forty-five
Mira interspersed her practice with intermittent prayers at the altar, hoping that, somehow, her mother would be moved to bless her with the ability to use a staff while performing sorcery.
“Damnit!” She didn’t know what she was doing wrong.
Was it thrown off balance? Or was it how little she was used to focusing her talent through an object?
Did it matter? Because, no matter what Mira did, her telekinesis missed the mark by about two feet every time she swung the staff and attempted to rearrange the items she perched atop the altar.
Like now, when she knocked two fresh citrus fruits, a brass plate, and unlit candles onto the floor.
Telekinesis at such a small scale was easy.
Mira had been doing it since she could remember.
Like teleporting. Or healing a shallow cut.
One of the markers of a young, talented child was the ability to move and arrange toy blocks in the nursery.
Something Mira was told she had excelled at before she could recall.
“As befitting her parentage!” her nannies had praised her, although she would have given anything to hear that from her own mother’s mouth.
Adding a focus, however, complicated things.
While things like staves and wands were fads that occasionally transcended the ages, they were very rarely necessary to express sorceric ability.
But if Mira were to adopt a staff as her “weapon” to deter trouble, then she had to figure out how to use it.
Especially in front of humans. They were the ones who needed impressing.
Ramaron had brought her the one he best thought matched her stature and style.
It’s so… my mother. She couldn’t help but notice the elegant wooden sphere that enclosed a small zatbah stone.
Carved down the staff were the same runes present on the Sanctuary’s shroud, so whoever made this—let alone owned it—had been privy to that knowledge.
I wonder what it means. Rahara spoke the ancient Harmony that precluded Julah.
Perhaps she knew how to read the runes that once represented spoken Harmony.
Well, Rahara wasn’t here. Mira had teleported into the town Temple to practice, erecting several wards to keep people out while she practiced, and she was determined to become adequate by the time Sulim and Sonall returned with the planet’s Relics.
She moved the staff in front of her, focusing on the oranges on the floor. One by one they lifted into the air, but getting them back on the altar was foolhardy. Mira had to use her hand to finish the job, if only to assure herself that she hadn’t completely broken her sorceric talent.
“…How the mighty fall.”
The staff would have clattered to the floor if it weren’t for Mira telekinetically snapping it back up into her hand.
Yet she was so startled, her wards violated, that she couldn’t help but gasp and aim the staff right at the intruder, as if that would have done a damn thing to protect her against her own father.
“You…”
Sweat coated the staff as Mira’s throat went dry. She lowered the object, attempting to relax—after all, Nerilis Dunsman was her father, and if she felt comfortable around anyone…
Well, maybe the Mira of that other reality could force herself to be comfortable around him, but the one of this reality knew what he was capable of.
“How did you get in here?” She asked that without thinking.
Because she knew how her father bypassed all of her wards and directly teleported into the Shield Town Temple, despite never having been there before.
I hope. The man was the most powerful sorcerer in the universe, possibly going back generations.
And I’m his daughter. Despite him not spending much time raising her, let alone being there for her in her darkest moments, nobody knew the scent and structure of a julah’s sorcery better than their kin. Maybe their soulmates…
Nerilis approached, his shoulders lax and his hands down at his side.
His long blond hair hung in a loose ponytail behind him, face slightly weathered from being in exile for decades and living in whatever conditions his sorcery managed.
Mira had rarely seen this man since he first abdicated the golden diadem of the High Priest and spent much of his time in Marlow Estate, where Mira had to go to see him.
I was an acolyte. I went from being a child of nepotism to a stooge.
Then? A pariah. Yet in that smattering of time when Nerilis kept close to his companion, Ramaron, Mira found a man on the mend.
Being High Priest had nearly destroyed him, according to Ramaron.
Why do I find these things through him, and not you, Ba?
Nerilis stopped a few feet away. His trousers and fitted long-sleeved shirt did not seem to bother him in this climate. I bet he’s figured out how to enchant his clothing to match whatever climate he’s in. Her father could do anything. As a child, Mira thought that with awe. Today?
Fear.
“Mira…”
She softened her muscles, allowing the staff to slightly slip from her grip. That was the tenderest voice she had heard from her father’s mouth since the night he explained to her how wonderful the Academy had been for him—and how wonderful it might be for her.
“…You look ridiculous with that thing.”
Her fingers tightened around the staff, the tip tapping into the floor. She used what passive sorcery she could focus on to keep it upright as she crossed her arms like the petulant child she still was. Five hundred years in the mortal world, and he still makes me act like this.
“Uncle Ram gave it to me.”
“Yes. I recognize it from his family’s collection. We used to play around with them when we were on holiday from the Academy. They are useless and cumbersome. No Dunsman has ever been caught dead with a staff.”
“Not even High Priest Dunsman?”
She dared to call him by his previous title. Yet the disgraced man of Yahzen did not react. He merely lifted his hand, snatching Mira’s staff away from her and snapping it into his grip. She instantly felt her passive sorcery dissipate back into the invisible ether of the Void.
“Ceremonial staves don’t count,” he told her, testing out how the staff moved through the air.
How dare he… Mira could hear her mother from the other reality right now.
“Even when he’s goofing around like that… isn’t he so handsome? So beautiful? I’ve never seen another man like him, my heart.”
But Mira couldn’t perceive her father through a smitten wife’s eyes.
She barely understood what her mother had seen in this man, besides power and confidence.
Whereas Joiya and Ramaron had jokingly called him a narcissist, though, his daughter knew he was something much worse—godly.
An uglier man with such talent was easier to defy; a beautiful man of smaller talent was easier to ignore.
Yet Nerilis Dunsman was molded from the sun’s brightest rays and the Void’s darkest matter.
His long, golden hair and healthy moon-touched skin represented both of the sky’s most celestial bodies that guided every man, woman, and entity that breathed life in the universe.
When she was a child, Mira used to stare at herself in the mirror before looking back at her father.
She would spend hours poring over photos of them standing together, wondering how this man could be half of her DNA.
Once, before she went off to the Academy, where she would be treated like a metaphysical specimen, she asked her father if he really was her sire.
He looked at me like that was a stupid question to ask, but he said he understood where it came from.
Nerilis told her that the only way he wasn’t her father was if there was no father at all.
As the years went by, she recognized his snarl, his brows, and his high cheekbones in her own face.
Their mannerisms were too alike to ignore.
Her lack of patience for insubordination and backtalk was so innately Dunsman that there was no way she merely picked up from watching her cousins’ behavior.
My grandmother Yariah once joked that I was more like my grandmother Josih Dunsman than my father.
Now that Mira saw when she looked in the mirror. She had Great Dame Dunsman’s nostrils.
“What are you doing here?” Mira finally asked.
Her father inhaled so deeply that his chest floated upward. It took Mira a moment to realize that the staff also rose with his breath. “I had to see it for myself,” he said upon exhale.
“What?”
“You. The last hope of our House. Yet I’m not surprised to see that you and I will be our own downfalls. Me, the megalomaniac hellbent on metaphysical destruction and, soon to be, genocide. You,
the Void-kissed daughter of my beloved wife who Ascended to godhood and has gone on to forsake everything we julah hold dear.”
Was he smirking? “The first julah chief on Cerilyn. I would be impressed at your gumption, but I know what you’re doing.”
Mira’s resolve was somewhere between an unenchanted wooden staff and the metal voya-yantrak atop the High Temple’s tallest dome.
“I’m doing exactly what Mother told me to do.”
“I do not doubt that your mother has visited you. She has been speaking to me as well. It seems that you and I are on a path to destruction, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.”
“Do you say that as my father, or as my adversary?”
“Adversary?” Those thin blond brows ever-so-slightly went up on Nerilis’s forehead.
“We are not foes, Mira. Not only would that go against the very nature of our kind, but we are both tasked by her to do what needs to be done. In our own ways. I’ve donned the mantle of destruction. You follow a different path.”
“You talk in riddles, Ba.”
“When you’ve been as deep into the metaphysical truths of our lives as I have been for so long, all you know are riddles. For example, I know that you have come from another reality. Sent here by the High Priestess, weren’t you?”
That resolve was now as weak as a blade of meadow grass. “How do you know that?”
“I felt it when it happened. When you Crossed.”
Mira was quiet.
“That was the night your mother visited me. Only when I say your mother, I mean the one from that world. Of course, you must consider that all of the High Priestesses are the same. After the Ascension, they are one entity. Because the Void is one entity that births every reality we can Cross into.
Even so…”