“You want me to attack the stone?”
“We… are under attack.”
And with that, Laric understood a different reason for the difficulty with drawing on more of that potential.
Talia. Maybe she wasn’t even alone any longer. And if that were the case, how was he going to be able to get free?
He looked over to Rowan. “So it seems as if the dragon and Xavier might be under attack. I’m not positive what Talia is doing, but there is something taking place there.”
Her eyes widened. “What?”
He nodded. “Right. I don’t know what’s happening, and I don’t know whether there is anything that we need to be doing differently, but I don’t have access to that same potential.”
“We have to get out there. If they are under attack, we need to help them.”
“I’m well aware,” he said.
“Can you share with me any way of exploding out of here? Or digging out. Or—”
“Fire,” Sashaak said.
“Fire is just going to burn us up,” Laric said.
It was one of the first thoughts that he’d had the moment they had been trapped, as he had started to wonder if there was a way that any of the other spellcraft forms that Sashaak had shown him would be effective. Especially because he knew that they seemed to work best with Sashaak’s natural potential. But none of that seemed to hold for him, and any time he thought about building up a fire, he was concerned that he would end up just baking himself and Rowan.
“Fire,” Sashaak said again.
Laric struggled with the idea, and he tried to figure out if there was going to be a way to get past this. He did not know if there was, but he needed to try, didn’t he?
Fire?
What was that going to take?
Laric didn’t think that he could hold on to fire while also wielding the stone form here. But did he have to?
He looked over to Rowan. “All right,” he said. “I don’t know if you’re going to be able to help with this, but it might be useful. What I’d like for you to do is use an earth-based spellcraft form that Talia showed us—”
“If I try to do that, it’s going to collapse on us,” she said. “I don’t want to be crushed in here.”
“I’m going to do it as well, but I want to see how long you can.”
“How long? I won’t be able to hold this.” She motioned with her hand.
Laric could feel himself growing tired. He possessed only so much natural potential of his own, and there was a very real possibility that it was going to crumble under the weight of the stone anyway.
“I just need to hold it long enough for me to shift to fire,” he said. “I don’t think I can do them both.”
It would be nicer if he could, and maybe with more training, he might be able to.
Rowan looked as if she wanted to argue, but then nodded. The shadows on her face flickered as the light dimmed, until it disappeared altogether. They were cast back in darkness. The stone overhead cracked and groaned, and Laric could feel it bearing down on him, but thankfully, it did not crush them.
“Let me know when you’re in place,” he said.
“I’m just going to bridge us,” she replied.
“All right.”
“And I’m going to try to create something of an archway. It distributes weight, and—”
“I don’t need to hear your technique,” Laric said, his voice growing tighter. “Although I appreciate that. It’s useful to know,” he added, not wanting to upset her.
He could feel something change. At first, he wasn’t sure what it was, just that the pressure on him started to ease just a little bit. It was subtle, but it was enough that he could feel the weight beginning to slowly, gradually fade away until it was little more than just a minor pressure.
“All right,” he said, and the cracking of stone around them began again. Rowan’s eyes widened, and Laric hurriedly fortified it. Then he smiled. “It’s okay. I’m going to go quickly. What I’m going to do is blast upward with fire. If this works the way that the dragon says, it’s going to explode upward, and hopefully will free us.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Well, if it doesn’t, then I just made an oven for us.”
She blinked. “Are you serious?”
“Maybe.”
She licked her lips and swallowed. Then she nodded.
He slowly began to ease away, but he realized that was a mistake and hurriedly withdrew, shifting to the most explosive form of fire that Sashaak had shown him, and he lashed upward with it. The moment that it struck the stone, Laric felt the stone beginning to crack, and yet it wasn’t enough.
The rock started pressing down. Rowan cried out. He felt the weight of it starting to push down on him, and he sank to his knees.
