Chapter Twenty #2
‘Naturally,’ said Naal with satisfaction. ‘The greatest magic users are the ones who understand what it means to be fully in their body. As a fighter, I imagine that sensation comes fairly easily to you.’
‘But Warden magic is different?’
‘Not only different, but opposite in its origin. The Elemental magic entrusted to us by the Mothers, as Wardens, comes directly from your soul. It is your spirit, the essence of you, that connects you to the divine. To Roheia.’
Kyra absent-mindedly tapped her fingers on her knee.
‘Close your eyes once more,’ Naal instructed.
‘I want you to envision your Earth magic as an orb of light, right in the centre of your chest. A continuously moving sphere of energy.’ Naal paused for a moment and it was quiet save the soft breeze as Kyra willed her imagination to yield to the Air Warden’s prompts. ‘What do you see? What do you feel?’
Nothing. A big fuck all. ‘It’s… I can…’ she started, but then exhaled with frustration. ‘Nothing, Naal. I can’t see or feel anything.’
‘Patience, Kyra. Try again.’
Patience. But she was not patient. She never had been. Perhaps it was a learned thing, for her grandmother certainly had very little of it.
How was she to be patient, when she had just under six months to find an ancient crystal that she was beginning to believe was entirely mythical?
How could she find patience when her brother’s freedom rested on her shoulders?
And how would patience help relieve the impossible pressure of being a Warden at the start of a damned war, whose powers had only just come forth?
Stirring in the pits of her soul, the monstrous creature appealed to her with a grin. Let me out… let me out…
‘Easy,’ Naal said softly. ‘Be gentle with yourself.’
Kyra gripped her knees tighter. The monster writhed. Beaming light seeped through her closed eyes.
‘Kyra, you cannot allow it to control you,’ Naal said sharply. ‘Come back to yourself.’
‘How,’ Kyra managed to croak.
Tremors began through her body. Frustration turned to undiluted fear as the monster clawed at the vines trying to keep it contained. It reared with excitement, victorious that she was acknowledging it, letting it shine through every crack and crevice of her broken soul-
‘It does not control you, Kyra,’ Naal urged. ‘I need you to calm down.’
‘I can’t…’ she breathed as her chest heaved up and down. Sweat trickled down the side of her face but she was frozen. Not from the cold, but paralysed with fear.
Her eyes flew open, and that white light assaulted her vision. But the light itself…
It was coming from her.
The monster had her. Was using her, grinning with malice at its ability to render her powerless.
‘You cannot fear it!’ Naal cried, but her voice sounded faraway now, the wind that swirled atop the mountain no longer caressed Kyra’s skin, the snow no longer holding her in its icy embrace.
She soared through nothing to somewhere else, somewhere safe.
In a clammy, dark cell lit with a singular torch on the wall, she landed.
The figure lying on top of a hard bed slowly sat up. Black eyes bore into hers, and darkness swept over her. That invasive, dominant light within her dulled to a faint glow, and somehow she knew that atop that mountain, her physical body had dimmed too.
She beheld the familiar male before her. ‘You… are you… are you real? Is this real?’
The male stood, towering well over a foot above her. His waving black hair hung loose around his shirt-covered shoulders, and his beard was longer and more unkempt than the last time she’d seen him. He was different this time, and not just in appearance.
Though he’d been physically naked the first time she’d encountered him, he was more bare now. There was a wildness to him, an endured sort of abandonment hidden in the soft creases of his square face.
He tilted his head to one side, calm intrigue befalling his beautiful features.
‘Am I imagining you?’ Kyra demanded. She had to know if this was some magic, or if she was just losing her damned mind.
‘No,’ he softly replied.
‘But you know who I am, don’t you?’ Kyra whispered. ‘You’ve said it before.’
‘Because you told me,’ he simply replied. ‘The first time we met you told me because you thought you were going to die. You said it didn’t matter who knew then. Do you not remember?’
She did remember, though up until now she’d believed it to be a hallucination. Her sanity had been clouded by whatever fucking sedative those Union cunts had put in her food.
‘How did we meet that night?’ she demanded. ‘Were you really there, under the Citadel?’
The stranger cocked his head to one side, surveying her.
‘You are projecting to me, just as I projected to you the last time. Just as you are doing now. I admit, I am yet to understand the connection between us. It ought not to be possible, to project directly to a person and not to a place one has been before. And yet… here you stand.’
That accent.
‘You’re Zarynthian,’ she said suddenly.
He became very still. Stoical in his stance. ‘I am,’ he said quietly, but there was no pride in his voice. If anything, he sounded almost sorry about it. He flexed his right fist, and a glint of gold caught her eye.
‘Who are you?’ Kyra asked, heart in her throat, for the emblem etched onto the signet ring on his middle finger was unmistakable. She’d endured enough mind-numbingly boring history classes with Win in her youth to recognize it immediately.
A dragon’s head, cocooned inside a twisted flame.
The stranger fisted both his hands then. A certain darkness shadowed his face. Softly, he said, ‘Why ask, when you already know the answer?’
His eyes, black as night, reflected the jittering flames in the torch bracket. And she knew then, knew who it was she’d unwittingly projected to.
The Prince of Fire watched her, and something in Kyra shivered under that depthless gaze of promised death.
‘You destroyed Phaenon City,’ Kyra whispered. ‘You’re the reason all of those people died.’ Images of the blackened mountainside scolded her mind.
‘I don’t deny it,’ he replied, lips barely moving. His stillness was beginning to unnerve her.
He knew who she was. And he was the son of Empress Azar.
She backed up a step.
Fuck. Fuck-
‘Kyra,’ Naal’s voice suddenly echoed all around them.
‘Kyra,’ he repeated, as if tasting her name on his tongue, his eyes slightly widening.
Something within her recoiled with fear. Now he knew her fucking name. There was another part of her though, a part she could not even begin to understand, or want to understand, that bristled with unexplainable pleasure.
It terrified her far more than that initial fear.
‘Kyra! Come back!’ Naal’s voice clattered through her mind again, more urgently this time.
Kyra squeezed her eyes shut and forced herself inward, clawing for the thread back to her body. Its glimmer was stronger now. She held onto it and pulled, willing her spirit back to her body.
‘Kyra,’ the Fire Warden said again, his voice sounding further away, as if he was speaking through a veil. ‘Wait-’
But then she was soaring through nothing and everything all at once, and when she opened her eyes to the blinding whiteness of the Summit, the Fire Warden was nowhere to be seen.
Naal’s hands were gripped hard on her shoulders, her silver gaze piercing her with a concerned fierceness. ‘You’re back,’ she said, relieved. ‘It’s alright. Breathe, Kyra.’
Kyra obeyed, taking in deep lungfuls of icy cold air, her head whipping right and left to further confirm that her shadowed enemy had not followed her through the abyss. There was nothing to be seen but the glittering white of the snow-capped Floating Mountains.
‘I assume that’s the first time you’ve ever projected?’ Naal asked, squeezing Kyra’s shoulders.
Not trusting herself to speak just yet, Kyra nodded.
‘I thought as much. With your magic so new to you I should have anticipated you might be more susceptible to an accidental projection. Many magic wielding children suffer the same thing before they learn to control their magic. In sleep it’s most likely: the soul is more volatile and liberated in that state.
’ Her brow furrowed with concern once more as her eyes raked over Kyra’s face. ‘Where did you go? You look shaken.’
Kyra opened her mouth, a reply forming on her tongue, but it died almost instantly.
What if Naal thought her connection to the Fire Warden was too much of a liability?
What if Naal decided she could no longer trust Kyra at all?
What if she locked her away, just to be sure he could not reach her, or learn their secrets in the coming war?
She’d never find the Eye of the Fifth then. She’d never free Oslan.
‘Avaldale,’ Kyra croaked. She cleared her throat, forcing herself to keep Naal’s gaze. ‘A Union soldier saw me on the docks. I… I was running from them when you called me back.’
Later, when Kyra lay in her room deep within Gallena’s temple, glaring up at the dark red canopy above her bed, she wondered just how many lies she would tell Naal before this pending war was over.
She also wondered if Roheia had made a grave mistake in choosing her as her Warden.
Did the Goddess not know that her soul was marred black with death and deception?
When she finally slept, exhaustion ultimately overwhelming her fear of an accidental projection during unconsciousness, her dreams were filled with formidable flames and eyes of unfathomable black.