Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
T he water was blood.
I was drowning in it. I drew in a gasp, and it pooled in my lungs, burned in my chest. The impact of my body hitting the liquid hurt, the force of stone against flesh. The threads blurred past me.
I was falling.
Falling past them.
Falling into this sea of blood.
Move, Sylina. Move move move.
I thrust my hands out just in time.
Pain ripped through my palms—but I’d caught a thread, barely, against what felt like an avalanche of pressure pushing me down. It took all my strength to pull myself up as the thread ate into my palms.
My head broke through the blood. I drew in a choked gasp of air and wiped it from my face—or tried to, while my palms bled, sliced open from the razor-sharp thread.
Center yourself.
But it was difficult to do that here, with the world swirling in chaos. An overwhelming sensation of… nothing , smallness, helplessness weighed down on my shoulders. I managed to get my feet positioned on the thread, but my entire body reviled the idea of taking a single step.
Enough. My inner voice sounded so much like the Sightmother’s, a single harsh command.
I walked.
Every step was labored, difficult, as if fighting against harsh wind. The mist grew thicker. The blood around my feet rose with the slow inevitability of an incoming tide. The dread in my heart rose, too, beat by beat, step by step.
Show me something, Weaver, I whispered.
Her words were distant, intangible, like a collection of sounds of the wind.
Perhaps you do not wish to see.
I do, I insisted.
The Weaver did not believe me. I did not believe myself.
But the mist thinned, revealing silhouettes of strange, broken shapes; first as distant flat grey, and then?—
Bodies.
All of them were bodies. Bodies twisted and broken beyond recognition. Bodies impaled on stakes or smashed between ruined buildings. Bodies burnt like the rabbit I had sacrificed for my Threadwalk, eyes running, skin peeled.
I wavered on the thread, nearly falling. The fear beat in my veins like a drum.
Something nudged my foot. My eyes—I had eyes here, I had never known anything else—fell to my feet. They were small, bare, dirty. My sister lay there, blue eyes staring at me wide and unseeing through tendrils of blond hair, clutching at her stomach, blood bubbling between her fingers.
It’s all going to be alright, she whispered.
I snapped my head up.
Not my sister. Just some person another version of me knew a long time ago.
I need the future, I told the Weaver—told myself. Not the past.
The threads intersect, the voice whispered, a teasing caress at the crest of my ear. This is the nature of life .
No. I didn’t accept that. I was a daughter of only the Weaver. I was a Sister of only the Arachessen. I had a task to complete.
I kept walking, chin up.
Show me more.
The silhouettes around me, limp like abandoned puppets, sprang back to life, floundering as if traveling backwards in time. Waves of vampire warriors surrounded me, moving in skips and lurches, fragments of many different moments in time.
The battle was vicious. The vampires were more skilled, obvious even in these shattered flashes—but the Vasaians were numerous, throwing themselves at their aggressors like lemmings over a cliff.
The blood around my ankles rose and rose. More red than black.
My heart pounded rapidly. I kept walking, step by steady step, but at this point, I wasn’t choosing to, nor could I have stopped myself.
Death was everywhere.
The mist rolled in and out. A violent crack of silent lightning, and it all went dark.
When the light returned, it revealed the same broken bodies as before. Broken bodies. Broken homes. Broken souls.
Please, a woman begged, crawling over the wreckage, dead-eyed. Her palms were raw and bloody as she stretched them toward me, but she didn’t react when the wounds were touched. She was lost in a Pythoraseed haze. Please , she begged.
No , I said. No. I can’t. I don’t ? —
Someone was speaking at the same time as me, our voices layering over each other. The little girl was small and dirty, with messy dark waves.
Someone grabbed her wrist and pulled her forward.
Familiarity clenched in my chest, a sudden reprieve from the fear that choked me.
I knew that figure. The two of them walked ahead of me. The boy was only a handful of years older than the girl, perhaps thirteen to her nine. He was skinny and lanky with a head of messy copper-chestnut hair.
Don’t look at them, he told the girl.
Alright, I thought, and didn’t.
I just walked. I was still very afraid. But I felt a little less so now, following him.
Distantly, someone was calling me, but I couldn’t make out the words.
Just look straight ahead, the boy said to the little girl. Alright? Just look straight ahead and don’t look anywhere else unless I tell you.
Alright , I thought. I can do that.
I kept walking. I kept looking straight ahead.
Suddenly, the girl stopped short. She turned around and stared right at me. Her eyes were bright blue. Striking, actually, surrounded by her dark hair and all the blood and dirt on her face.
The boy stopped too, glancing at the girl, confused.
Then he turned around.
I let out a horrible choking sound—a scream that didn’t have enough air.
Suddenly the boy was not a boy. Suddenly he was an adult, still lanky, still skinny, still with the same blue eyes and messy hair.
His throat was open, his abdomen torn apart, revealing glimpses of pulsing gore.
His eyes widened.
Vivi, he choked. His voice was warped, drowning with blood. He reached out. Stumbled toward me.
I couldn’t move. Fear paralyzed me. I couldn’t look away. Couldn’t look anywhere but straight ahead, just like he had told me.
Vivi! he begged again, coming closer.
I tried to move, but threads tangled around my ankles—so many threads, past and present and future, intertwined and tightening and?—
He grabbed me?—