Chapter 46
Chapter Forty-Six
W ind swept my hair, stealing it and tossing it haphazardly around my face. The cliff was always like this—wild, unpredictable, brutal. It tasted of salt and fury.
There was no safety. No footing. Just wind—furious and unrelenting—howling like the ghosts of the Gods.
I stood at the precipice, my cloak flaring around my legs, fingers trembling at my sides. Air roared around me, sharp and wild. It tasted like lightning… and something more.
Power.
“Don’t try to force it,” my mother said, her voice nearly carried off by the wind. “Air answers to no one. You don’t command it. You become it.”
I closed my eyes.
Behind me, Maalikai stood in silence—tense, unreadable. And Sebastian… still not returned from Ophelia. His absence hollowed something in me. They were my opposite winds in this storm. One warm and burning, the other cold and steady.
But right now, everything else blurred into background noise, lost beneath the gale screaming in my ears.
Movement caught my eye—Evie, stepping up beside my mother. Her presence was a jolt, like a piece of me long lost and suddenly found. A shadow of mine. Opposite, yet the same in impossible ways.
I inhaled. Air filled my lungs like ice. I reached—not with my hands, but with my pulse. And something shifted.
A hush.
The wind paused, as if the world itself was holding its breath with me. My eyes snapped open.
Clouds curled at my fingertips. The air responded—hesitant at first, then with growing urgency. My hair lifted off my shoulders. Dust spiraled around my feet in delicate, dancing patterns.
I moved—slow, deliberate. Like I was conducting something ancient. And the wind obeyed. It wrapped around my arms, my throat, my legs… lifting me. Like a lover’s hands.
Without thinking, I took a step forward, like the wind called to me.
I hovered.
For a breathless second, I was weightless. Untouchable.
Come to me.
And I obeyed. In a weird trance I took another step forward. And another. Only slightly conscious that I was precariously close to the cliffs edge.
“Emylia?” I recognised my mother’s voice but at the moment it was lost, drowned out by the voice that still called me.
Come to me.
One step forward, but now it wasn’t just forward, it was upwards, the wind capturing my weight and holding it. And still higher I climbed.
“Emylia, stop.” This time it was Maalikai, his voice commanding, but not strong enough to make me falter.
Power crackled through me, ebbed around me is whorls. Claiming me. Promising power that would command all others.
Another step, I was close enough to the precipice now that if I took one more step my fall would no longer be guarded by the ground, but hollowed by the cliff drop, into the raging water that smashed against the cliff face. Not even I would be able to survive that fall.
But I didn’t stop. I took another step.
The wind howled around me, feral and wild, threading through my hair like a lover’s touch, tugging me forward with invisible fingers.
I didn’t feel my feet move.
Didn’t feel the rocks shift beneath my soles.
The world had narrowed to a single point—the edge of the cliff, where the sky bled into the sea and the wind whispered my name like a promise. Like the call of a siren.
It wasn’t magik.
It was something older.
Something deeper.
Something that wanted to claimme.
My pulse slowed. My thoughts quieted. Even the roar of the waves fell away, until all I could hear was the wind... and the hum of power curling in my blood.
One more step.
One more breath?—
“Emylia.”
Evie’s voice pierced the trance—but not enough to claim me.
Not completely.
My foot hovered, trembling mid-air, suspended between surrender and something like choice.
“Emmie.”
Gods. That name.
It sliced through me, debilitating–an echo of something torn from me long ago, now roaring back to life as if it had ruptured something buried. Something raw. Familiar. Devastating.
It cracked everything wide open.
The name she’d used since we were children—soft and fierce, spoken like a secret only we shared.
It didn’t just carry memory. Or love.
It commanded it.
It didn’t just reach me.
It grippedme.
Gripped my soul.
Gripped the wild, spiraling thing inside me I hadn’t yet learned to control.
“Stop,” she said.
And I did. Not just me.
The wind. Like even ithad heard her.
Obeyedher.
Then the gust snapped.
The clearing shattered with it.
Wind screamed as it tore free from my grasp, spiraling into chaos. I staggered. My balance faltered. The cliff edge crumbled beneath me—rocks falling, my foot sliding with them.
I heard Evie scream.
But somehow, I steadied myself–teetering on the edge, a heartbeat from certain death.
“Wow,” I whispered. “That was too close.”
A collective sigh swept through my entourage.
“Fuck Princess–never do that again.” Maalikai took a step forward, his hand reaching for me.
His fingertips brushed mine–barely–when a sudden gust slammed into my chest. Not from behind, but head-on. Like the wind itself wanted me gone.
It knocked the breath from my lungs–and the balance from my feet.
Then the world tilted.
My foot slipped–gravel tearing from beneath my boots–and suddenly, I was falling.
Air rushed at my face, the sky spinning–the world tilting out from under me as I plummeted.
Then, for one breathless second, I hovered.
I clawed at the ground, fingers dragging through dirt, desperate to catch hold of something— anything . Magik shimmered through the air. My body held—suspended—my mother’s power curled around me like a cradle of light.
Then—solid hands. Warm. Real.
Maalik.
Grounding. Wordless.
His hand clamped over mine, steadying me.
“Godsdamn it, Princess,” he muttered. “Commanding power isn’t enough for you—you had to add flying to your repertoire?”
My smile was instant. “I was inspired by the legends. I wanted to test myself. To see if I could take on a Cindralyx, if it ever came to that.”
Legends claimed the Cindralyx were the most eloquent beasts in the air. They commanded both fire and flight, wings of molten gold and the fury of storms.
They were myths. But so was magik.
And now that I had tasted flight—tasted freedom?—
I wanted more.