The Spell Comes Apart

For one held, perfect instant the working hangs complete in the air before you — an intricate lattice of light, humming just below the threshold of hearing, every fine line of it exactly where it was willed to be, trembling with the force barely contained inside. It is beautiful. It is, for that single suspended heartbeat, entirely right.

Then a single thread of it frays. The flaw races outward faster than thought; the whole structure shudders, brightens past all bearing, and comes apart at once. Light sheets outward in a great soundless wave that punches the breath from your chest and leaves a searing afterimage burned across your vision, so that for a moment you see the shape of the spell everywhere you look. The taste of hot metal floods your mouth, and the air turns thick with a scorched and thunderous smell — storms and lightning-struck stone, with something faintly, disturbingly sweet underneath it. Where the shape had hung a moment ago there is now only a slow, drifting fall of dying sparks, settling through the ruined air like ash that cannot quite bring itself to land.