The Omen Machine

The world seemed to be flickering. He saw little flashes of red, yellow, and orange.

And then Jit picked up the jar holding the flesh she had taken from under Henrik’s fingernails. The forms were rotating so fast that he could hardly make out individuals. It was all becoming a blur of dark, glistening flesh and thrashing limbs.

The Hedge Maid abruptly threw the jar she had up into the air above glowing circles and the writhing mass of forms.

Henrik saw the glass explode apart. The liquid in the jar seemed to ignite.

The world turned so bright that it looked like he could see Jit’s bones right through her body.

Everything was turned to light and fire. The trees all around burned. Hot glowing embers were drawn off the trees to swirl around the incandescence coming from the contents of the jar above the center of the flaming circle.

The Hedge Maid held her hands up, summoning forces he had never imagined. She stood alone against the light, defined by it, holding sway over a world turned to an inferno.

In the center of it all, in the heart of the blinding light, standing out like bright stars, there was something brighter yet. Small bits— the bits of flesh Jit had recovered from under his fingernails— were so incandescent that they made the rest of the burning world seem dull in comparison.

Her arms raised, Jit seemed to be commanding those bright sparks to pull everything else up with them as they rotated while climbing ever higher into the sky.

Alone in the center of the roaring conflagration, Jit lifted her arms higher, commanding it all to come together.

The masses of bone men howled as they burned, their bodies coming apart in flaming sparks and smoke that was sucked into the horrific vortex of blinding radiance.

Everything around him, all the trees, the vines, the moss, the bushes, even the ground, glowed as it burned and disintegrated into flaming embers and ash, coming off in long whorls that were pulled ever inward to spiral up toward the tiny sparks of blinding light that rose up through the center of the spiraling clouds.

The wind roared, the fire roared. Henrik had to squint against the blinding power of it all. He would have covered his eyes but he dared not take his hands away from his ears for fear that he, too, would be summoned by Jit into the inferno.

Even when he shut his eyes, he saw the same things as when he’d had his eyes open.

It was a night of burning color, of blinding light, of deafening sound … of madness.

Everything was being pulled into the glowing light in the center of the clearing. Branches and debris ripped from trees and the entire forest ignited as it was pulled in. Trees and plants disintegrated into a thousand sparks that swirled around and upward, following the radiant sparks of flesh. The bodies of the dead that had risen came apart in crackling, glowing embers like everything else.

The howls of terror and agony kept tears running freely down Henrik’s face.

The Hedge Maid lifted her arms again. The very air in the center of the clearing ignited in a blinding furnace of light.

Just when Henrik thought he would surely be pulled into it all to die in the terrible ignition of light, it ended.

The sudden silence felt like it might make him fall over.

It felt like he had been pushing against the sound, as if he’d been trying to stand in a gale. When the sound abruptly stopped, he almost stumbled forward.

His ears throbbed. His head throbbed. His whole body throbbed.

But the sound was not the only thing that was gone.

Henrik blinked. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The raging whirlwind of fire and light was gone as well.

He looked around and saw that the moss on the nearby trees hung limp in the still, humid air, just as it had before. Every tree was still there. The ground that had broken open as the bone men had erupted out of it looked undisturbed.

It was as if none of what Henrik had just seen had actually happened.

Except, the jar was gone and tiny bits of glass, like a thousand fallen stars, lay scattered across the bare ground.

Henrik couldn’t understand what had happened, what he had seen. He couldn’t understand if the fire had been real, if the creatures he had seen come up out of the ground were real, if the terrible sound and all the rest of it had been real.

Bishop Arc, still standing where he had been in the beginning, looked unharmed, and unmoved. He wore the same glare as he had in the beginning. If he was surprised by the deafening display of fire and light, he didn’t show it.

In the center of the clearing, the six familiars slowly circled in around Jit, tending to her, fussing over her, touching her protectively, as if to see if she had survived the ordeal. She ignored them as she used a foot to swipe away the marks she had made in the dirt with her staff when she had first come out.