Dawn of Ash (34 page)

“Who is there?” I asked, my focus more on the magic as it enveloped me, paying attention to the way it moved, searching for clues as to who was talking or even what was happening.

“I’m here,” the little girl said with a laugh, the sound similar to Christmas bells.

“And where is here?” I was tense, the fear and uncertainty coming back, despite the fact I could still feel Joclyn’s magic calming me.

The lack of control and understanding I was experiencing made the emotions worse. I had been in situations of life or death before. I had been moments away from death. But even in those traumatizing moments, I still had control over my life. I could choose to live, choose to die, choose to fight, choose to give in.

Here, I had none of those options.

I could only focus on trying to figure out what had happened, on where I was.

My gut was telling me that, by following the water into Joclyn’s power, this was a sight, but I had seen her sights before, and they were not like this. I had connected with her mind before, and it was not like this.

“You know where you are,” the voice came again with a laugh, the childlike game winding up my spine in agitation. “You were just thinking about it.”

I cringed at the intonation, and Joclyn’s magic flared within me at what was said, her own fear increasing alongside mine.

“You can hear…?” It wasn’t possible. Only Joclyn could tap into my mind, and then it was because of the way our souls had fused. This voice, however, was not hers. “Joclyn?” I spun on the spot, searching from end to end of the void to find who was speaking and understand what was going on.

“Joclyn!” I knew she had to be there because I could feel her magic. I could feel it swell as I said her name, the warmth of it seeping into my bones, wrapping around me in snakes of a comforting weight.

I gasped at the intimate touch, my eyes closing as my heart rate pulsed in excitement, each throb promising me she was right there, so close I could feel her skin against mine.

Opening my eyes, I expected the lights that were so common for us to appear among the void of white, but there was nothing. Just a powerful sensation that she was right there, standing beside me, my magic pulling me toward her.

“I am not Joclyn, but I know her very well.”

“How do you know her?” I asked, the simple phrase not making any sense. “Where is she? May I see her?” I kept my voice low as I continued to look into the nothing, my heart rate accelerating even as I tried to keep myself calm, to speak to this mysterious thing as I would a child. Regardless, something deep inside whispered to me that whatever I was facing was not the child they were masquerading as.

“No. She is not here anymore. I took her somewhere else.”

“Where?” With a start of fear, the word erupted in long, hollow sounds stretching away from me.

I cringed, tensing as that strange magic increased inside me, the waves of it moving through me, blending with Joclyn’s as the sound of the laugh deepened, heightened.

“She loved you very much, you know.” All signs of the game she had been playing were lost in the heaviness of her voice, the sound of the echoed laugh running over it.

“Loved?” Fear and anger erupted with the single word as the laugh continued to resonate, as if someone had bumped a gramophone, the sound coming again and again.

I could feel my temper rise to dangerous levels, my anger increasing until Joclyn’s magic swelled again. The warmth of it wrapped around me so tightly it was all I could focus on, and the weight of my anger seeped away with it, the sound of the laugh fading to shadows until it was just me and the heavy familiarity of Joclyn’s magic pulling at my mind and soul.

The weight of her pressed against my chest, lying over my arms. Just as she was in the world I had come from, before I had been pulled into this place.

I stopped. The knot in my stomach spun abruptly at the revelation that was whipping me around. I had dismissed it so easily before, but there was nothing else …

“You are thinking about it again,” the child chastised. My mind focused back on that room, on the girl I held. “About where you are, about what this is. Have you figured it out yet?”

“This is a sight.”

She laughed at my revelation, the joyful sound making it clear I was right.

“Yes.” The laugh dripped off her voice. “This is where sights live, where they are created. This is a sight before it is seen, when it is full of possibilities and futures. This is the very base of Drak magic. This is where everything begins and ends.”

“But there is nothing here,” I gasped, knowing how ridiculous it sounded. I knew magic better than any. But this … This did not feel like magic. I felt no power. I felt no strength. It was only the empty space of my mind.

“Yes. Would you like to see your beginning or ending?”

I didn’t even have a chance to respond before her laugh rebounded, the sound loud and haunting. The white void I was trapped in shifted and spun as I watched, my mind aching with the change, with the force and power of the magic I was being subjected to.

With wide eyes, I watched the white meld into vibrant colors and shapes. My heart tensed at what I was about to see before the image landed on a room I knew all too well.

My parents’ bedroom.

“Your beginning first, I think,” the child’s voice whispered, her voice mellow as the mysterious magic within me spread. The light, joyful nature of it seeped away my fear as I looked in on a room I had been in thousands of times before.

It was my own space within Imdalind now, but it hadn’t looked like this for centuries. The wide bed took up much of the massive room, ancient furnishings cluttering the space. It was in this room that I had held Ovailia for the first time—her, a tiny infant; me, an adult.

Shocked, I looked as my mother lay in that same bed. Her blonde hair was wound in a long braid, the golden ribbon woven through the intricate weave. The length flowed over the bed, wrapped with my father’s, the délka vedení královsk intertwined. Just as they did with Joclyn and me, I realized with a start.

My father sat nestled against my mother, his dark hair longer, his face softer, his eyes smiling. I didn’t think I had ever seen so much joy in his eyes. I didn’t think I had ever seen my mother so happy as I did right then, as they sat in that bed, holding an infant in their arms.

I watched the scene before me, watched the father of my childhood memories. I had almost forgotten that smile, forgotten the way his eyes lit up when he smiled. I had forgotten how he used to love, that he used to know how.

“Give him the stone, darling,” my mother whispered.

Father smiled at her before he kissed her, the longing apparent as she laughed, before pulling away with the same joy in his eyes.

Smiling, he placed a small, white stone against the hand of the child. The tiny, white bead turned a violent shade of blue the second it made contact with my skin.

My parents looked at the transition in awe. Mother gasped before she laughed while Father’s smile expanded in awe.

The tiny birthstones usually took time to change, took time to connect with the infantile magic, time to pull it to that one spot. This time, it was instantaneous.

“You began there,” the voice came again as the image of my parents faded back to the void.

My head spun with the strength of Joclyn’s magic, the force of it like a confirmation.

“So this is what she is? It’s amazing.
She’s
amazing.” Awe dripped from me at the remarkable reality I was facing, the void seeming to be more than the empty nothing I had taken it to be. “How am I seeing this?”

“You hold the water in your body, more than any other who does not bear my blood. You have been burned for the one who speaks to your soul, for the one who came to change it all. You have survived its pain and bonded yourself to the one the mud has chosen to guide my kind. You are powerful, Ilyan Krul. I will allow you to see.” The childlike quality of the voice had deepened. The laugh that lived behind the words shifted to a darkness that wound through me, becoming an aged wisdom it hadn’t portrayed before.

I spun on the spot, searching again for the owner. Still, there was nothing.

“So I am Drak now?” I questioned, the words feeling heavy and impossible. My mind still moved over what I was surrounded by in a wave, a desperation to understand gripping me.

“I have shown you your beginning, but it is no more than part of the story, you know. So much of what you have seen has been broken by one who should not be among us. You wish to see sight? You wish to know? I will show you what is true. I will show you what you should have seen. It all ends
before
it begins.”

The deep rumble of her voice intensified as the magic did, melding with Joclyn’s so perfectly they seemed to be one. My magic pulled at me as if they were.

“Joclyn?” I asked the space, my voice hollow as her magic responded, as the voice continued to meld into one I knew all too well. One I loved.

“This is sight.”

I turned at Joclyn’s voice, expecting to see her behind me, panicked of what I would face and unprepared for what came, instead.

For what I was plunged into.

Without the slightest warning, I was plunged back into the maelstrom of light and sound. My head spun violently as my magic swelled, Joclyn’s right alongside it. With a twist of my stomach, the flashing prison filled with images that moved so fast I could barely focus on them. I knew that, with each image, with each flash of past and future, what I saw would be permanently imbedded into me, stored within my memory.

With a jolt of fear, Sain screamed in my mind, a young Dramin cowering below him, as the man held the boy against the wall of an alley.

A flash filtered the image to that of Edmund standing over Ovailia as he cut down her back, the flesh ripping open as she screamed and begged for mercy.

Wyn disrupted the scene, the girl barely a child as she sat, playing a game of marbles, simply to erupt in anger, her rage engulfing her in flames. Massive balls of fire soared around her before submerging her body, her skin burning away from the bone and creating something darker than I had ever assumed her to hide within her.

Her screams lingered in my ears as the image shifted to the French countryside where Joclyn walked by the house I had built for her so long ago. Her hair blew in the wind as she looked out at the waves, tears streaming down her cheeks.

My heart rate intensified at the image of my beautiful mate, alone, before it faded to me as an adult, teaching my brother Markus the traditional marriage braid. His smile was wide at his fortune, at being safe from our father, at what the following night would hold for him. That precious image shifted to his murder days later, that heartbreaking moment a flash of color in my mind. The haunting echo of Edmund’s laugh rippled through me before I was plunged into the belly of Imdalind, into the tunnels I had blocked many years before, right to the deep wells of the earth.

Sain, my grandmother, the first of the Trpaslíks, and the first of the Vilỳ gasped for air at the side of the wide well of Imdalind. The Vilỳ wriggled as it coughed and sputtered for air, its bright blue wings unfurling from the sticky muck like a hatchling. With a scream, its sphinx-like face twisted as it awakened from whatever life it knew before.

One after another, they came, images of past, present, and future wound together so tightly my head swelled with the information, with the emotion carried on the back of them. I could barely process, could barely think. The throbbing ache amplified before the calm voice of the child came again, the voice high and haunting as it cut into the images bombarding me.

“This is sight as Joclyn knows it.”

Joclyn’s magic wound around my soul as the visions continued to slow. Like slides in a movie, they came and left, slowing until I was staring at myself from a time long before.

“This is sight,” Joclyn’s voice filled me, her magic pressing against me as I searched for her, unable to see anything except what the vision was showing me. “This is true.”

Everything moved in overdrive, my soul frozen in fear as I watched myself walk down the main hall in the middle of Imdalind, right to the first pool of sight that the Draks had used for centuries.

It was the exact scene from hundreds of years before: Sain surrounded by Draks, their bodies still as they stood, enveloped in capes. He walked around the pool to greet me, everything silent as he spoke at a speed I could not comprehend, leaving the ‘me’ of the past alone by the pool’s edge as I stripped off my shirt. Water rose up before me like a pillar, eating away my flesh as it connected with my magic.

“This is the end,” the child whispered as the sight I had seen a hundred times before swelled within me, my heart ready to see Joclyn, to see what I had committed to memory so long before. To see that moment when I knew she would be mine.

But it wasn’t.

It wasn’t anything like I had been shown before. The words were the same, but the images, the meaning…

Everything was different.

In one moment, everything I had been working toward, everything I had expected, was shattered.