Chapter Twenty-Two #3
Tears shimmered in his eyes. He closed them and touched his forehead to hers in defeat. “Aiyah.”
That one word of acquiescence, wrenched by love from a heart drowning in fear, made her love him more than she ever had. She
smoothed her thumbs across the warm silk of his skin. “If love were power enough, shei’tan, our truemate bond would be complete a thousand times over.” Her lips curved in a trembling smile. “You bring pride to this
Fey.”
His arms closed tight around her, and his mouth claimed hers in a final, passionate kiss. ?Ver reisa ku’chae, Ellysetta. Kem surah.? When at last he let her go, he stepped back a pace, and grim determination settled over his features. “But if this must be
done, shei’tani, we will do it together.” He removed the Soul Quest crystal from around his neck and settled it in place around hers. “You
will use my strength and everything I can give you.”
“Rain, nei. If the High Mage can use me to Mark you—”
He pressed a finger to her lips. “Then it will be no more than you accepted as the price to save the tairen. If you can live
with three Marks, I can surely live with one.”
“Rain . . .”
“If these were our children, would you want me to stand by and do nothing while you risked your life to save them?”
She had no more defense against that argument than he had.
He turned to the pride’s makai. “Sybharukai, if anything happens to Ellysetta, promise you will not let me fly.” His lids narrowed over eyes gone abruptly savage. “And if this Mage succeeds in stealing the young, promise you will scorch Eld to a barren wasteland.”
The gray tairen growled her assent. ?It will be done, Rainier-Eras.?
Eld ~ Boura Fell
Shan leaned his head back against the sel’dor-lined rock wall of his prison, welcoming the familiar searing burn. Over the years, the pain had become almost a comfort.
His eyes closed. Weariness and despair crowded his heart. Hope was a thing long lost.
?He has Marked her, shei’tani. She is weaving Azrahn and he Marked her again.?
In the darkness behind his lids, he summoned the image of his beloved, the sweet fire of her hair, the shining brightness
of her golden eyes, so that when her answer came it was as if she were here with him, standing before him, the only light
left in his world.
?She spins the forbidden magic on purpose? The Fey would never allow it.?
?She tries to save the tairen. The Mage is stealing their souls.? That much he’d gleaned from the link that had tied part of Shan’s soul to Ellysetta’s since before her birth. ?She fights him now.?
?She cannot defeat him alone.?
?I know.?
?We must help her.?
?Maur is there in the Well. He will sense our presence, just as he did when we came to her aid before.? Shan’s bones were barely knitted from the price he’d paid for that effort, and Elfeya’s nightmares over what the Mage had
done to her still woke both of them in a cold sweat each night.
?We still must help her.?
Shan hung his head, resting his chin on his chest. He had expected no other answer. ?I know.?
?Then show me her weaves, shei’tan, and be my bridge to her soul.?
The Fading Lands ~ Fey’Bahren
Ellysetta gathered the strength of Rain and the tairen and fed their power into her weaves along with more power of her own.
For a moment, the healing threads lit up like ropes of sunlight. For a moment, the darkness retreated. But then, just as quickly,
the light was leached away.
The kitlings cried out in desperate fear, singing the bright word of her name like a talisman and a prayer. Their trust stabbed
her heart as their frightened minds reached out to her the way a fearful child’s fingers clutched at his mother’s skirts.
With a sob, she sent another blast of power down her weaves, brightness to hold off the dark, but just as before, after a
brief flaring moment of hope, shadow consumed the light.
The weaves the Eye had shown her were not powerful enough. She tried to strengthen them with song, pouring love into every
word. She spun every healing weave she knew. And still nothing worked. Her Azrahn-enhanced weaves might have been enough to
save the kits before the Mage loosed his soul-stealer upon them, but now the battle had changed. She wasn’t just trying to
draw the kits from the Well, she was fighting to keep something from pulling them back in.
The kitlings were dying. Connected as she was with her weaves, she could feel them slipping away, not just one or two but
all of them. Their bodies were perfectly healthy, yet slowly, their sweet voices and the brightness of their souls were fading.
You are a shei’dalin. Hold them to the Light.
The thought blossomed in her mind, filled with urgent conviction.
She needed to spin a shei’dalin’s healing weave, the kind Venarra had used to hold that dying woman’s soul to life.
Venarra hadn’t taught her the patterns yet, but her mind must have instinctively recorded them, because the knowledge was there, as if she’d spun those weaves a thousand times.
Adelis, Bright One, Lord of Light, please, teska, help me. Guide me. Do not let me fail. The gods had answered her prayers in the past, working their miracles through her instinctive, untutored magic. She prayed
they would help her again now.
She forced herself to block out the pitiful cries of the baby tairen and surrendered to the crooning, powerful song of the
tairen. It flowed over and through her, carrying away her fear and doubt. Her hands unclenched. Her muscles relaxed. Her breathing
became deep and even. She was a well of calm, and into that well her consciousness dove deep.
The source of her power lay far within her, shining bright as the sun, more white than gold, dazzling with the strength of
her shei’dalin’s love. She absorbed the power into her consciousness until every thought blazed with magical resonance. Then, when she could
hold no more, she sent her spirit, the living essence of her soul, out of her own body and into the small bodies of the tairen
kitlings, just as the shei’dalins sent themselves into the body of another when they needed to perform great healing.
Follow your weaves into the Well.
As if guided by the invisible hands of the gods, she found the humming threads of her healing weaves inside the kits and followed
them, leaving the gleaming radiance of the world and descending into the dark realm of souls.
Light was extinguished. The abrupt darkness alarmed her. Had she fallen for one of the Mage’s traps?
She reached instinctively for Rain across the threads of their bond. ?Rain . . . ?
?I am here, beloved.? His voice returned, a deep baritone, steady and reassuring. He was there with her in the darkness, just as he’d been with
her in the blinding gray-white of the Mists. He would always be there with her.
The brief moment of doubt and fear passed, and her confidence surged anew. As long as Rain was with her, she was strong.
She traced the threads of her weave as a miner lost in the impenetrable blackness of a cave might follow a rope to guide himself
back to the surface, only she followed to go deeper into the mine. Finally, after a seemingly endless plunge into dark, light
reappeared. First came soft glimmers of red, then dim, faint glows of a brighter hue that, as she drew nearer, became small
orbs of rainbow-hued light, flickering uncertainly. The kitlings.
And with them, the enemy she’d come to fight.
A nearly invisible, shifting darkness that merged into the surrounding black of the Well. Nothing as substantial as smoke,
but rather an oily void that moved as if it were alive. From it flowed countless tiny threads, like black spider silk, attached
to the kitlings’ souls, sucking at them like so many leeches, draining away their brightness.
She lashed at the dark threads, tearing them away from the unwilling hosts.
?Get away from them! Leave them alone.?
The threads reared back, writhing blindly. A handful of them latched onto her. She ripped them away, only to find a dozen
more reaching out to replace them. Everywhere they touched, her brightness dimmed, as if the hungry mouths were draining her
soul too.
?Ellysetta!? Rain cried. A surge of power raced through her, filling her with the bright, powerful, blazing light of his love.
The black thing shrank back, its silken threads releasing her as if burned.
Yes. Yes, that’s it, ajiana. No darkness, no matter how deep, holds dominion over Light. Shine your Light, Ellysetta. Weave your love.
The voice spoke with quiet certainty, reaffirming her strength. She could do this. She had the power. The gods had chosen
her to do it.
She drew upon her magic, upon Rain’s fiercely shining brightness, upon the strength of the tairen concentrated in the crystals she held and the song that swirled around her.
It still wasn’t enough. Too much of her own strength was tethered to that safety anchor she’d prepared, and the magic she needed to weave now demanded everything she had to give.
She released her anchor, gathering that magic into herself as well, summoning every bit of power from every source she could
find. She spun it into threads, glowing, golden-white shei’dalin’s love, burning bright as the Great Sun, and with it shadowy Azrahn, dark as the ember of a dead star. The new pattern both
fed strength into the kits and began to shear away those feeding mouths from the Well.
As each dark strand withered and fell away, the kitlings’ light shone brighter.
She kept feeding power into her weave, drawing upon Rain, the tairen, and the seemingly limitless source of confidence and
love she’d found so unexpectedly here in the Well. Her Azrahn and shei’dalin’s love were so tightly interwoven, the threads became a single melded rope. Light and dark strobed in rhythm like blood flowing
through the life-giving arteries of a god. The light was stronger than the dark. Its radiant glow brightened the shadows,