Chapter 69 June
JUNE
Ever since June was five years old, she’d slipped back and forth between two worlds.
One existed when she was awake, and it was where her sister and Mama Anoet lived. The other, one she cleverly named Grassy Land, appeared when she was asleep.
No one except June could visit this place.
Well, that wasn’t true. “Visit” was the wrong word. June had no choice in the matter. She was dragged there every day, yanked from the real world like a puppet on a string and dropped from the blue sky into an endless green field.
Unforgivingly green except for a tall stone pillar in the middle.
Shortly after Kidan left her room, June’s eyes had become heavy.
She hadn’t been able to reach her pot of hartshorn before she fainted.
Now her eyes opened in that world, lying in the middle of the knee-high, sweeping grass.
June’s skin no longer grew irritated at the prickling the plant’s sharp edges produced.
She groaned and sat up.
A couple paces away, upon cleared ground, an open book and a pen were positioned on a flat rock. Along the pillar, a chaos of symbols was carved. Triangles. Squares. Circles. All intertwined and forming new shapes, telling stories, old legends.
Usually, June would sit before the symbols, gripping the pen and ready to write. But today she stood with her fists clenched and marched to the pillar, tilting her head up.
“You promised you’d give me one night!” she shouted.
Her words drifted across the wilderness before something caught it.
“Your lessons must continue. There is still a lot you don’t know.” The mighty voice came down from the heavens.
At least, June used to think he was an angel.
“One night!” June shouted at the man perfectly balanced on the high singular pillar, dressed in thick handmade cotton cloth, a gabi.
The second-most powerful person to ever live. Creator of the Three Binds and June’s personal hell.
The Last Sage.
He had his legs crossed before him, face the picture of a silent storm. “We don’t have much time.”
Time.
There it was again.
June turned away in frustration. Her lovely clothes were gone, replaced with the traditional attire of the Amhara people—her ancestors’ embroidered kemis fell from her shoulders to her ankles, cinched at the waist with a sash.
“Come, Desta,” the Last Sage ordered, voice ancient and mighty.
“That’s not my name,” June snapped.
“You will earn many names yet. But your mother named you Desta so I name you Desta. She only changed it to hide you from the map.”
Desta. One who brings joy.
“Let us not waste any more time. We must discuss Mot Zebeyas today.”
It was the Last Sage’s favorite word: “time.”
From the first day June met him as a child, he’d told her she was running out of it. The destruction of the world was coming, the artifacts must be kept hidden, and June must hurry and kill the person she loved most before her twenty-first birthday.
June did her best to ignore time. Even for their birthdays, June had long decided to celebrate early, steal back whatever she could from time.
Fisting her hands, June plopped down before the stone slab, staring at the book filled with pages of her own handwriting. With shaking fingers and cloudy vision, June lifted the pen and wrote a new entry.