Chapter 2 #2
“We should go back. Surely there’s better shelter to be had among the larger rocks.” Aela tried reasoning with Kaitos, but as she was pleading with her captor, the priest wailed.
A mournful howl of wind cut them off. The outer arm of a twister snapped out of the air and swept the priest clean off the path before either Kaitos or Aela could do anything.
The air was thick; there was no sign of where the priest was lifted off to, his cry lost in the dust storm.
Aela met Kaitos’ wide eyes. They both lunged toward the pass.
In a burst of speed that sent blinding pain across her abdomen, Aela drove ahead of Kaitos, the priest’s demise urging her broken body.
The surviving pair staggered up the steep slope as quickly as the incline would allow against the ravaging storm.
At the mouth of the pass, fear welcomed Aela once more upon seeing the desolate village: the only semblance of man-made shelter for many leagues.
Nestled in a once plush oasis was the first home she had on Prente.
Now it was nothing more than scorched earth.
She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the dark patch of ground, so severe against the light earth tones of the surrounding landscape.
Aela squeezed her eyes shut. What remained of the village, with its dilapidated buildings that were more charred remains than structures, heated her memories.
Living walls of flame flickered behind her eyelids as her memories threatened to break free. The village had been engulfed by flames in an instant—consuming nearly every life in the span of a breath.
“Well?” Kaitos bellowed over the wind.
“Well, what?” Aela called back, blinking her eyes against the dust and dirt that impaired her vision.
“Off you go then,” he said with an impatient wave toward the lack of town.
Aela drew in a slow breath through her dust scarf and led him down the trail toward her former home.
While the dust storm was milder on this side of the pass, there was no telling how long that would last. The charred earth crunched beneath their boots as they walked past the outer perimeter of houses that had once stood cheek by jowl.
The skeleton structures creaked precariously in the anguished wind blowing down the pass.
As Aela drew closer to the center of the village with Kaitos close behind her, any semblance of shelter they had hoped to find was gone.
There really is nothing left.
It didn’t matter that she had told Kaitos as much when she referred to the village as a pile of ash.
Whenever she needed to venture to Surya, Aela had avoided passing through her former village.
But to see it again, reduced to nothing, shook the mental walls she built over the years since she had lived there.
“By the Unrested,” Kaitos cursed at the dirt-stained sky.
Her breath caught as if stolen by an invisible hand, clamping around her neck as she shuffled toward where her old home had stood.
The fire had burned hottest here, leaving the earth polished until it shone like black glass.
The epicenter of the fire that destroyed the village, which left no survivors save for herself and her adoptive mother, Renee.
And now there was only her. Aela sweated as heat rose from the polished ground and mingled with that overhead, making it difficult to breathe.
Smoke curled around her feet. Her body felt like a cinder on the precipice of combustion.
Kaitos strode to her. “More witchy tricks?”
Aela was too lost in her mind to comprehend what was happening—what was real and what wasn’t.
Memory swept her up like sand in the howling wind.
What Aela remembered of the village fire whirled in her mind: scorching heat, screams shouted in the distance, Renee’s terror, and something else—a nightmare within a memory.
Trembling walls and blasts of starlight.
Disbelief and agony. It all came in fitful glitches, burning through her subconscious until what was past or present, nightmare or memory, was indiscernible.
It had been a pleasant day, nearly ninety years ago, filled with coming-of-age traditions and older women passing down wisdom to the younger ones.
After Renee and Aela had retired into their home, Aela’s power stepped out of the confines of her dreams. She was shaken from her reverie by Kaitos, who was screaming in her face, but all she heard was the roaring in her ears.
A heat coiled in her body that begged to be unleashed.
A lopsided grin spread across her lips as something otherworldly took hold of her, and the fire from her past once again ravaged her present.
It could not be contained. A barrage of living flame erupted from her memories and licked across the blackened earth at her feet, eagerly seeking consumption.
A cyclone of fire, twin to that from her nightmares and that which desolated the mountain village, roared to life once more, breaking through Aela’s feeble control.
Red and orange flames engulfed Kaitos—the terrible inferno silencing his pain.
Aela knew she should get away, try to douse the flames, do something, but the ethereal waves of the flames held her in their thrall.
The flames finally stuttered out. Not one flake of ash stirred in the air.
The blackened husk on the ground was all that remained of Kaitos.
Aela quickly averted her eyes and retched.
With shaking hands, she wiped her mouth and stumbled away from the sight.
Fueled by a deep-rooted survival instinct alone, Aela’s body sprang into motion.
She had to get away. Even if Kaitos and the other priests didn’t know what she truly was, it would only take one non-catastrophic flare of her power and they would know.
They may be inferior beings to her, but there were ways to harness the power of stars. Death was more amenable to capture.