《The Moon's Mercy: Throne of Ashes》全部章節：第 21 章 - 第 30 章

The silence after the landslide was really scary. It was like the whole world was holding its breath. Elara was lying in the mud at the bottom of the valley. Her body was covered in bruises. She felt really tired. The special gauntlet on her arm was not working anymore. It had stopped glowing, it was just a dull metal now.The old woman with the staff was standing next to Elara. She did not move when the black ink started coming out of the ground. She just stood there like a statue. Then she said, "Get up child of the Sun. You cannot hide anymore. You have made the earth really angry. Now the Void is coming to get you."Elara slowly got up on her knees. She looked at Damon. He was standing a little away from her. He looked smaller and more human than before.. He was still ready to fight. He was standing in front of Elara protecting her from the shadow that was coming.Elara said, "Damon...". He did not turn around. He just said, "Stay behind me Elara. Do not let the Shadow touch Leo."

The snow on the top of the Frost-Peak mountain did not melt from the heat of the library's destruction. It turned into a fog that smelled of burnt air and old frost. Elara was lying face down in the snow, her hands in the cold white powder. This was helping to cool down the heat from the bronze gauntlet. Her skin was a mix of ash and dried gold. This was from the memories she had used to break her father's machine.Damon was breathing hard beside her. He had changed back into a person. His skin was very pale. The silver marks on his body were not shining like they usually did. He was not moving, just staring at the sky.Elara said "Jasmine" in a voice. Her throat hurt like it had broken glass in it.Jasmine was sitting up a few feet away. She was in a lot of pain as she used a piece of her robe to tie up her broken arm. She was not looking at Elara, she was looking at the boy between them.Leo was alive. He was not the same boy who had run through the Blackwood library with a broken c

The descent from the Frost-Peak summit was not a retreat. It was a race against a changing atmosphere. The violet cloud did not behave like fog or industrial smog. The violet cloud moved down the slopes of the mountain like a heavy liquid ribbon. It hugged the contours of the ravines and erased the gray pines beneath a blanket of toxic amethyst.Where the mist touched the snow the white drifts did not melt. They crystallized into a glass-like crust that crackled under the wind. Elara carried Leo against her chest. Her arms were wrapped tightly around his shivering frame. The bronze gauntlet on her forearm was cool now. Its metallic skin was scarred from the sudden eruption of solar fire that had broken Aaron’s Null-Drive.Every step she took through the thickening crust felt like treading on needles. Her mortal lungs burned as the air grew heavier. The air was sweet with the scent of rotting honey and cold iron. Jasmine rasped from behind her. The White Lotus agent was leaning heavily

The silence of a city is different from the silence of a grave. A grave is finished; a dead city is like a machine that has stopped working, its metal bones still cooling down. Millions of people are silently waiting in the dark holding their breath.Thirty feet below the guard post of the Null-Sector frontier, the pumping station was a dark and cold place. The air smelled of burnt copper and melted insulation, a thick and greasy fog that tasted of zinc and used electricity. The big turbines under the iron grates had stopped moving their blades dripping with stagnant gray water that splashed into the lower sumps with a slow and painful rhythm.Elara sat in the dark, her back against the rusty base of a dead transformer. Her right arm, without the bronze gauntlet she had worn for three years felt raw and light. The metal had cracked like a shell leaving behind a jagged line of gray ash that flaked off her skin every time she moved her fingers. Without the light, her eyes could not see

The lower vault did not smell like the books in the Blackwood library or the heavy histories in the Citadel. It smelled like paper and limestone and the bad smell of old ink. This was where people kept all the information about the world. A room under the ground where the Null-Sector had written down all the details about the land, the rocks and the borders they had fought about for a long time.The room had three candles made from animal fat that were stuck to boxes. The flames moved around in the wind that came through the floor making shadows on the big metal boxes that went from the floor to the ceiling.Elara sat at a metal table in the middle of the room, her bared scarred forearm resting against a massive topographical map of the nothern frontier basin. The gray ash of her burnt sovereignty had completely peeled away, leaving behind a jagged, pink like of new skin that twitched with every movement of her wrist. She held a heavy mechanical pencil in her left hand, her thumb trac