Chapter Thirteen #2
We watch the comet ride an invisible orbit in his hands.
“This used to be your favorite illusion,” he muses in a soft whisper.
“You had just learned of the Ardoris comet festival in the Anatolé Kingdom. You all but rioted when my father explained you weren’t allowed to attend.
” A nostalgic smile tugs at his lips. “Do you remember?”
A weak curve tugs at the corner of my mouth. But where Gray’s smile was sewn from warm remembrance, mine is strung from the threads of frayed, wistful strings. “I remember. It was how I found that spot on the roof. I wanted to be alone—wanted to gaze at the colored stars.”
Gray nods. “But…” he trails off, allowing me to finish the story.
My chest tightens. “The sky was cloudy, and the stars weren’t visible that night. I descended the roof in a rage and fell off the ladder. I was fine, but…”
“You sobbed hysterically.”
I shoot him a look. “I was twelve. Cut me some slack.” But my features soften as I continue gazing at the silverlight comet in his palms. “I was so upset for so many reasons. My mother was gone. The king was forcing me to shadow his current night attendants. Falling…it just felt like a catalyst—an excuse to finally feel all the pain I’d been harboring on the inside.
” I huff a hollow laugh, shaking my head.
“I remember crying until I felt empty. And then you were there. Your mother sent you.” I flick my gaze up from Gray’s glittering illusion and meet his eyes.
His impossibly kind eyes that burn with the gold of sunlit meadows.
“It felt like it had been so long since I’d last seen you cry.
There for a while, you were just…hollow.
” His eyes round in a sad sort of way. “I remember being conflicted, happy to see you finally feel something. But it killed me to see you cry like that. So I created this illusion to soothe you.” The comet flares brightly a final time before rippling and di sappearing.
“Something about it made everything click into place for me. I became familiar with my magic’s touch.
Knew exactly what it felt like—suddenly understood how to call on it the way a wielder should.
” Gray drops his hands to his side. “And now I am going to help you do that very thing.”
A frenzy of nerves ricochets beneath my skin. “Tell me what I need to do.”
“I want you to close your eyes and recede deep inside yourself. As if your consciousness is a flowing stream, and you are pouring it into your veins. I want you to inspect the contents residing there, and then bring them back with you as you open your eyes.”
I arch a brow. “That…makes zero sense.”
He chuckles, amused. “It will.”
I suck in a breath and loudly blow out all the consumed air from my lungs. I shake out my hands, hoping that will help with the nerves.
Gray, picking up on my nervousness—though, it’s not like that’s particularly hard to do right now—takes both my hands in his. “Close your eyes,” he instructs in a whisper.
I follow his instructions.
“Now,” he continues with a feather-light tone, “feel yourself drifting away from my voice. Drifting away and into yourself. You are searching for something. Something foreign yet utterly familiar. Find it.”
I focus inward, allowing Gray’s words and the sounds of the rushing river to fade softly.
A whipping breeze pushes hair from my shoulders, and I inhale the scent of the white pines mingling with cedar and sweet lush grass—breathe in the smell of crackling embers and ash as they swirl up toward the heavens.
Slowly, I begin to ebb and flow in the expanse of myself.
There is a blotch of darkness—a whisper into the void—and then like lights being turned on, stars blink into existence.
One small flicker, then ten, then a hundred.
One after another, until the depths of infinity are filled with glowing, luminous balls of light.
They twinkle and glimmer, some silver and gold, others violet and sage.
And then they burn . They burn violently.
They burn with a cold flame—a flame that is destruction and rebirth.
The ceiling of colored stars illuminates a network of glowing threads wound with every color, twirling over themselves like the braided rivers found in Tuarana’s River Lace.
Most are too far for me to reach, flowing in the distance into something that appears like a loom.
Yet there is one that hums directly in front of me, golden and bright.
At the base of my feet, there is a pulsing thread lacing itself around my body, flowers of every color blooming throughout as if it were a vine.
I pluck the thread, causing a sudden burst of glittering light to funnel inside my skin, flooding my veins.
As it pours its thrumming energy into me, I see flashes of rippling power waving into the colorless depths in hues of fiery blues and glowing violets and burning orange.
It radiates like heat from a flame, and then it shifts, and I am soaring through infinity as ice and burning stone—dust trailing in my wake.
And I feel…
Endless. Boundless. Like the energy of light that illuminates the vastness of night. I feel like I could conjure anything—an envelope of glittering power.
“Lyra.” Gray’s voice leaks back into my mind. “Lyra,” he says again.
Like a wave, I recede from this place of star and thread. I kiss the inky depths goodbye and ride the wind back until I feel the heat wrapping around my cold bones.
“Open your eyes and look down,” Gray murmurs.
Slowly…oh, so slowly, I blink my eyes open, waiting for the blurriness to fade. I glance down and see the faint hint of silver lining my veins. Like the first time, it mingles with streaks of gold. Yet what is most notable is the way I can feel it humming underneath my skin.
Gray grins at me with unabashed pride. He folds his arms across his chest—a bead of sweat hovering above his brow—and he dips his chin. “And now I give you permission to sleep.”