CHAPTER 3 RAYA
RAYA
When the future comes, it doesn’t come with instructions.
It comes with smells, and tastes, and flickers.
With feelings, and certainties, and betrayals.
Colors. It comes in sparkling glistens of sapphire, a rich, vibrant blue that’s as endless as the sky and as deep as the ocean, as beautiful as the gem for which it was named.
But then a bell vibrates through the vision and the blues fade to reveal a cascade of radiant gold, orange, and red, a bronze glow flickering at their edges.
Come morning, those colors will change everything.
He will change everything.
Through the swirling haze of magic, I glimpse the boy who will ruin my life.
Dark brown hair, coppery brown skin, warm brown eyes—dead with indifference. And though the future shows me nothing of what will draw me to him in such an absolute way, I know instantly, in my heart, that I will love him. That I will be recklessly and irrevocably in love with him.
But that he is pain.
That inside him, there is nothing but pain and grief and despair, so much so that it burns its way through my skin.
This boy is going to break me.
And it won’t matter because all around us, all I see is death.
Our death. The death of our magics. The death of the Gray.
My death.
Which is impossible since an Indigo cannot see their own passing; that’s the most fundamental truth of the future: it cannot predict its own end.
And yet, I see the moment the color in my veins withers.
The moment his does, too, since we meet our deaths together.
We all meet our deaths together, Shade, Hue, rogue, and Gray.
Not with a whisper, but with a poisonous swell, on a scale so unimaginable it rips day from night and light from shadow.
My mind from the vision. Leaving nothing behind but the sour stench of fear and the lingering touch of danger, a question the future poses to me instead.
What in the name of all three Gods was that?