Chapter 11
He screamed until his voice left him.
Until his arms pinwheeled and his hands scraped at the air. There was nothing to stop him, nothing to help slow his descent. He screamed until his lungs were ragged, because he knew this place. He’d been here before, the very first time he died.
But instead of the towering, golden gates...
He saw a storm in the distance.
The battlefield, in the sky above the Expanse.
It was filled with a cloud of dark shadows and flashing, colorful lights. Sacred magic clashed against darksoul dread. He saw raphons and war eagles and most of all, he saw a dark-haired Sacred king.
His father, fighting against the Acolyte as he sent his double-pillared magic in spirals of wind and ice. But the king looked older, and far more ancient, as if magic had taken its toll on his body. As if decades had passed since Kinlear last saw him.
“Father!” he cried, reaching out as he fell through the sky. “Help me!”
But his father fought on.
The thunder boomed, and the image shifted until suddenly the soldiers were gone. Until the sky above the Expanse was empty once more.
As he fell, his mind was filled with truths.
Visions.
The future...just as Magus had said.
He saw his return home to the Citadel. He watched his own long embrace with Arawn, a happy reunion. His brother’s muscles dwarfed him. His magic blazed as bright as any Firemage king.
He saw Soraya slamming her fist against his chest. She was utterly breathless, as if she’d run to get to him. “Leave us like that again, and I swear to the gods, I’ll kill you myself.”
The sky changed.
Kinlear was older in the next vision.
His eyes widened – it couldn’t be true – for he saw himself in an Eagleminders’ cloak, gold fabric lining the white hood.
He wasn’t just close to the great birds.
..he was right there with them, Minding them as he saw fit.
It was a future he’d never expected. A future he wanted to run to, with open arms and his heart beating out of his chest.
Things shifted again, until he saw a beautiful Sacred woman.
Soraya, with her dark hair and her eyes like the night. But she was older, a furiously talented Rider...
And... she was his.
He’d never thought it possible, but he saw the moment of their Matching, when the gods chose him for Soraya, instead of Arawn.
He saw the pain in his twin brother’s eyes.
He saw a speaking stone shoved into a drawer, forgotten, and a chasm that widened between twins, as their love for the same woman stepped in.
He fell further into the future, tears filling his vision as he saw his own life flash before his eyes. They were glimpses, beautiful little snippets of what he was to someday call his own.
An answer to all his prayers.
A life that was worth living, after all the pain, all the suffering...
He’d never wanted anything more than this.
The good mixed with the bad. The beauty in the chaos. In the future, he saw that his illness still plagued him.
But Soraya was there.
He saw– his eyes widened, and warmth flooded him even as he fell through the darkness – the two of them, together in a dark room, behind a rune-locked door, with their lips pressed close, and no clothing between them as they did something that was beautiful...and utterly forbidden.
“I love you,” she whispered to him. “I will do anything to save you.”
The vision shifted.
He saw himself coughing and bleeding and being put in runic stasis, time and again.
He saw the rage in Soraya’s eyes as she stood over his sleeping body and told the gods, “Take me. Please...heal him. And take me instead.”
He saw her hands holding a black book. He fell past a vision of empty pages that flickered too fast.
He saw--
Something shot past him, shifting the vision again.
A war eagle, brilliant and bright.
Gods, it was soaring fast. Recklessly, it flew into the wind and the snow and the oncoming night. He could feel the gale from its feathers, hear the rumble of its screech echo deep in his chest.
And though it hadn’t happened yet, Kinlear knew that eagle, for in the visions, he had trained it himself.
He remembered every moment of his hands on its golden feathers and beak.
He remembered when they’d shifted from soft, delicate fluff to a sleek, shimmering gold that resembled the sunset on a warm summer night.
He remembered every moment of teaching he’d spent with it, his own murmured words, the patience he’d used as he’d taught it to bend and bow and accept a saddle as if it were only the sigh of the wind.
The eagle was glorious now, older and stronger, and on its back was Arawn—flying faster than he’d thought a Sacred able to hang on against the wind, as he chased after a tiny, winged shadow in the distance.
“COME BACK!” Arawn screamed.
There was desperation all over his face. His voice was ragged as he wept, the wind pushing his tears into the sky. “COME BACK!”
Kinlear wanted to help him.
It was urgent, he sensed.
He looked far away, following the other Rider, and wondered who it was. Why it was so important that Arawn had chased after it alone, before the battle was about to begin.
But his brother faded before he could make sense of it.
The vision fell dark again, until the wind pushed against Kinlear, and his path of falling changed.
Suddenly, he was headed towards the cliffs of Augaurde, and there in the snow, in the shadow of the Aviary...
He saw his mother.
His father stood beside her, sick and dying, as all powerful Sacred would do.
Beside the king stood the Lordachian Masters and Arawn, and... Kinlear gasped.
A raphon.
It was the Acolyte’s favored beast, winged and powerful and so, so dangerous, and it was standing alive and free inside the Citadel’s wards.
It made no move to harm anyone, and no blade was pointed at it, as if the beast belonged there.
As if it was chosen.
As if it was...
“Six,” Kinlear whispered.
He swore the beast heard him, as it tilted its head upwards, its scarred beak and dark eyes facing the wind.
...And there he was, standing just beyond its two dark wings. In the vision, Kinlear was even taller than he was now, which told him he had room to grow. He smiled as he noted that he was devilishly handsome, even with his vial and his cane, and...
The image shifted.
Until he was no longer falling. Now, he saw through his own future eyes.
Now, he was in that body, on that cliff, staring down at his own mother.
The skin around her eyes was far more wrinkled at the corners, as she glared at him, no love left to give, and said, “I will never know why the gods willed you for this. But if it must be so...do not fail. Do not squander your only chance at greatness.”
He turned his back on his mother and went to stand beside the raphon. He could smell its wet fur and feathers, a perfect mix of two beasts within. And standing there, her hand upon its neck, was Soraya, who looked unafraid as she--
No, Kinlear realized.
It wasn’t Soraya.
His betrothed was nowhere to be seen on the snowy cliff.
It was, instead, a peculiar woman. A stranger.
She was small, and wearing all black, like him. Her wild hair was dark and braided back into a Sacred warrior’s braid. Her face...he gasped.
It was marked deeply, by three black scars that could only have come from the claws of a monster.
She was a survivor.
She was small but she was strong.
Kinlear needed, desperately, to know her name.
But he never got the chance to ask it, for the image faded, pulling him away again until he was falling once more. Alone, in the dark sky again, where he wondered if he would ever land...or if this was to be his new fate.
Not to fight a monster, but to fall.
To tumble into the beyond.
To never find a safe landing place.
No sooner had he thought it, that he heard a shrill cry come from behind him.
Beat.
Beat.
Beat.
The sound of something winged.
He gasped as he landed, hard, upon a creature of blackest night.
One that was dark and feathered and carried on two dark wings. Six. The raphon from the cliffside, with a jagged white scar on its beak.
And he wasn’t alone.
There she was again...the mysterious woman with a trio of glittering black scars on her face.
Kinlear was in his future body. He had his arms around her, and she had a blade of her own, black with a hilt of raven wings, upon her delicate hip.
He rested his chin on her shoulder, holding her close. And so, so perfectly...she fit him.
He heard a voice – his own – saying, “Because of you...I’ll slay the Acolyte.” The raphon banked, and he held tight to the woman in his arms.
She was his. He was hers.
He knew it, every bit as much as he knew Soraya was gone. She’d left him, as Magus did. And Kinlear, older and wiser...had found someone else to fill the void in his heart.
“I’ll bring glory to Lordach,” he said. “We’ll be remembered forever, the prince and the raphon rider.”
She leaned against him, warm and right.
His.
She was his.
Together, they soared into the darkness, right through the veil of storms and living shadows...right into the domain of the Acolyte.