Chapter 24 Sid
SID
ELYRIA
Cedric chewed his lip, looking nervously from the scorch mark on the floor, to the door, and back again. “Can I . . . can I stay?”
“You may do whatever you please, Sir Knight,” Elyria said lightly. “As much fun as this diversion has been, I would like to get back to what I was doing before you came banging in.”
His shoulder relaxed, and the motion made something settle in Elyria as well. “And what exactly was it that you were doing?” he asked.
“Not being interrupted.” She moved a good deal away from the scorched stone where they’d been fighting, and sat down, legs crossed under her body.
The scar on Cedric’s upper lip winked as his mouth stretched into a smile, and Elyria reluctantly shut her eyes.
“Summoning another sparrow?” he asked. “I should think you and Nox had perfected the task of communicating with one another in the shadows by now.”
She opened one eye just to narrow it at him. “Oh, should we have by now? I’ve only just learned how to do this, Sir Know-It-All. These things take time—something you will very quickly find out, I think.”
He frowned, lifting his hands in supplication. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Mmm, I’m sure you didn’t,” she hummed, closing her eye again.
She let her shadows pool in the center of each palm, collecting into a small sphere again.
“Now, if you’re going to stay, fine, but be quiet.
I need to focus.” She paused before explaining, “I’m working on getting them to last longer, corporealize more fully. ”
“So you can use them to communicate across distance, like you said,” he mused, and Elyria couldn’t help but feel like there was something sad in his tone. “Please, go right ahead then. I won’t make a sound. You won’t even know I’m here.”
Behind her shuttered eyelids, Elyria rolled her eyes.
She really did try her best to block him out.
She would never admit that the very idea of pretending he was not there was ludicrous.
The more time they spent together, the more she felt him, even when they were separated.
Like he was ever-present. An increasingly immutable part of her.
Right. Focus.
Her hands moved in tandem as she located that thread of wild magic in her blood once more and snipped the tiniest kernel of it free, placing it inside her shadows.
Then, she began weaving them together.
It was grueling, tedious. And it took a really fucking long stars-damned time. Longer than it had ever taken her to craft one of her sparrows before.
Cedric, to his credit, said nothing. He was indeed so quiet that at one point, she wondered if he had left entirely.
But when she turned her head to check—just for a moment—she found him leaning against the wall nearest to her, arms crossed over his chest, watching her work with a careful, penetrating gaze.
Slowly, eventually, finally, she felt it—that snap of magic that told her the construct she’d been crafting was complete, that it was enough to stand on its own, separate from her. Her hands stilled. She cracked one eye open, then the other, her gaze dropping to her lap and—
Her brow furrowed. A soft gasp parted her lips. And the mass of shadows that now lay across her legs stretched.
And then it fucking purred.
Not a sparrow.
It was a kitten, really. A cub. No bigger than the length of her forearm, formed entirely from her darkness. Fur of blackest night. A round head. Long, lanky body. Four small legs that ended in soft paws.
Elyria’s heart and mind raced in tandem as the shadowcat leapt from her lap.
It paced along the ground with ghostly grace, wisps of smoke dancing along its spine, forming its tail, drifting upward in the shape of softly pointed ears.
Glowing emerald-green eyes peered out from its shadow-swirled face as it sat back on its hind legs—and meowed.
How? The question rebounded off the sides of her skull, rippled in her soul. How did she make something so . . . alive?
A life.
Wetness gathered on Elyria’s lash line, a singular tear forming in the inner corner of her eye.
She blinked, surprise at her body’s reaction quickening the beat of her heart.
She reached up with a knuckle to brush it away as it crested, carving a line down her cheek, but another finger was already there to catch it.
She looked up and met a ring of gold set within warm brown eyes, wonder and adoration beaming back at her as Cedric, now kneeling before her, smoothed her cheekbone. She hadn’t even heard him approach.
“Incredible.” His gaze turned downward, and she followed it to see the shadowcat circling them both, weaving between them. He extended a tentative hand, holding it aloft.
Elyria bit her lip. “I didn’t—I don’t know how—”
The cub let out a tiny meow and leaned forward to rub its shadowy face against Cedric’s palm.
He inhaled sharply.
“What is it?”
“It’s—It feels almost real,” he said, his mouth gaping slightly.
“I think . . . it is almost real.” She scooted closer to him, cocking her head at the cub. “But I don’t understand it.”
“What do you mean? You just made it. I watched you.”
“I didn’t mean to, though.” She pursed her lips to one side, her mind racing.
“Nox told me they thought I could do more, that my shadows are different than theirs. But it’s more unpredictable because of it, and that’s why I haven’t been able to shadowstep.
” She scowled, repositioning herself on the floor and bringing her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them.
“They encouraged me to find a way to weave my wild magic with my darkness, get them working in tandem, so I’ve been practicing.
I thought perhaps I’d be able to get the sparrows to stay longer, travel farther. But I didn’t mean to do this.”
“Maybe your magic is growing,” Cedric said, voice soft.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have distracted me,” she retorted, harsher than she intended. She hugged her knees tighter.
If Cedric noticed, he didn’t seem to mind. Not as the cub butted its shadow-swirled head against his hip. “I distracted you, and a bird became a cat?” he said with amusement, wonder coloring the words as he ran his hand down the creature’s back in a gentle pet.
Elyria smirked. “You walked into the room and evidently I felt the innate need to replace squawking with claws and teeth.”
Cedric laughed, the sound dancing in her ears. She had to work very hard to smother the proud smile that threatened to emerge at having elicited such a sound.
“Oh yes, you’re just vicious, aren’t you?” he said to the purring cub, which had crawled directly into his lap, rolled over onto its back, and was now playing with the drawstring of his pants.
Elyria reached out to touch the creature, her fingers twining in its shadows—her shadows?
—and glancing off the soft black fur of its belly.
She tried to catalog the feeling of it—that meeting ground between soft and hard, between sleep and waking.
It straddled the line between corporeal and intangible, like running a hand through fog only to meet something solid underneath.
She sucked in a breath. “You know, I don’t like to brag but—”
Cedric snorted a laugh, then coughed to cover the sound. She ignored him.
“—it really is a neat bit of magic, isn’t it?
” She tried to recall exactly what she had done, how she’d inadvertently bent her shadows into the shape of this creature, woven that kernel of wild into it.
But even as she racked her brain, she doubted she would be able to recreate it.
Not when she was relatively confident her magic had acted entirely of its own accord.
“What’s its name?” asked Cedric.
Elyria blinked. “Name?”
“You don’t plan on calling it, well, ‘it’ forever, do you?”
“It won’t last forever,” she said with a shrug. “And it’s not as though I bother naming my sparrows. They’re gone nearly as quickly as I’d be able to come up with something. So, enjoy the adoration of your tiny feline companion while you can, Sir Knight. It will return to the shadows soon enough.”
Even as she said the words, Elyria wondered if they were true.
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Cedric said, an echo of her very thoughts. “I’ve felt your sparrows. Seen your shadows at work. This is . . . not that. Not the same. Whatever it is that you did, this is something new. I think you may just be stuck with her.”
Elyria swallowed. “Her?”
“Seems like a ‘her’, doesn’t she?” He picked up the cub with both hands, lifting it so that its head was next to Elyria’s, then squinted as if evaluating them both. “She has your eyes. You must be so proud.”
Elyria scowled. “Very funny.”
“Take a look for yourself, if you don’t believe me,” he said, plopping the creature back in Elyria’s lap.
She tsked, looking down at her creation with new eyes.
Ones that did, she had to admit, match the exact shade of emerald peering back at her from its feline face.
“If it won’t disappear on its own like my sparrows, I suppose I’ll just have to, you know, make it go away.
” She raised a hand, though the angle of her brows surely gave away her ignorance as she considered how she was supposed to un-corporealize a shadow creature she hadn’t even intended to make in the first place.
She also was suddenly unsure if she wanted to.
She didn’t get a chance to decide one way or the other. As if it could sense her wavering will, the cub hissed at her. Elyria winced at the scratch of sharp claws against her skin as it leapt off her, immediately bounding back to Cedric and twining its shadowy body around his arm.
Cedric shook his head gently, disbelief scrawled across his handsome face. “Miraculous.”
“A traitorous miracle,” Elyria grumbled, rubbing the spot on her thigh where the cub’s claws had dug into her.
“How about, ‘Obsidian’ then?” he said.
“What?”