Fire Within: Book Two of Fire and Stone (Stories of Fire and Stone 2) Read Online Free PDF

before the battle, to protect us from new magics for a time, and to let us know when Moloch drew near, so he couldn’t ambush us. We were ready. Toman’s army stood by, hidden, and there was nothing to stop me from summoning anything I wanted. But we were fools. This was Moloch we were fighting, and he was more ready than we were.”
    “Jonathan, you’re burning up!” his mother said, interrupting his narrative. She’d been holding his hand, but now she let go to check his forehead.
    “Sorry,” Esset replied. He stopped to calm himself and his mother looked at him fearfully as she felt his body temperature drop to something far closer to normal in the span of a few moments.
    “Better?” Esset asked.
    “No,” she whispered back, trying not to be horrified. She wanted to know what was happening to her boy; she wanted him to be okay.
    “Please, Mom, sit down,” he urged her. When she was sitting again, he continued.
    “The amulets only stopped magic that wasn’t already in place. We thought that was good, because then Toman’s artificial arm would continue to work, and he could still animate his things that he had his magic in already. But we didn’t know that Moloch had prepared beforehand too. Years ago. Moloch knew who Toman was; he’d left him alive on purpose. But Moloch knew that anyone left alive would hate him, and could come back, so he put—well, something like a seed inside of him. A geas that he could activate whenever he liked.”
    “Geas?” his mother asked. Esset knew his father would be familiar with them, but his mother didn’t know a lot about magic.
    “A geas is a kind of spell that acts like a compulsion, forcing someone to do something, or not do something,” Mr. Esset explained, then nodded for his son to continue. Esset did so.
    “I don’t know what kind of geas it was, but Toman couldn’t fight him. And then…Moloch turned Toman on me. Toman couldn’t fight it, I could see that with my own eyes. Toman went to Moloch as Toman’s army of stone animations came after me. Moloch knew I couldn’t win, so he started a transportation spell. That was when I summoned the phoenix.” It was almost as if Esset’s words were a cue for the symbols of the summon to flash before his vision again. His parents were silent; Mr. Esset was a summoner himself, and Mrs. Esset knew enough about what her husband and son could do to know. Which meant they both knew that Esset should be dead.
    “I might have injured him, but I don’t know how badly. His transportation spell finished and took them away before the phoenix could do any real damage. After that, I don’t remember anything until I woke up.” The last part was actually a lie. He remembered dying—or what he’d thought had been dying at the time. But his parents didn’t need to know about that, and he had no intention of telling them.
    “The ones who found me said I’d been encased in stone in a crater that was radiating immense heat. They told me it had been two years. My summoner’s tome is the only other thing that survived.” He looked around and saw it on the bedside table. “I don’t know why I’m still alive, but I keep seeing the summon for the phoenix in front of my eyes, and my head hasn’t stopped pounding since I woke up. It’s getting worse, and more frequent. I don’t know if it’s trying to get me to summon it again, or what, but I don’t think I can hold out for long.” He reached up and rubbed his eyes with his hands, then continued.
    “I had to tell you about Toman though. I don’t know if anything can be done. How is a geas undone? I need to try to reach Sergeant Warthog—maybe she can somehow help Toman if he’s still alive.” Esset found that he was shaking and his body temperature was rising again. Anger and fear spiked in him for a second, and for just a moment, before he could get a grip on himself, the tiny flamelets appeared and danced in the air around him. His mother gasped and beat at a