void-prism.

  The prism flew towards him in a high arc, and for a moment even the gorilla and the dragon followed it with their eyes, as the brilliant white glow soared towards Hayden like a miniature sun, landing on the ground a few yards in front of him. Hunter had incredible aim, or else had gotten really lucky, which was just one more thing for him to be good at, Hayden supposed.

  Drawn by the bright warmth of the prism—though he couldn’t remember why—Hayden limped towards it, leaving Hunter to fight off the monsters without caring what happened to the man. There was a giant opening in the air not too far away, with strange lines of faint light that dead-ended into it, but Hayden didn’t know or care what any of that was for.

  He knelt down and picked up the glowing diamond with trembling hands, holding it above his head while he hurled again so that he wouldn’t get puke on it. He examined the diamond carefully once he was sure of his stomach, rotating it in front of his face and noting that it seemed much too large for any ring or necklace, and would probably make a killing at market.

  The pain in his head was beginning to subside, or maybe he was just becoming less aware of it. If he focused, he could still feel pulses of pain rippling through him, especially in his chest—and his arms, for whatever reason—but he tried to ignore it because it was an unpleasant sensation.

  The man who was fighting the gorilla and trying to avoid the dragon—what was his name?—was shouting something at him about a Closing spell, gesturing to the top of his head for some stupid reason.

  That guy is nuts, Hayden smirked, thinking that if the monsters didn’t kill the man then he would have to, because he wasn’t giving up this diamond for anything, even though the fool had trusted him with holding it while he did battle.

  The man sliced one of the gorilla’s big arms and it howled in pain and rage. Once again, the fighter turned to Hayden and pointed to the prism and then the top of his head.

  Frowning, Hayden touched his own head and was surprised to feel some kind of metal headband on it—a circlet of some sort. Curious, he felt around with his fingers to get an idea of how the thing was put together, and was intrigued when a metal eyepiece swung down in front of his right eye. It was much too wide for his eye though—maybe even large enough to hold the diamond in the palm of his hand…

  There’s a thought.

  Hayden slowly brought the glowing diamond to his face, squinting from the brightness as he tried fitting it into the eyepiece. He had to stop almost immediately and turn it around backwards, since he’d almost just poked his eye out with the pointy end. To his pleasant surprise the thing fit perfectly, and when he removed his hand he was amazed by how the gloomy world looked when viewed through prismatic light. There were thousands of bands of color playing out in front of his eye, and some of them even seemed to belong beside each other, like they had a purpose…

  Ignoring the sounds of battle up ahead, he turned his head in all directions, stopping when he saw a jagged slash through the air up ahead with multicolored light pouring through it.

  It was the strange aperture that had those faint lines of light running into it. When he looked at it with the naked eye, it just looked like a distorted ripple in the air, but when he viewed it through the diamond he could see power radiating from it—like magic.

  He continued walking slowly towards the opening, wanting to study it closer. If there was a way to use this diamond to harness the power flowing out of that anomaly…there would be nothing he couldn’t do. No one would ever be able to rule over him again if he had that power, and anyone who didn’t like him wouldn’t last long once he stood against them…

  He was still about a hundred yards away when he became aware of the other man shouting at him again. For some reason he kept yelling, “Close it! Do the Closing spell and run!”

  At first the advice made no sense to Hayden and so he ignored it, thinking it was nothing but the ravings of a madman who was fighting off a giant gorilla and a dragon. But then, gradually, something about the words ‘Closing spell’ seemed to resonate in his mind, like there was something he should be remembering about it but had forgotten…

 
Without really knowing why, Hayden lifted his hand and idly began twisting the diamond around in his eyepiece, intrigued by the faint clicking sound the monocle made as it rotated. It was fascinating how all those colored bands changed and moved with it, so that now he was looking at entirely different alignments.

  Alignments?

  Strange word to pull out of midair, but Hayden shrugged it off and continued turning the thing. He found a solid band of red-blue-yellow that abutted a thin line of green and a thick one of orange.

  A Prime Trefecta, with an orange inversion, he thought immediately, pleased with himself for identifying it, and then wondering how he even knew those words.

  Another click of the monocle and something stuck out to Hayden’s eye, a series of colors that made him think of closing doors for some reason.

  The Closing spell, he knew, without knowing why he knew it.

  Since Hunter was still shouting about it even as he began to wear down from fighting monsters much more powerful than him, Hayden decided to give it a go and see what happened. Maybe the man was telling him the way to capture the power of that strange aperture that looked like a jagged scar through the air.

  He leveled his gaze at the opening, looking through the proper alignment, and thought, Close!

  The diamond lit up so brightly that he had to rip it out of the eyepiece and drop it on the ground, his right eye temporarily blinded by patches of exploding light from the proximity. He cursed out loud and glared at the culprit, which was shrinking slowly but visibly before his very eyes—well, eye.

  That jerk was tricking me into destroying this diamond, just because he knew I wouldn’t give it back to him!

  Something else in his mind snapped then, and suddenly he was on his hands and knees, reeling with pain. He slammed his head against the ground, desperately trying to make it stop, but nothing would help. He continued banging his head against the ground, thinking of how funny he must look, and then bursting into wild laughter at the image it invoked. He laughed so hard it hurt—though it was hard to tell because all of him hurt by now, rolling around the ground and alternating between screaming and laughing as he stared up at the sky, while the glowing diamond shrank slowly beside him.

  Then someone was leaning over him—a man who was much more handsome than he would ever be—pulling him to his feet and saying something he couldn’t understand. The man looked worried for some reason, brandishing a machete in one hand.

  That was even funnier, and Hayden laughed harder, hysterical now despite the pain in his head and body. The man sheathed his machete on his belt, and before Hayden could object, he hoisted Hayden into the air and draped him over his shoulders like a large sack of potatoes, Hayden’s body curved into a ‘C’ around his neck while he stared at the ground.

  That diamond is almost gone…he thought sadly. It would be a shame when it disappeared, because it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his entire life.

  The ground was shaking below him—no, the man that was carrying him was now running, fast. Hayden’s head was killing him and this did nothing to alleviate that, the jarring impact of the man’s footfalls causing more patches of colored light to explode in front of his eyes. He began heaving, but as he’d already thrown up so much there was nothing left in his stomach to spill out. He had no idea what the man was running towards, and at one point he thought he saw a dragon claw rake past his line of sight, but then he felt like he was being flung through a very tight tube, his entire body feeling the compression. He worried that it might snap every bone in his body, but then the tension was gone and he tumbled into blinding sunlight.

  The fierce pain in his head abated almost instantly, the searing in his chest and arms retreating down past his elbow, then his wrist, and finally out of his hands as though he was bleeding it out. He had no idea how horrible the pain was until it was gone, and it left so abruptly that he was left reeling in the aftermath.

  His throat ached from shouting and vomiting, his hands were bleeding and had shed most of their dirty bandages, and his entire body hurt. He blinked his eyes, raising a hand to shield them against the glare of the mid-day sunlight as he laboriously pulled himself to his feet. He felt strange, like his entire brain was being rewired all at the same time; thoughts and memories flew behind his eyes, every emotion on the spectrum rippling through him in rapid succession. For a minute it was impossible to orient himself, to tell what was real and what wasn’t.

  When his eyes adjusted to the brightness—his right eye still coming into focus from being blinded in the schism—he recognized his surroundings. He was back at Mizzenwald, at the place where the aperture to the schism had stood open all year, only now there was nothing behind him but empty space.

  The portal’s been closed.

  Hayden was just glad that he could recognize his surroundings, that his feelings seemed to be leveling out and returning to normal.

  That was when he realized that Hunter had come through the opening with him. Hayden blinked hard and tried to sift through his mind for his most recent memories. After the distortion fully penetrated his brain his recollection was foggy at best, though he had a vague suspicion that at one point Hunter was fighting off monsters while he stood around uselessly, trying to figure out what to do with the onyx prism.

  Guiltily, he remembered his resentful, bitter feelings towards the man who had been nothing but helpful, despite having no reason to risk himself for a total stranger. Hunter had somehow managed to convince Hayden to seal the portal, but then his memories became even fuzzier…

  I fell to the ground. I was watching the prism shrink without even realizing I was going to get stuck inside.

  With a surge of nausea, he remembered staring down at the ground while it shook beneath him in time with someone else’s footsteps.

  Hunter was carrying me on his back. He must have dove through the opening before it was fully shut so that we’d both make it.

  Now the man was on his hands and knees on the grass behind him, eyes clamped shut despite facing the ground and being shielded from the direct sunlight. He looked like he was undergoing the same sort of painful mental reorganizing that Hayden had been, only it was taking a lot longer. He wasn’t sure why Hunter would be experiencing the reshuffling effect, as he wasn’t a mage, but had never really considered the possibility that a regular person would have a problem adjusting to the regular world.

  “Hayden!”

  The sound of his name caused him to jump, which hurt horribly, but then his eyes focused on Master Asher, who had just risen from a chair he had propped outside the opening.

  He was waiting for me to come back.

  He had no idea how long he’d been gone, but was touched that the Master had believed he would returned, enough to wait for him outside the schism for whoever-knows-how-long.

  “Asher!” He grinned, suddenly able to appreciate that he had done the impossible and made it out of the schism alive. “I never thought I’d see this place again,” he began excitedly. “The distortion in there was a lot more intense than I thought it would be, especially towards the end. Howard and Tanner both didn’t make it,” he frowned here. “If not for Hunter showing up when he did, I would have been eaten by hyenas before we even made it to the mountain pass. I never would have managed to seal the exit and make it back through without his help—he had to carry me on his back. Asher?”

  The Prism Master had taken one step towards him as soon as he saw him arrive, but had been frozen in place ever since. He had a strange look on his face, mouth hanging slightly open as though stuck mid-speech. It took Hayden a moment to place the expression on his mentor’s face—terror.

  The Prism Master’s eyes were wide with fear, his face blanched of color. The naked horror on his face made him look unusually young, and Hayden wasn’t sure he had ever seen his mentor looking so vulnerable.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked worriedly, wondering why Asher was still staring at him like he was an absolutely terrifying app
arition.

  Asher remained silent, still wide-eyed and unmoving.

  “Come on, I can’t look that bad…” Hayden insisted.

  Then he realized what he should have noticed before. Asher wasn’t staring at him in horror, he was staring at Hunter—who was right behind him and now struggling to his feet.

  “Oh, right—this is Hunter, the guy who saved my life…” he explained, gesturing to the man behind him, who still looked like he was attempting to shake off the strange fugue that was a result of crossing realms.

  When Hunter was finally upright and his face was properly visible, Asher spoke a single word, a word that set off so many different thoughts and emotions inside of Hayden that for a moment he worried that he was back inside the schism and suffering the effects of distortion.

  His voice unusually soft and scared, Asher said, “Aleric?”