Chapter 6 #2
“For what?”
“Control. Capacity. Affinity. Stability.”
“Affinity is Light.”
“According to the manifestation.”
I glanced down at my side. “According to you.”
“According to wards that have been identifying wielders longer than either of us has been alive.”
“Comforting.”
“They aren’t designed to comfort you.”
That, at least, I believed. “And then?”
“Training.”
“For how long?”
“As long as necessary.”
“Can you answer one question without making me ask another?”
“No.” I glared at the side of his face. Coren kept riding.
Near sunset we stopped beside another ruin, this one little more than two standing columns and a section of wall.
Coren built the fire. I ate because he told me to, then hated myself for noticing I was hungry enough to finish everything.
Grief should have changed ordinary things.
Bread should have tasted different now. Cold should have felt different.
My body should have understood that Maia was dead and stopped asking to be fed and warmed and rested as though any of that still mattered.
I stared west until darkness swallowed the road behind us. “There was a presence out there.”
Coren’s hand stopped over his saddlebag.
“During the attack,” I said. “Beyond the ridge.”
He resumed what he was doing. “Wraiths.”
“No.”
That got his attention.
I swallowed. I hadn’t told anyone except Maia. Saying it now made the memory return with sickening clarity. The cold. The wraith above Irelia. Maia against the well. Then that sensation from somewhere beyond Edenlo. Vast enough that my mind hadn’t known what to make of it.
“I felt it watching me.” Nothing in his face betrayed what he was thinking. “Not watching.” I shook my head. “That’s wrong. It was more like…” Hunger. The word Maia had reacted to. “It noticed me.”
“Before or after you manifested?”
“During.”
“Where?”
“West.” Coren looked toward the darkness behind us. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing you need to concern yourself with tonight.”
My temper snapped. “People died.”
“I know.”
“My mother died.”
“I know.”
“My best friend died. Nara died. Thirty-two people were buried because those things came into Edenlo, and you’re sitting there deciding what I need to concern myself with?”
Coren’s eyes returned to mine. “I’m deciding whether frightening you with possibilities I cannot confirm will resurrect any of them.”
I hated him for being right enough that I couldn’t answer.
He looked west again. “Tell the Sanctum exactly what you felt.”
“Why?”
“Because unlike me, there are people there whose job is to determine what it means.”
I stared at him for another moment before pulling Maia’s cloak around myself and turning away. He didn’t mention it again.
By the third afternoon, the land began to change.
Not dramatically. There were no mountains suddenly splitting apart or silver walls descending from the sky.
The Barren Belt simply grew quieter. Birds disappeared first. Then insects.
Even the wind seemed to lose interest in us.
My mare began tossing her head every few minutes, ears flattening at sounds I couldn’t hear.
Then my rune warmed.
I straightened in the saddle.
Coren kept riding.
The warmth strengthened with every mile. Not painful. Familiar in a way that frightened me more. “Coren.”
“I know.”
“You know what?”
“We’re close.” The road climbed the final ridge, and I saw the Veil.
Every story had gotten it wrong.
It wasn’t a wall. It wasn’t fog. It wasn’t a curtain of light dividing one half of the world from another. Those were the descriptions people used because there wasn’t a word for what stood before me.
The Veil stretched north and south beyond anything I could see, a vast distortion cutting through the land.
The world behind it existed and didn’t. Mountains bent strangely through its surface.
Sky became silver, then colorless, then silver again.
Pale currents moved vertically through it despite the complete absence of wind, twisting around one another in patterns my eyes couldn’t hold.
Looking directly at it made distance impossible to judge.
It might have been twenty feet wide. It might have gone on forever.
I stopped my horse.
Coren rode another several yards before turning. “Lyra.”
“What is that?”
“The Veil.”
“I know what it’s called.”
“Then we’re making progress.”
I didn’t appreciate the answer enough to tell him. My mare shifted beneath me, refusing my first attempt to move her forward. The rune beneath my ribs had begun pulsing now. Once. Twice. Again. Silver-blue light showed faintly through my tunic.
Coren saw it.
“What?”
His gaze remained on my side. “Nothing.”
“Stop saying nothing when it’s obviously something.”
“Can you control it?”
“I don’t even know what it is.”
“Then don’t reach for it.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“Good.”
He turned his horse toward the Veil.
I stared at his back. “We’re riding through that?”
“Yes.”
“People in Edenlo don’t go near it.”
“People in Edenlo don’t do many things.”
My fingers tightened around the reins. Maia had known. All those years she had looked west whenever I asked where I came from. All those years she had carried whatever certainty made her believe I belonged beyond this thing and never told me. Now I was close enough to feel cold coming from it.
Coren crossed first.
The Veil swallowed him.
One instant he was there. The next there was only shifting silver.
My mare backed away.
“It’s fine,” I whispered, though neither of us believed me. I stroked her neck. “Come on.”
She resisted until I pressed my heels against her sides.
Cold went through me so violently my teeth struck together.
Not winter cold. Not wraith-cold. This went deeper, slipping beneath skin and muscle and bone as if my body had become transparent.
Sound vanished. I couldn’t hear the horse beneath me.
Couldn’t hear my own breathing. Silver filled everything.
My rune ignited.
I doubled forward with a gasp I couldn’t hear. Then the silver disappeared.
There was no horse. No Coren. No ground.
For one impossible heartbeat, I hung inside a darkness so vast that the idea of distance stopped meaning anything.
Lines stretched through it.
Thousands.
Millions.
Thin strands of light crossed the dark in every direction, some bright enough to hurt, others barely visible.
They intersected and separated, vanished into distances my mind couldn’t comprehend, each trembling with a pulse that felt horribly close to life.
One passed near enough that I reached toward it without thinking.
Beyond it were more.
And more.
And more.
Not ending at the Veil.
Not ending anywhere.
Far away, one strand flickered.
Then went dark.
The darkness vanished. Sound slammed back into the world and my mare screamed.
I nearly fell from the saddle as she reared, my hands locking desperately around the reins. Someone seized her bridle and dragged her down before she could throw me.
“Lyra.”
Coren. I sucked air into lungs that felt crushed. “Look at me.”
I did. We were on the other side.
The Veil shimmered behind him, innocent as moonlight.
Coren held the mare steady. “What happened?”
“I…” My entire body shook. “I don’t know.”
His eyes narrowed. “You stopped moving.”
“I saw something.”
“What?”
I looked back at the Veil.
Silver shifted across its surface.
Nothing else.
“What did you see?” Coren asked again.
I thought of the endless darkness. The strands. The one that had gone out.
For reasons I couldn’t explain, I didn’t want to tell him. “Nothing.”
Coren studied me long enough that I knew he didn’t believe me. Then he released the bridle. “Keep moving.”
I looked back once.
The Veil rippled.
For the smallest instant, I could have sworn the Veil looked back.
Then Coren rode ahead, and I followed.
The world east of the Veil wasn’t beautiful in the way I had expected magic to make things beautiful.
The trees were still trees. Dirt remained dirt.
Clouds moved across the sky without anyone commanding them.
But beneath all of it was a pressure I hadn’t known was missing until I felt it. The air itself seemed fuller.
The first settlement we passed proved how little I understood.
It was smaller than Edenlo had been before the attack, built around a stone road and a narrow stream.
I expected people to stare at Coren’s emblem.
Instead, no one seemed particularly interested in us.
A woman outside a smithy held two fingers beneath an unlit brazier.
Flame appeared between them and dropped onto the coals.
She continued speaking to the man beside her as though she hadn’t just made fire from nothing.
I nearly rode into Coren’s horse.
A few buildings farther on, a man stood beside a wagon with one wheel sunk deep into mud. He touched his palm to the road. The earth beneath the wheel hardened and rose several inches, pushing the wagon free.
No one screamed.
No one backed away.
No one called either of them dangerous.
A girl carrying baskets noticed me staring and stared back.
I looked away first.
“Are they all wielders?” I asked once we cleared the settlement.
“The children aren’t. Not yet.”
Edenlo had buried thirty-two people and needed someone to blame. They had chosen the only person who could make light appear from her hands. Here, a woman had created fire in the middle of a conversation and nobody had even stopped talking. I touched Irelia’s sun charm through Maia’s cloak.
I hated them a little for how ordinary they made it look.
We continued east.
Coren pointed out nothing unless I asked.
I learned more by watching. An old man repairing a low wall pressed both hands against a cracked stone and drew the broken pieces together until the seam disappeared.
Later, we passed two travelers wearing dark clothing with faint markings visible along their forearms. One shadow stretched several feet farther than it should have despite the afternoon sun.
I watched it until the riders disappeared behind us.
“Shadow?” I asked.