Chapter Thirteen My Star #4
She whirled, unsure whether she was about to demand he follow through on the threat or drive her ruby dagger through his immortal heart to test the limit of the Earth Star.
When she saw his arrogant expression, she settled on the latter.
Reya reached for her steel, but froze when she saw the violet Ire glowing on the skin of her arm.
“Right there,” Caelan said, clutching the sides of her face to make her look at him. “Tell me what you’re feeling right now.”
She stumbled for the right words. “I don’t know. Anger. Violence.” Desire, she refused to add.
“Good. Hold on to that. Everyone accesses their power differently. This is how we’re going to find yours.
Eventually, you won’t need to use your emotions as a crutch, but for now, try to think of them as a guide.
Anger helped me find the fire. It took me far longer to find the healing, which required a calm and humility I didn’t have for many years. ”
He might as well have doused her with a bucket of cold water. She read the words in his eyes: I can play your game, too, thief. She was torn between fury and mortification that the shift in her scent had told him it had worked, while he was unaffected.
“My head and its good sense are all that’s keeping me from throttling you.”
“You’re welcome to try, Reyanwyn.”
Her blood simmered at the name.
Helpful or not, she still wanted to stab him. Anger had always been her trigger.
Caelan shrugged off his sword. “Now we can begin. Get angry. Get violent. I can handle it. Use it like a map to find the source.”
“I… can’t, Caelan.” She knew she sounded pathetic, and she hated it, but she was frightened, and not just for herself.
“It helps to visualize it, to see what it looks like, where it comes from. Where does your power start?” He stepped closer. “What contains it?”
Reya tried to follow her emotions like a pathway, closing her eyes and envisioning herself at the barrier between her consciousness and that rumbling sea of power.
“A wall.”
“What kind of wall?”
“Like a floodgate.” She opened her eyes and found Caelan nodding.
“Some Sages see a door, a tunnel. If a floodgate is what works for you, then that’s what we’ll use. Now, lower the gate.”
Reya flinched. “You might want to take a step back.”
“Do I look afraid to you?”
She stared into the flaming amber of his eyes. No. He didn’t. Any sane person would have put some distance between them, but Caelan seemed wholly unconcerned for his well-being. In fact, he seemed to be inching closer.
“Will I have to light your funeral pyre or will your body just burst into flames?” she asked.
“Quit stalling.”
Right. Here goes nothing.
Reya closed her eyes again and let her imagination give the floodgate form until she saw it as clearly as she’d seen Caelan standing before her.
Until she stood in a cave like the ones she had explored with her brothers when they were children.
Stalactites and stalagmites reached for the ceiling and floor like jagged teeth, and a wall of glowing iridescent crystal writhed before her as if it were a living thing, surface forming and reforming in a thousand tiny layers.
It was a place and yet not a place. Real and unreal.
Now what the hell was she supposed to do?
Visualize it, Caelan had said. Reya looked to where the crystal floodgate met the roof of the cavern and imagined it lowering.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Reya mumbled, her core going molten and tight as light poured over the barrier. Her eyes flew open as it wove through her fingers, skittered across the ground, ruffled her hair.
It wasn’t without color, she realized. An infinite range of shades glittered in the luster, strings of red and green and blue and gold and violet. How had she not noticed it before?
Caelan held his ground. “Good. Now close it.”
She tried. Sweat dampened her forehead as she commanded the crystal gate to reform, to seal, but it wouldn’t budge. The power had been confined too long, and she’d just given it a morsel of freedom after ten years of starvation.
“Bring the gate back up,” he said, more firmly this time.
On the rooftops above Edris, when the sun hit the metal at just the right angle, it bounced in a reflective flash. This was like that.
Light singed the grass beneath her feet, turning the earth to stardust, and an answering shield of fire erupted around Caelan.
Suddenly, she was no longer in the Cleary. She was back in a mountainside cottage.
Reya gritted her teeth and shoved the memories down, down, down just like she had her magic, trapping the power and all that came with it at the bottom of her soul.
A long crack raced up the iridescent floodgate and splintered like a spiderweb.
No, she begged, starting to panic.
“Reyanwyn,” Caelan said, his voice suddenly dark with warning. But she barely heard him. The power could not be contained. She could not be contained.
Light encircled her pupils. The world turned white. It was better this way. Better to forget. Someone spoke but she couldn’t hear the words. Not as that river of power pulled her under and swept her away, leaving an entirely different creature in her place.
A hand engulfed in gold pressed against her forehead, and the world plunged into darkness.