Free The Warlock (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel #5) by Michael Scott

thick with wreckage
.
    “And where is the redoubtable Aoife of the Shadows?” Agnes continued, slipping from Japanese back into English.
    Memories of a crystal tower, lashed by a boiling sea. Long ragged cracks raced across the surface of the tower, only to instantly heal again. Lightning wrapped around the tower in huge spirals. And a woman, running, running, running up an endless flight of stairs
.
    Sophie felt the world shift and spin about her. She reached out to touch the wall and was aware that her silver aura was beginning to sparkle on her flesh.
    Jasmine …
    Memories of a woman kneeling before a golden statue, clutching a small metal-bound book, while behind her the world shattered into glass and flame
.
    Niten stepped up to Agnes and bowed deeply. “Gone into a Shadowrealm with the Archon Coatlicue, mistress,” he said.
    “I pity the Archon,” Aunt Agnes said quietly.
    And Sophie suddenly remembered why the jasmine was so familiar. It was Aunt Agnes’s favorite perfume. And the scent of Tsagaglalal, She Who Watches.
    And then the world spun around her and turned black.

n the wild northeast shores of Danu Talis, an impossibly tall, incredibly slender twisting glass spire rose directly out of the sea off the city of Murias. The city was ancient, but the spire predated it by millennia. When the Great Elders had created the Isle of Danu Talis by raising the seabed in an extraordinary act of Elemental creation, the glass spire and the remnants of an Earthlord city had also been wrenched up from the seafloor. Much of the ancient city was fused to enormous globes of melted glass shot through with threads of solid gold, evidence of the terrible battles the Earthlords had fought with the Archons and Great Elders in the Time Before Time.
    But the crystal spire was pristine and gleaming, untouched or unaffected by the incredible heat that had melted the surrounding buildings. It occupied a rocky spur of land that became an island at every high tide. The tower of unbrokenwhite quartzlike crystal changed color with the weather and tides, from chill gray to icy blue, to alabaster white, to an arctic green. When the high tides lashed against the smooth walls, the salt water hissed and boiled, so that the tower was perpetually wreathed in steam even though the stones themselves were cool. At night, the spire glowed with a pale phosphorescence the color of sour milk, throbbing to a slow regular rhythm like a great heart, sending pulsing streaks of color—reds and purples—up the length of the needle. During the winter months, when bitter hailstorms sleeted in from the Great Ice at the Top of the World and sheathed the city of Murias in thick snow and solid ice, the tower remained untouched.
    The Elder and Great Elder inhabitants of Murias regarded the tower with a mixture of awe and terror. No strangers to wonders, they were masters of Elemental Magic, and there was little that was beyond their powers. They knew that they inhabited an old world, an ancient world, and that remnants of its primeval past still lurked in the shadows. For generations, the Great Elders and the Elders who had come after them had fought the Archons and defeated them, and had even swept away the last of the hideous Earthlords. The Elders’ powers—a mixture of science fueled by auric energy—rendered them almost invulnerable. But even they feared the tower’s solitary occupant. Legend had named the island the Tor Ri. In the ancient language of Danu Talis it meant “The King’s Tower”—but no king lived there.
    The crystal spire was the home of Abraham the Mage.

    The tall redheaded warrior in shimmering crimson armor staggered through the narrow doorway and leaned forward, hands on thighs, breathing heavily. “Abraham, those stairs will be the death of me,” he panted. “They seem to go on forever and always leave me breathless. One of these days I’m going to count them.”
    “Two hundred and forty-eight,” the tall, angular man