I
remember only the dreams.
I lost myself in a gushing stream of vivid images, drowning in fragments of people that I didn’t know and yet knew intimately. A blonde-haired woman wearing a beautiful purple cloak taking a bite of an apple. A pair of weathered hands wrapping around a door handle. The distinct rush of cold as I stepped into a pool of cold water in a place I’d never seen before, pressing my toes on intricate ceramic tile. My throat contracting around voices, voices, voices.
When I snapped my eyes open into black darkness, I inhaled so sharply that I sucked in beads of the sweat rolling down my face.
My head throbbed with such vicious intensity that I could practically hear it on the inside of my skull. Saliva pooled at the back of my throat. In a distant thought that was almost drowned out by my pulsating headache, I recognized that I really, really did not want to vomit in bed.
I slid back the covers and relished the momentarily distracting coolness of tile beneath my bare feet, then I staggered to the washroom abutting the bedroom and leaned over the sink, clutching the edges.
I flicked my head to swish a strand of dangling back hair out of my face. It fell immediately back where it was, directly in front of my vision.
Bare footsteps approached and a soft, white light slowly imbued the room, illuminating my face in the mirror.
My face. Max’s face.
My face.
Only very distantly, very far away, did it occur to me that this was not what I expected to see.
“Max.” A whisper, hoarse with sleep. I looked over my shoulder to see Nura lingering in the doorway, blinking at me blearily, hair falling in wild, loose curls around her shoulders. She looked so… young.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
I opened my mouth to respond, but instead, I woke up.
 |
“You’re alright.”
A hand rubbed my back in smooth, wide circles. It was dark.
Everything hurt.
Max.
I didn’t realize I said his name aloud until I heard the voice answer, “Don’t talk.”
My eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, and I found myself looking up at dangling silver braids. Nura. I could only lift my head just long enough to recognize her. Then a spasm shot through my muscles, and I rolled onto my side, curling up.
I just saw him. I could have sworn I did. But that wasn’t right. He shouldn’t be here. Was it a dream?
“Where — is he?”
I barely got the words out.
“I don’t know, Tisaanah,” Nura murmured. “No one knows.”
My stomach clenched in nausea, but my cheeks tightened. Good. “I hope he’s far away…”
“Shh.” Nura’s touch smoothed away sweat with the cool skin of her palm. “Sleep. Your body needs to heal.”
A blanket of darkness began to fall over my senses, and my chest leapt in panic.
No. No no no. I didn’t want to go back into that river of dreams. Couldn’t. It would kill me.
A wave of pain converged with my waning consciousness, momentarily drowning me. When I swung back into tenuous awareness, I was clutching Nura’s hand so fiercely that our fingers trembled together.
I had lied to Zeryth. I was afraid. I was so afraid that I couldn’t breathe. My wide eyes shot to Nura, and I knew she understood my silent confession.
“You’re alright,” she whispered.
I gripped her hand as if it were the only thing keeping me tethered to the world — until that, too, melted into darkness.
“You’re alright, Tisaanah.” Her voice echoed, fading with me. “I’m not going anywhere.”
|
A DREAM. A MEMORY.
“I’m not going anywhere, Max.”
I blinked. It took me a moment to realize what she had said from beneath the pounding of my headache.
The girl held out her hands and grinned from between sheets of straight black hair. A bright green snake coiled in her hands, looking at me with unnerving yellow eyes.
“You can look at me with that blank stare all you want. I’m not going anywhere. And neither is he.” She looked down at her companion and made an exaggerated pout. “It’s not his fault that you’re afraid of him. Put out your hands.”
We were in a small, dusty room, light streaming through one large window, walls lined with shelves that held gold wire cages and little glass boxes.
Kira lifted her eyebrows at me, the sarcastic point abandoned in favor of a curling smirk that was so uncannily my own that it still sometimes shocked me. Six months away and I had almost forgotten the degree to which we shared the same damn face.
“I don’t like creatures that don’t have the common decency to have limbs like the rest of us,” I said.
“You don’t like the centipedes either and they have lots
of limbs.”
“Something between snakes and centipedes is acceptable.” I eyed the snake, who stared back at me with equal trepidation. “Put that thing away.”
Kira let out a groan, but slid the snake back into his cage. It obeyed so quickly that it almost seemed like it understood what she wanted it to do. She did have an uncanny affinity with the things.
“He’s one of my favorite new ones. I’ve gotten so many more since you’ve been gone.”
One look around the shed had confirmed that. It had been half as full when I left, but she’d only been getting started. Father agreed to give her the shed out in the woods in exchange for her promise to never — under any circumstances, even the small ones, especially the small ones — bring any kind of living creature into the house ever again.
It had been the first thing she wanted to do when I returned home for leave. She hardly let me say hello to
anyone else before she dragged me into the woods to show me the new additions to her collection.
She slid the green snake’s cage back onto the shelf, alongside at least a half dozen other serpents of various shapes, sizes, and colors. Then snatched a glass box from the shelf below it. “Look at this!”
I looked down at a giant, shiny black beetle, its shell reflecting purple and green against the light through the window.
“Nice.”
“Do you know what it eats?” I shook my head.
“Rotting flesh.”
“That’s charming.”
“Don’t worry, only the kind that’s already dead.” “Oh, good, that was almost morbid.”
I ran my eyes along the wall. She liked snakes more than anything, so there were many of those. But the lower shelf, it seemed, was the “bug shelf.” Beetles, ants, little squirming maggots.
I paused at one glass box.
“This one,” I said, pointing, “looks too normal and pretty to be a part of your collection.”
She followed my finger to the quivering butterfly perched on a mossy stick, light reflecting off of shimmering burgundy wings. “Oh. I thought so too at first. But!” Her dark eyes lit up. “Did you know that when butterflies make a cocoon, their bodies totally dissolve? They just become sticky caterpillar goo with a couple of organs mixed in. They don’t even have a brain.”
I wrinkled my nose. “That’s disgusting. How did you find that out?”
I was almost afraid of the answer – so I let out a small breath of relief when she replied, “I read about it.”
Then she added, “But I didn’t think that sounded accurate, so I cut a cocoon in half at Aunt Lysara’s house.
And it was right! Just goo.”
“Mother and Aunt Lysara must’ve been thrilled.” “Mother said I lacked social graces.”
“She says that to me too.”
Funny, because our mother also lacked “social graces”, no matter how much she tried to pretend otherwise.
“Oh! I almost forgot!” Kira put down the beetle, distracted, and grinned at me as she snapped her fingers. Then frowned when nothing happened.
Another snap.
And a third — which released a small puff of blue sparks. She repeated herself, creating a slightly larger cluster of light, like a little fragment of lightning.
“Good, right? I’ve been practicing.”
I smiled, despite myself. The only other Wielder in our family. It seemed fitting. Fitting and slightly terrifying. “Have you started thinking about what you’ll do for training?”
A wrinkle crossed the bridge of her nose, as if I was asking her a stupid question. Another expression that I recognized as one that belonged to me first. “I’ll join the military, like you and Nura.”
My smile faded.
Six months ago, I wouldn’t have hesitated to encourage her to follow my path. Hell, that’s exactly what I did when she first started showing signs of being a Wielder — I had no reason not to. I liked the military. Liked the structure, like the competition, liked the way that it drove me to push myself further and further and further until I clawed my way all the way up the ladder. Certainly much higher than if I were secluded in some poor Solarie’s shack somewhere, wasting my time with pointless exercises.
But these last few months — the war, the battles —
“Ugh, it smells terrible in here.” The door swung open and Atraclius poked his head into the shed, wire-frame
glasses shifting as he scrunched up his nose. “I’ve been sent to retrieve you. Father’s getting impatient.”
He grinned. He had one of those smiles that split his whole face in two. Almost obnoxiously infectious. “Besides, I’m starving. And I’ve got a lot of stories to tell you, Max”
{I’ve got a lot of stories to tell you, Tisaanah…}
I opened my mouth to answer, but couldn’t speak.
{So many stories.}
The world froze. Then dissolved into blackness.
{Do you like them? I’ll have yours soon, too.}
