Chapter 34 #3
“There’s been a couple of times when I’ve felt like giving up… when things have felt like too much and I’ve been drowning. That’s when I have the dreams.” I sighed out my breath as I thought about them and how I felt whenever I had one.
“The land calls your name,” Arianell murmured and waved her fingers through the longer grass near the stream. “It responds to you.”
“Because I’m part seelie?”
She slowly shook her head. “Because you need it to.”
I frowned at that. “The dreams do feel comforting. Like… like Lucia is showing me I belong here. I always feel stronger afterwards. Able to keep moving forwards.”
“The goddess guides you,” she whispered dreamily, her gaze growing vacant as she tilted her head back and her eyes lifted to the canopy of the trees. “She shows you the way.”
“The way towards what?” I picked at the grass. “Towards being stronger? Towards not breaking?”
“Towards being,” she murmured.
“Being isn’t a thing,” I countered.
Her head dropped, her eyes landing on me as she pouted. “It is so. We all are being.”
I felt sure I was going to lose her, as I had lost Neve so many times when talking to her, and began to suspect all dragons were slightly crazed. I supposed seeing the future all the time would probably do that to you.
She caught my look and scowled at me as she lifted a hand to point at everything she spoke about. “The tree is being a tree. The water is being water. The air is being air. I am being a dragon. You are being…”
“Being what?” I leaned towards her, eager to know.
She shrugged. “I do not think you have decided what you are being yet.”
I loosed a frustrated noise as something inside me tightened like a spring about to reach its limit and suddenly explode.
But then it made a strange sort of sense.
“Because I’m just a wolf… but not just a wolf.
I’m a seelie… but not just a seelie.” I lowered my gaze to the patch of grass between us as I felt my way through it, making sense of myself.
“I’m torn between the parts of me, and between who I want to be.
So I’m not being a wolf. I’m not being a seelie. I’m just being… me?”
She shook her head. “You are still deciding what you will become, remember? You are being less than you can be, too wrapped up in words—wolf, seelie—to see the truth of your heart.”
Neve’s vision came back to me. The one where she had told me to stay in the light, and when the time came, to drink the water and drift in the dark to embrace all that I was, had been and ever could be.
I was in the light right now. I still didn’t know what the water was—the Hallow Water that Sylas had been giving to the witch?
—or what she had meant by drifting in the dark, or embracing.
Now Arianell thought I was being less than I could be.
“Arianell—” I cut off the question I had wanted to ask as I lifted my head and found her staring at me.
Or rather right through me.
Her glassy eyes were wide, her body perfectly still.
Her voice lacked energy and brightness, becoming monotonous as she spoke.
“The shadows run deep into this side of the land, as the light runs deep into the shadows. Roots that branch and twine, and reach towards every corner of this realm, flowing with life to bring it to the very edges of this reality.” She idly swept her hands out, palms downwards, and moved them around as her eyelids fell to half mast. “Flowing. Reaching. Shadow into light. Light into shadow. All the land connected by roots. Can you feel them?”
She suddenly seized my hands and pressed them to the dewy grass, making me jump.
“Flowing. Reaching. Tying this land and the people together. Shadow into light. Light into shadow.” She pressed my hands harder into the ground.
I nodded as I felt that connection to nature flowing past my fingertips, hoping it would make her ease her grip on me before I came away from this with bruises.
She lifted one hand from mine and wove her fingers through the air.
Forming a dazzling white tree with black roots that were a mirror of it.
I thought of the elkyn in my dreams and how it had been mirrored in a similar way in the lake.
Arianell’s hand tightened against mine and her pale blue eyes darted to me. “You lied to me, little wolf.”
I tensed and eased back, the coldness of her voice raising my hackles. “No. I haven’t lied to you.”
“You said you had not met the goddess.”
I swallowed and tried to take my hand back. “And I haven’t. I don’t even know if she’s real. You all speak of her as if she’s a living, breathing thing.”
She chuckled. “Oh, she is real. She is very real. You have seen her.”
I shook my head. “I haven’t seen her.”
“Some say she walks the land as a beautiful silver-white beast with antlers of deepest obsidian, ringed with the gold of her bond to this land and her creatures.” She released my hand and I sagged back, staring at her as I saw the elkyn from my dreams, and she continued, “Others say she walks as a stunning onyx beast with golden antlers ringed with the black of her bond. You have seen her, have you not? You have seen both sides of her.”
Chills skittered down my arms and thighs.
“I… in my dream. There’s an elkyn. White as snow, but when she walks out onto a lake, her reflection is black as night.”
“The goddess guides you,” she whispered and patted my hand, and then turned to her white tree with its black roots. “Light into shadow. Shadow into light. One cannot exist without the other.”
“Did you push that dream into my head?” I growled, sure that she had.
She arched a brow at me, angling her head towards me. “Dragons do not push things into people’s heads. We see visions and we speak them. We do not manipulate the threads of fate, nor do we influence the minds of others.”
Neve had scolded me once about attempting to manipulate the threads of fate. I hadn’t known then that dragon shifters found it offensive or that it went against their creed.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend.” I reached for her arm and she caught my wrist, twisting my hand towards her as her gaze fell on my ring.
“The land speaks of wrath, dagger-sharp,” she murmured, staring at it.
“I think he might be coming now.” I knew who she was speaking about, but I needed to hear her confirm it. “The colour of my ring changed to sapphire.”
Arianell gracefully lifted her right hand towards the tree we sat under. “The flowers bloom, do they not?”
I looked up at them and noticed they were the same blooms the dragon had woven when we had last spoken.
Seven petals.
The flowers Neve had seen in her vision.
They were opening.
Kaeleron was coming.