The white light swept across the crater floor, reducing the spiders to ash in its wake. Shrill, horrible cries rose up from the swarming army, like a thousand whistles blowing at once. The tide of hairy bodies turned away swiftly, pouring back up the snake pit’s sloped walls. Jessica pointed the flashlight into the air, and the slithers that crossed its path burst into flame, suddenly red against the dark sky. She shone the light straight up to search for the darkling over their heads, but the creature had disappeared into the distance, howling.

A last few spiders crawled witlessly around the smoking bodies of their fellows, and she burned them one by one with the flashlight.

The white light seemed unreal and uncanny in the blue time, revealing everything in its true colors. The beam drove the blue from the landscape, returned the reds and browns of the desert, and turned the charred bodies of slithers and spiders a dull gray.

Even the moon above them seemed gray now, pale and unthreatening, washed out and emptied of its menace.

As the attackers retreated from the snake pit, the night grew silent. The clicking calls of slithers and the shrieks of the spider army faded, until only the howls of a few darklings could be heard, screams of pain and defeat in the distance.

“Turn that thing off!” Dess complained.

Jessica started when she saw her friends’ eyes flashing angry purple in the light. Dess cowered behind her hands. Jonathan, Melissa, and Rex had all covered their eyes, their faces twisted in pain.

Only Jessica could stand the light.

She pointed the flashlight to the ground, then switched it off.

“Sorry.”

One by one, blinking painfully, they dropped their hands.

“That’s okay,” said Rex.

“Yeah. Don’t worry about it,” Jonathan said.

“Call it even.” Dess laughed, rubbing her eyes. “Not being spider food kind of makes up for the temporary blinding.”

“Speak for yourself,” Melissa said, rubbing her temples. “I had to taste your stupid pain along with mine.”

“You really can do it,” Rex said softly. “You brought technology into the secret hour.”

Jessica’s head spun. Her vision still danced with the colors revealed in the white light, the afterimages of burning spiders and slithers. The flashlight seemed to be tingling in her hand.

“Fire on tap,” Dess said. “You’re a darkling’s worst nightmare!”

Melissa nodded slowly, looking into the sky. “That’s true. They are not happy about this. Not happy at all.”

Jessica looked at her, then down at the flashlight in her hand. “Yeah, but what are they going to do about it?”

Dess laughed. “You said it.”

Jonathan put his hand on her shoulder. “It’s true. You’re the flame-bringer. This means you’re safe now, Jessica.”