Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Aela slipped her crystal bands off and tucked them beneath her pillow, clinging to consciousness in the Taureon palace.
Nestled in the silken sheets of her massive bed, her body sagged in relief from the exhausting schedule she kept over the last several days to stay sane.
Hovering just beyond the veil of sleep, she waited for a sign that The Darkness was near.
The heaviness of her limbs and eyelids succumbed to sleep before she could think any more about the bone-chilling stillness within her dreamscape.
Aela sighed as she released control, letting her subconscious drift in nothingness.
It was a rare occurrence that her dreams held the comforting darkness of rest and not the curse.
That Darkness had Aela working long days in Tabitha’s shop or seeking out training sessions with Arche or Zosma.
Her attempts to befriend Tala went unanswered as the Adjacent avoided her.
All of it was to ensure she had a peaceful sleep where she didn’t dream.
Idly she wondered if it were possible not to dream.
Perhaps the instances she didn’t remember dreaming were when The Darkness finally caught her.
Aela fell into a memory where she and Jaelin, her former lover on Prente, were a tangle of limbs and breath on her pallet of blankets in her hewn home in The Spine.
Jaelin’s mud-brown eyes were soft around the edges as he dipped his fingers into the pink kernels of salt and slowly brought them to her lips. Aela gently took his wrist and shook her head.
“You take it. You need it more than I do,” she said, lifting her head off the pallet to kiss him.
He made a sound of protest when he pulled away to lick the salt from his fingers. “I’ll get you to take some before I’m through with you, mark my words.”
Jaelin had given her his saltbox after that, a simple gift but a grand gesture. Salt was essential for crossing the desert, and though she insisted they keep their relationship casual, he always found ways to look after her.
Even in the replay of a memory—Aela’s mind was active—the familiar itch of being watched settled between her shoulder blades.
Aela fled the respite of her memory with Jaelin and hovered over the night skies of Avarice, still in her dreamscape.
Her intention tunneled down into her magic, awakening the tug in her gut.
Shift.
Aela observed Tarek without reservation.
Strangely, she had made her peace with Tala.
But Tarek… he had stripped her of dignity and agency.
She had no qualms about invading his privacy if she could find something useful.
It was a lecherous affair, and the scene burned into her eyes.
She grimaced. Mun and Teja were there, alongside a version of herself.
If only she could find a way to influence someone’s dream to give her what she needed.
This was not what she wanted to see. Knowing she was invisible to him, Aela ignored the sounds coming from his bedchamber, going elsewhere within Tarek’s dream.
While she was unlikely to find anything lying about that screamed here’s what happened to your constellation, Aela was restless to find something, anything beneficial.
Before she made any progress, blackness shattered Aela’s dream, and she tumbled into a sea of night.
She should have known better than to believe she could find peace or control within her dreams anymore.
Aela righted herself in the black void. A cool wind swept over her, lifting her hair off her neck. She willed herself away.
Shift.
Appearing in the pillowy clouds over her home planet, Aela raced through the air. A clicking sounded from somewhere beneath the churning waves.
“Not this again,” Aela grumbled.
Prepared to stake her claim and protect her home world this time, a scaled suit of iridescent midnight-blue armor crawled over her skin, and a whip of lightning unfurled from her fist. She summoned clouds on a thread of air to cover her as she stalked the sky above the ocean’s surface.
A hissing drifted up as steam seared the water beneath her.
Aela shot back into the sky in time as a tidal wave revealed a thing of myths that flew into the air.
Tyran.
Sheets of rain poured off the great beast—soaking Aela—as he undulated higher into the clouds while his colossal body kept coming out of the water.
Her lightning sputtered out, and she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Majestic didn’t come close enough to describing him.
A teal, scaled sinuous body with a crest of lighter hued fur ran down his spine.
A pair of antlers sprouted from his massive head surrounded by a mane of hair clamped with tarnished golden bells.
Glaring red and yellow eyes stared down at her from where the epoc of her constellation’s Goddess engulfed in the sky.
Four legs ending in razor-sharp claws supported his frame.
He thrashed his feathery tail in agitation.
The force of the roar that came from Tyran nearly dried Aela’s armor as his putrid, hot breath blasted over her.
Somehow, she held her position. As his roar faded, Tyran clicked at her. Aela shook her head.
If only I weren’t dreaming.
A sense of wonder drove away the fear that tried to grip her as she dared to drift closer, hovering in front of him at eye level.
“Hello,” Aela breathed, bowing her head.
Tarnished bells chimed as Tyran’s head shifted to the side. His mouth parted slightly, and the clicking sounded again.
“I don’t understand—how are you here?”
She was dreaming, but how had her imagination conjured this? Aela had seen his likeness etched into the walls of Linteum as a youngling and had read countless fables of him, yet he put all the myths and renderings to shame.
Tyran’s gaze commanded her own down to the ocean below them, revealing the dark trench. Aela’s eyes darted between the mythical water dragon and the ocean.
“It’s your resting place. Have you been there this whole time?”
She didn’t expect an answer, nor could she understand his ticks and rattles, yet still Aela marveled at him.
The black at the center of Tyran’s eyes sharpened, and Aela braced herself.
Instead of swallowing her whole, Tyran bobbed his head, gaining altitude and wrapped his sinuous body around hers, blocking out the rest of the sky.
Darkness descended.
While she couldn’t understand Tyran’s clicking, she understood the growl that started deep in his belly and crescendoed between his massive teeth. Tyran was protecting her from something.
“This is my dream,” Aela said, growing frustrated. She pressed her will on her dreamscape, willing it to be the calm sanctuary it once was and not a free-for-all for unexpected guests. Thunder rolled in the distance.
Aela squeezed out from under Tyran, floating higher and gently brushing her hand along his underside.
She parted his feathery teal mane to better see the latest intruder.
Where she had come to expect The Darkness as a blanket of night that devoured all light, it was a shadow of a man.
The dark shroud was clearly male in appearance, with wide-set shoulders and powerfully built arms, but there were no defining features to identify. He was all shadow.
“What are you?” Aela demanded.
The dark shroud cocked his head to the side, studying her.
“Do you speak? What do you want?”
The shadow figure directed his nondescript eyes at Tyran. “Give us a moment,” he said with a jerk of his chin.
Aela balked.
Who is he to command an epoc?
Tyran growled then surprised her as he shot into the sky, soaring through the atmosphere and into the cosmic night, leaving her alone with the shroud.
The shadowy figure drifted closer. Trepidation iced over her gut. Aela gave him a wide berth as she circled him in the sky. She shook her head. Leaving the dark shroud behind, she didn’t bother with a farewell as she soared through the clouds into the black diamond-flecked night.
“Where are you going?” the shadow figure’s voice came from behind her.
On instinct, Aela spun around with a whip of lightning, cracking it at the shroud. The strike sailed harmlessly through his incorporeal form like smoke.
Aela gritted her teeth. “I’m tired of running from my own dreams.”
“Don’t,” the shroud said, his deep voice dragging over her skin.
“Don’t what?” Aela asked.
“Stop running.”
She froze in place, her lightning hissing and biting at the night air. She had too many thoughts that were firing at once as the shadow figure moved closer, the angles of his body disappearing into the eternal night.
“Are you afraid?” he asked.
“No,” Aela said, squaring her shoulders. Maybe she should be afraid of the shadow, yet she was not. Her dreamscape always held a mysticism that she wasn’t sure she would ever understand, but one thing she knew in her soul—she couldn’t be harmed here.
“How are you in my dreams?”
The shadowy figure chuckled. “The how is not important, but the why is.”
“Alright… Why?”
“I have a vested interest in you.”
“Care to explain?”
“I will, another time.” The words dragged from him as if tethered by a substantial weight.
Puzzled by their whole interaction, she narrowed her turquoise eyes. “Are you The Darkness?” Her magic thrummed, ready to strike.
He looked down at his shrouded form. “Do I look like The Darkness?”
“Hmm,” Aela considered. Again, the odd nature of her dream came to the forefront of her mind, and her unease abated the longer she studied him.
What else in the realm could he be if not The Darkness?
Celestials believed The Darkness to be a mindless, mysterious curse that plagued the realm, devouring anything and everything in its path.
The male before her certainly wasn’t mindless, and who knew what manner of creatures still went undiscovered?
The realm was a vast place. Perhaps he was something beyond the charted boundaries of the stars.
Shaking her head, Aela released her lightning and refocused on her task of finding her family.
Tarek’s dreams were a dead end, and she might not have much time until the cursed Darkness inevitably came for her.
Shooting off again, Aela soared through the astral air.
The shroud easily kept pace with her as she flew.
Where her violet-white light streaked behind her, leaving a glimmering trail, he moved through the void of night without a trace.
“Really?” Aela asked of the shadow figure.
“It’s your dream,” he shrugged. “Where are we going?”
“To find my family.”
“Why fly when you could will yourself elsewhere, as you often do in your dreams?”
Clicking her tongue behind her teeth, Aela skipped over how the shadow figure knew her dream habits.
“My dreams bend to my will, but something is keeping me from my constellation. It’s as if an invisible veil separates me from finding them or doing some things what I want.
” Aela pondered the similarity of her dream manipulation to her other magic, then frowned at the shadow figure, her mind once again trying to puzzle him out.
She muttered to herself, veering to the right, circling wide of a blazing star in her path.
“The gifts of the Gods do manifest in different ways,” the shroud said into the silence, adding to her contemplation. “Your power is still maturing, despite everything you’ve gone through.”
His words pierced a tender spot within her, the pain fleeting before she could sense where it came from.
Aela skidded to a halt, searching the night sky for a pattern to help her get her bearings.
She had tried countless times to simply will herself to her constellation.
She was blocked. Just like her water element refused her call outside of her dreams, she couldn’t reach her family within them.
Her magic was full of contradictions and abnormalities.
“Where to now?” the shadowy male asked, pulling her from her thoughts.
“I don’t know. I need something to find them; spying on Tarek or other Taureons hasn’t proved fruitful.”
“Spying on the Bull?” the shroud whistled. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”
Aela huffed. The close-knit knowledge he claimed to have of her dreams was unsettling, but maybe she could use him.
“Do you know how I can find my family? You’re connected to my dreams somehow, but I’m blocked…” she trailed off, fixing hopeful eyes on his black smoke-like figure.
“That… I cannot do.”
“Why not?”
“Fate is a fickle thing, Aela.”
She shivered at her name on his lips.
“What do the Fates have to do with me finding my family? What could I possibly need more than being reunited with them?”
“Fate is not cruel, and it’s not good; it is the balance that holds life together. No one can understand why Fate brings certain beings together only to pull others apart. Our experience is a piece, a thread of their infinite design.”
“That’s not helpful,” Aela grumbled.
“Isn’t it?” the shadow figure pushed. “Even you were swayed by a plight of a House that is not your own. You didn’t owe them anything; you could have walked away, yet you didn’t.”
“Their need was greater than mine.”
The shadow figure angled his head in a leading manner, encouraging Aela’s mind to delve deeper. For the remainder of her dream, they silently flew side by side through the realm while Aela tried and failed for her dreams to point her home.