Riley stalked closer. “You should have known better than to hold the ceremony tonight.” One of the cultists dropped before him with a scream as if both his legs had spontaneously broken. “If you had waited for the Alignment, perhaps I would not have had the power to resist your summoning.” The second cultist fell even more painfully on top of the first. “Perhaps what you say could have been true. But you were impatient. And so your doom is sealed.”

With each word Riley spoke, his voice was growing deeper, louder, more resonant, more intense. His frame seemed to radiate with strength that matched the cascading glow from his eyes, as if he had been finally set free from some long bondage.

I watched him reach the fire and, one by one, the remaining cultists toppled before him. With each mind he unhinged, each soul he consumed, I could see the power within him crest like ocean waves building impossibly.

On the other side of the fire, I caught sight of Epistola scrambling back to the books. She began flipping through them frantically. But my attention was pulled from her desperate chanting as Riley flung away one of the robed bodies that had piled up around him and fixed his radiating eyes on the last cultist, who seemed to have shaken free of his hypnosis. He’d escaped the stage and was running up the aisle between the house seats. I could hear his terrified cursing even over the din. Riley merely stared at his retreating back for a moment and then I saw a smile spread across his beautiful face. It was a smile of satisfaction.

The cultist stumbled and fell to his knees in the aisle. I saw him hug his ribs tightly and then he began to pound his forehead against the floor, his shrieks joining the chorus.

I looked back to Riley and it seemed that he grew larger before my eyes without actually changing size at all. It was as if the geometry of the space around us was slipping away, creating the illusion that he somehow filled the whole theatre. He lifted a hand as if he would touch it to his tranquil face, but then just looked at it. The light pouring from his eyes illuminated the flesh of his fingers green. His entire body began to quiver.

I could hear Epistola chanting madly from the podium, but Riley didn’t seem to notice. I wanted to call out to him, to warn him that she was up to something, but before I could form the words, he abruptly gasped and bent double. He wrapped his arms tight around himself as if in pain, and I shrieked. The light that had before only been coming from his eyes now radiated from his entire body. It swirled out of him, concentrated in some places more than others, a great ball of it on his back.