32
The Waiting Blackness
There was no more time to think. There was barely time to react at all. As the blackness loomed closer, towering overhead like a wave about to crash down all around her, Melanie dipped her hand into the pouch that kept her spell components.
Her fingers quickly traced the shape of a carefully wrapped item and clenched around it, reacting to its familiar feel with the instinctive insight of hundreds of caresses, hundreds of incantations. She knew this thing without needing to think on it: the essence of the very first spell Timon had ever taught her.
The words of the incantation swept off her tongue without effort, so often had she given them voice in the past. Even had she the time to pull out her spell book, she would not have needed to consult it, so intimate
