“Now!” Jake yelled.
Far down the slanted passageway, the reflected sunlight illuminated Bach’uuk. Bach’uuk lifted his shield of armor into the light. It sparked as brightly as a piece of the sun, which in fact it was. He tilted his plate and reflected the brilliance farther down the tunnel—toward Marika.
Would it work?
Marika had given Jake this idea, a way to rid the emerald shieldstone of its poisonous shadows and possibly raise the valley’s protective barriers. The plan had started with her statement There must be a way to cast the shadows out of the stone. The answer was obvious. What was the best way to chase away a shadow?
To shine a light on it.
Also at the time, Jake had been struggling to think of a way to use electricity to jump-start the stone, to fuse modern science and Pangaean alchemy. With his flashlight’s batteries gone, he had needed a new source of power. And what was world’s largest power source? The answer rose into the sky every day, warming the Earth.
The sun.
Even Marika’s father had stated the connection between the crystals and sunlight. They’d been in the Astromicon, watching the dance of crystals across the sunlit slits of the dome. His words had stayed with Jake.
All alchemy starts with the sun.
So Jake hung his hopes upon the new day, the rising of the sun. He sought to reflect its brilliance down into the heart of the temple, to cast out the shadows from the stone and use the sun’s energy to fire the crystal back to life. The problem was getting the energy down there.
The bronze bangles hanging off the Neanderthal Elders’ staffs had reminded Jake.
Mirrors reflect sunlight.
All he needed was to bounce the morning’s light from one mirror to the next, from Jake to Bach’uuk to Marika. She could then reflect the sunlight into the heart of the pyramid and bathe the darkened crystal in the sun’s brilliance.
But would it work?
All these thoughts flashed through Jake’s mind within the blaring of a single horn. He held the breastplate steady as the grakyl horde rose up to the challenge from Pindor’s army. Down the tunnel, Bach’uuk was bathed in sunlight and reflecting its brightness deeper into the heart of the pyramid.
But also from the corner of his eye, Jake noted the Skull King swinging around. Kalverum lunged toward him.
Then time froze. He saw his father sitting under a tree, explaining about Isaac Newton, how the scientist discovered gravity in the falling of an apple. He had told Jake at the time that the greatest gift of the human mind was its ability to ask one question, one word. All of human history traced back to this one question.
Why?
His father’s words echoed to Jake now.
The discovery of truth is what we all seek. And it is the good man who stands behind the truth and defends it with his life.
So as the Skull King attacked, Jake did not flinch. Bathed in sunlight, he held the breastplate steady. He must trust he was right. Even if it cost him his life.
Claws reached for his throat. Nails touched his neck and burned his skin, blistering on contact.
Then the tingling over his body suddenly burst into an emerald blast of blinding force. The explosion blew Jake back into the tunnel as if he’d been shoved in the chest. Kalverum was thrown the other way, down the pyramid’s steps.
Jake landed hard on his back. The breastplate got knocked from his hands and went banging down the slanted passageway. Jake gasped air back into his shocked lungs and fought to his feet. He scrambled back to the threshold.
He felt the pressure of the shield as he neared it. Even a yard away, the hairs on Jake’s arms quivered with its energy. He pushed far enough into it to view the lower steps. The Skull King stared up at Jake, his shadowy fists clenched. Hatred pulsed off his evil form.
Jake sensed a storm building within that shell of darkness, readying to hurl itself against the reborn shield. But thunder rumbled overhead. Both Jake and Kalverum turned to the sky.
When the rumble of thunder repeated, with it came an arc of energy, an emerald fire across the roof of the valley. The energy seemed to set fire to the volcanic ridges. It pooled across the sky like an aurora borealis.
The shield! It was re-forming over the valley!
Against this fiery backdrop, the grakyl horde flew in ragged formations.
Then the lightning storm truly began, crackling with sharper blasts of thunder. A forked bolt lanced down out of the sky and froze one of the grakyl in midair. Then the emerald lightning snapped back into the sky—taking the grakyl with it. The beast was torn out of the valley and flung high into the air. It tumbled end over end, tossed far beyond the new shield.
Other bolts fired downward, zapping some of the grakyl with such force that they fell dead to the earth. But most were grabbed and fired out of the valley with such force that they quickly vanished.
Down the steps, the Skull King recognized the tide of battle had suddenly shifted. He turned his gaze again toward Jake. For the first time, Jake saw his eyes. They were spats of black flame. Jake imagined the fire rising from a core of pure bloodstone.
It was like staring into the eyes of something ancient and evil, something far older than any Calypsian Magister gone bad. Behind that black gaze hid the nameless beast that forever haunted nightmares and prowled shadows and dark spaces, something that had been lurking at the edges of humankind since the beginning of time.
Jake felt a scream trapped in his throat.
Then that dreaded gaze fell away. The Skull King flowed down the steps to his shadowy mount and flew up into the high saddle. Wings rose like great sheets of night. The beast bunched its massive bulk and leaped skyward.
Jake watched the mount circle into the sky with mighty beats of its wings. Lightning crackled all around mount and rider, stabbing and bursting against the shadows. Unlike the grakyl, the Skull King bore some alchemy that kept him from being immediately flung out of the valley. But from the rapid ascent, Jake guessed such protections would not last long. The beast’s dark form fought for the clear skies and climbed higher.
With one final burst, the Skull King broke through the shield with an explosion of green fire and flew off.
It was over.
Still, Jake felt little relief. He remained cold and trembling—and he knew why.
Just before the Skull King had turned away, Jake sensed a wordless promise: This was not over between them. In this cusp of a new day, where light and darkness balanced, Jake had made a choice to stand in the sunlight. And from this moment onward, the darkness would be watching him, waiting for him to slip.
Jake might have quailed and lost all heart right then, even with victory near. But he remembered something vital and important.