7. Raea
Raea
I wake up with a yawn, stretching in the sheets and reaching for Ry, only to remember he left early this morning. I can’t wait for the days we don’t have to sneak around.
Today, classes start up again, and I’m not sure if I’m ready. How am I supposed to sit in class and pretend to care when I know a section of the Veil is gone?
My mind spirals as I shower and dress, replaying everything we’ve learned from the Book of Beginnings, the Codex, the scrolls.
Somewhere, there have to be answers.
When I head out of my room, I’m surprised Ryker isn’t waiting. In fact, the only person outside of my room is Aksel.
“He had practice, and Ezra is reviewing…” He pauses. “You’ll have another guard by tomorrow.”
It's like a blow to the chest, but I inhale and nod before heading downstairs. I go through my morning routine at breakfast, smiling and pretending that everything is okay. When Britta asks, “So how long have you two been sneaking around?” I nearly choke on my food.
Tate pounds on my back while I reach for my water.
“I mean, you both had all of us fooled. We thought you hated each other.”
When I can breathe again, I respond, “We did. It’s our Bond. It’s really intense and with our childhood—” I shrug.
It’s Aada who leans in from down the table and asks, “Okay, but how have you not lost your Bond? We aren’t blind. That man is the definition of sex…”
“Good morning, love,” Ryker interrupts, kneeling next to me.
Aada turns red as she sinks into her seat, and the rest of the table looks away, though they aren’t doing a good job at hiding their eavesdropping.
He’s still sweaty from practice with a backward hat shoved over messy hair. It should be illegal for someone to look that good with so little effort.
Because I can, I cup the back of his neck, running my fingers through the short strands peeking out, and press a soft kiss to his lips. “Morning,” I whisper against his mouth. I can feel everyone’s eyes on us. “Good practice?”
He nods before whispering into my ear, “I’d love to know what she thinks of the poor men who actually crawl into bed with her. If I am the definition, and I’ve surely never visited her bed—”
I can’t help but snort as I smack his shoulder, not daring to look her way. “You’re unbearable.”
Ryker stands looking around the table. “Try harder, guys. You aren’t fooling anyone with that obvious staring.” He winks and smirks at me. “Ciara, Tate.” With a nod, he disappears to the head table.
Someone whistles low.
“Lucky bitch,” Britta mutters.
I sit in Intel, wanting to scream. Professor Manaea either isn’t very good at his job or his Intel is wrong.
“The strange weather patterns seem to have calmed down. Reports around the system show that for once, everything is stable as it should be.” He shakes his head, muttering. “Just a fluke.”
I roll my neck and tap my tablet pen on the desk. I know what fear can do, but this is irresponsible. Why aren’t they seeing what we are? Can’t they tell that the Veil is broken? We were supposed to have more time. Instead of looking at our planets, we should be looking at the barrier.
“Hey, you okay?” Tate asks, leaning toward me.
I shake my head. “No. I—”
“Lord Kinnuenen,” Professor Manaea interrupts. “Would you mind reading the intelligence that came in this morning from Khyreth?” He hums, his silver, bushy brows lifting in question.
Tate mutters something as he swipes through his tablet, pulling up a single report from the Kadora Protos.
“Report delivered by Commander Ren Cassidy. To be delivered to all seven kingdoms.” Tate mutters the facts out loud as he scrolls.
When he finds it, he clears his throat. “As of 0400 this morning, on a routine mission from Terria to Hraun, we noticed a momentary flash of light originating from sector 12 along Ateria’s borders near Khyreth, moon seven.
“We were unsure if there was an explosion or what it could have been, so after several attempts at scanning the grids, we went to scout. Upon arriving at Khyreth, we were able to capture recorded footage of the strange black cloud moving under the typical atmospheric clouds that cover Khyreth. We have alerted King Alexi and Ateria’s command, and have not heard back. ”
I’m pretty sure I stop breathing. Ateria has to be where the Veil is missing. Could the shadow forces have already moved in? I need to talk to Ryker.
Now.
I stand, grabbing my bag and shoving my tablet inside. “I’m sorry. I need to go.”
Professor Manaea is about to protest, but I don’t give him time. I rush out the door and across the yard back to Taeolyn, where Ryker is currently in Ethnography class.
I knock once on the open doorframe, and all heads swivel toward me. “Sorry Professor for the interruption—”
Ryker is out of his seat in an instant, abandoning his things and walking out of class with me.
Once we are in the hall, we find an empty study room.
I relay everything we learned in Intel. He scrubs a hand down his face before pulling his Prism out of his back pocket.
When I glance out of the room, Ezra is back, catching up with Rune.
“I need reports on Khyreth now. I want them by end of day. Hold off on sending anyone in, but I need surface images.” Ryker wraps an arm around me, tugging me closer.
“Yes. No open channels. Hand-delivered as soon as possible.” With that, he tucks his Prism back in his pocket and pulls me in for a real hug.
“Do you think we’re too late?”
His hand runs down my spine. “No. It could be nothing, love. For now, there’s nothing we can do. Once I have the reports, we should know more.”
“I can’t go back to class, Ry. I can’t pretend everything is okay. Something is wrong. Aolyn hasn’t called. Ateria’s Protos aren’t responding. What if they’re here?”
He sighs. “I don’t know. Dammit.” He drops his forehead to mine. “It’s going to be okay. We will come up with a plan later. For now, let’s go see Professor Ainslyn. If they are here, you need to practice so you can protect yourself. It's clear that it's you they want.”
Professor Ainslyn canceled combat classes for today, and now we are standing somewhere in the Delomere Mountains, just below the freeze line.
I’m shivering, but the Professor wants me to practice summoning my starlight.
He’s about halfway up the mountain in a transport, watching safely from a distance.
I was able to control it last time—kind of.
It doesn’t matter. This is better than sitting in class.
I close my eyes and find that well of power within me.
I know this is the source of my magic, but I still haven’t figured out what to do with it.
I yank open the lid that I constructed to keep it at bay and find the molten heat bubbling deep inside.
Great.
“Any day now,” Professor Ainslyn says into my earpiece.
“I’m trying. I can see it, but how do I get it to do anything?”
Of course he doesn’t respond. Okay. That’s fine. I can do this.
The last time I manifested, I was angry and scared. More than I ever had been in my life. It was a response, not something I had to make happen.
Blowing out a long breath, I conjure the memories. The helpless feeling of watching Kuron bleed to death in front of me, the anger I felt toward the men thinking they could get away with it.
I feel the chill in the air disappear, and when I look back to my well of magic, it's bubbling over the surface.
Okay. I can work with that.
The heat flows within me. I feel it wrap around me, every vein, every bone, covered, but somehow unaffected. It’s truly amazing. I shake out my hands and think about pushing it out of me. I pop a single eye open to see if anything is happening. I groan. Of course, it’s not that easy.
“This isn’t working,” I say into the earpiece. “Any tips?”
A gust of wind blows in my direction, snow particles twinkling like mini stars against the bright blue sky.
The elders on the Ancestor Isles told me that I had to stop fighting my magic. To not be scared of it.
I can officially say, I’m not scared—at least I don’t think I am. I can see the value in honing my magic, especially when I think about the fact that the enemy forces we’ve been warned about our whole lives might very well be here already.
And who is the one that’s supposed to be the savior of the system?
Me.
The earpiece crackles before I hear again. “Why don’t you just start by channeling?”
“Ryker has to channel it out of me.”
“Are you sure? What if you were to expel it out and away?”
I tilt my head, considering.
This time, when I close my eyes, I can see the lines of energy flowing around me, deep into the mountain, creating a web effect around the planet. Seeing it is almost second nature now that I know what it is.
The vibrant hues of gold flow like they’re on a river, toward a destination. I reach for it, feeling the soft hum and vibration in my hands as my body absorbs the energy. Unlike the magic within me, this does burn. It’s hot and uncomfortable, but not completely unbearable yet.
I pull in as much as I can handle, suddenly regretting it. What if I can’t expel it?
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
The power builds within me as I fall to my knees. I need to figure this out. Ryker is still on campus. I thrust my hands into the freezing soil and imagine letting it flow back out of me, reversing the pull.
Drawing the power in is easy. Expelling it, not so much.
My heart races as I shove. When the pain is unbearable, I hear myself scream, but all I can see is gold—fiery gold that licks up my spine, flooding my the veins in my arms. With a desperate cry, my panic subsides, and my magic responds.
It doesn’t snuff out the flames; it absorbs them. The gold disappears into molten white.
I scream again, and at once, it explodes out of me. The release is so powerful, the ground beneath me shakes, and I hear the crack of trees and the squawk of a flock of birds taking flight.
Like before, this power, it just…is. I don’t know where or how, but all I have to do is tell it to come back, and it does. It’s like shutting the curtain and watching the light slowly disappear. There’s no beginning or end to it.
My vision clears in another breath, and when I see the devastation around me, my stomach swirls with nausea, taking the rest of my energy with it.
“Thanks,” I say softly, my voice hoarse from screaming earlier. Fresh from the shower, I curl against Ryker in bed with a cup of warm tea and honey.
When Professor Ainslyn picked me up after the release, he was quiet the whole way back to school. As if an explosion had gone off, trees for a hundred yards in every direction were bent or felled away from the blast. The snow melted, and several trees and bushes were charred.
I know it could have been worse, but seeing it again did not make me feel any better about the magic within me.
My magic is a weapon. And I still don’t know if I’m capable of controlling it.
“Hey,” Ryker says, shaking me from my thoughts. “It’s going to be okay.”
I nod.
He pulls out his Prism. The glass device illuminates with the blue lines before he projects it above. “I just got the reports before you landed.”
“Have you read them?” I ask, gripping a hand to my throat.
Something like anger, then sorrow, passes through his eyes. “No. I was waiting for you.” He turns his gaze back to the device and selects the folder titled Classified. It contains a folder of images, a video, and a document with a detailed report.
He selects the document first.
Upon further inspection, the atmosphere did not contain any traces of light or fuel. As is typical, the moon itself remained shrouded in a dense layer of cloud cover. Using penetrating radar scans, the moon shows no changes or signs of life.
After a full scan, we deployed a probe to capture live video for further inspection. As you can see, scans remain unchanged from archives.
We checked the Veil around Ateria, sampling energy outputs, in every sector. The outputs also remain unchanged and hold steady at per 3.2×1020 second.
“That’s impossible,” I whisper, doing the math in my head. “You said it was gone. This shows that it’s even stronger than before.”
Ryker closes his eyes for a moment before shaking his head. “I don’t know. It’s…fine. The veil is fine. Damn.”
I shake my head in disbelief. According to these reports, in a single heartbeat, the veil releases more energy than a billion lightning bolts combined. The last report I trusted showed that it was 2.4×1017 per second. That was less than a month ago, and it was on the verge of total collapse.
Ryker closes the report and flips through the photo and video files.
There’s absolutely nothing out there—just an eerie blue landscape with glassy plains and bioluminescent plants clinging to life beneath the clouds.
In one video, a cryovolcano erupts, shooting water and ammonia into the atmosphere, where it freezes like nature's ice sculpture.
I shiver watching it.
Ryker sighs and shuts his device down, tossing it onto the nightstand.
“It doesn’t make sense, but this is good news, love.
This means we have time.” He lies down on the pillow beside me, wrapping warm, strong arms around me.
“We know what’s coming,” he says, pulling me to his chest and tucking me into him. “We don’t have to stop training.”
I yawn, feeling both exhausted and safe.
Despite Ezra’s grumbling when Ryker grabbed my pajamas from my room earlier, I know they’re all happier that we're both in one location. Just because we’ve been in the same bed the past two nights doesn’t change the risk we’re taking. Tomorrow I’ll sleep alone.
With another yawn, I bury my face in his bare chest, breathing in my favorite scent in the universe. I press a soft kiss to his skin before drifting off.
Tomorrow will be different.