Chapter 37
thirty-seven
. . .
Ever
The Transference Stone: the seat of power the Usher wants to claim, and the place where my magic brought me to my knees.
Not where I want to go back to if I can help it. But my need to speak to the Maker is greater than the fear of what this place holds, so I let Kalan lead us through the forest.
Kyra stays behind to speak with her parents after confirming the Maker’s location.
She upped and vanished after Micah’s death and has her own bridges to mend and questions to seek answers to.
We pulled her whole life into this, and she’s been nothing but a loyal friend to me—a friend who lost her brother at the hands of mine.
I shove that thought aside to try and keep it banished and not let the weight of the sentiment take over, so I concentrate on where we’re going.
Lyle and Kalan lead me into the Variscite forest, the safest path while there are patrols and sentries about, according to Kyra.
We don’t stray from the cover of the trees.
In the gloom of the forest, the wind bites at my skin, the air now frigid and bitter, as if every step north drops the temperature a fraction more.
“Do you hear it? The Forest?” Kalan asks me.
I shake my head, the weight of that loss heavier than I imagined.
It doesn’t diminish the same sense of awe and wonder I felt when I first ventured beneath the canopy.
Even experiencing it on the walk towards the ceremony with Ten, I was drawn to the forest. If we weren’t in Kirrasia, it would be impossible not to think magic could exist while walking through these trees.
It isn’t a long walk to the Ceremony spot, and I let the memory of my first journey here—with Ten—lift the trepidation that seems to grow with each step.
“Thank you for being here.” I turn to make sure Lyle can hear me. “I need you to know that.”
“I do.” Her words are clipped, and I hope there will be a time and a place we can get back to how things were before Kirrasia. “Do you—”
“It’s just beyond here. We’ll break cover, and we should be near the clearing,” Kalan issues instructions, interrupting Lyle, but she walks on, forgetting what she was about to say.
There is so much unsaid between us. I hope we’ll find a time to lay it all out, but here and now isn’t that time.
Sure enough, we arrive at the familiar spot, with the slab of stone and pillars rising into the sky, waiting.
My opinion of this place hasn’t improved since the previous visits. It’s as if there’s something in the air.
“I only ever had good memories of this place until your Transference. It was a joyous occasion—a celebration—that marked an important part of our lives,” Lyle says.
“Were you ever told why this was where the Transference happened?”
“No. It was just the way it was and has been for generations.” Lyle keeps her gaze on the plinth before us.
“When Ten first brought me here, I touched the stone. I felt a presence here, and it wasn’t good.
It was as if all the pain and hurt over the years were festering…
I didn’t think much of it, with everything else on my worried mind.
Ten and everyone else kept saying that the Transference wasn’t anything to worry about. But what if it is something else?”
“What do you mean, Ever?” Kalan looks at me, seeing too much again.
“Kalan, the Naturals believe that a part of their magic goes back into the earth, that’s what fuels the Jarkoreth, or something like that. Could this be the same, only instead of creating a beast to protect the forest, it’s stored, waiting and locked away, until someone has the key?”
“A curious one, aren’t you?” The Maker’s voice sounds inside my mind, and I snap my eyes up to search for her.
Three shadowed and cloaked figures appear a little way past the stone.
“Come, child.” She turns and walks away from the clearing and towards the trees, leaving her companions.
I glance back at Kalan and Lyle and then follow the Maker.
Before I walk out of sight, my whole body begins to shake, and I turn back just to see them again.
They both stand, watching me, and I know they’ll be here for me on the other side of this conversation.
I offer a nod, then dip beyond the tree line.
After the first few trees, which are deep and thick, they thin out again, forming a circular space where boulders and stones have been placed into an inner ring.
In the centre, three chairs positioned in a close arc that look like they’ve been sculpted from the roots of trees, rise from the ground to cradle whoever may sit them.
The Maker takes her place in the centre. “Sit.”
I do, taking the seat to her left.
Her sightless eyes travel to my throat as I take my place.
She reaches out with one of her hands, her spindly finger hovering over the burn on my throat.
“You seem to be missing something.” As her finger grazes over my skin, I fight the stinging sensation that sparks all the way down my chest. “Interesting.”
“Is that all you have to say?” I don’t speak inside my mind to her.
“What would you have me say?”
“I don’t know. Something to help or explain it to me? Tell me what happened. What happened to me to leave this mark?” It was my hope that she would lay the answers out to me.
“You showed that you cannot be bound, child. That is clear. Do you remember what I told you?”
Riddles. Those confusing words. “It is earth and space and time and everything in between,” I repeat the most confusing parts of what she told me back to her, and she just chuckles.
She lifts her hand to my neck again and tilts her head to the sky.
Suddenly, we’re not in the woods anymore. We’re back in the Great Hall, and we’re having tea.
I step forward and watch the scene play out, a bystander to a memory—my memory, just like I’ve done before.
“Like good and bad? Light and darkness?” I hear myself ask the question. I’d almost forgotten what she said, drowned by the horrors and the constant reminder that perhaps my magic is only a curse. A link to death.
“You are learning that your gift can amplify or drain. But it is not confined like the other Orders. I see all because I was the first. You will see possibilities. For you. For others. To weave and thread and sew. To nurture or to destroy. But at the centre of it all is your mind and heart. And the way to rule them in harmony is to master your emotions. Something that takes years.”
Control my emotions. Easier said than done. And when my emotions have peaked, that’s when I’ve felt the most powerful. That’s when I’ve been able to use my magic.
Her words float in my mind again. “Caress it, nurture it, for it can be fickle and stubborn and deadly.”
Deadly.
The Maker pulls us back from the memory, leaving me with more questions than I started with.
“Is it fickle, or am I just bad at all of this?” I ask. “Because my emotion seems to be the key, and now I can pull on powers I shouldn’t have. Any magic I’ve experienced, I can feel now.” She doesn’t answer. “I saw what the Usher plans. What he wants to do.”
“Yes.”
She doesn’t question what that might mean—a disgruntled and powerful Natural coming back to rid Kirrasia of everything they know. “You know this?” My face scrunches up at how calm she is. I came back here to do the right thing, and she already knows?
“You know I see all, child. You will see possibilities.”
“So, the Usher?”
“That will be for our Goddess to decide.”
Aslendrix.
“And… what the Usher did, calling on Novandia. Did that change me and my power? Will I have gifts from both God and Goddess?” Is that why my magic feels so eager, now that I do not need touch to command it?
“Because I’m afraid. Afraid of this power that seemed to vanish and desert me, and then come back with force.
Since crossing back into Kirrasia, I’m able to cast all of us under a cloak of invisibility like it’s nothing.
” I take a breath, my heart pounding and beating for more answers, wanting to purge myself of the questions and fill the gap they leave with knowledge that will ease the emptiness that’s taken root in the depths of the well that housed my power.
“Whatever I did that night destroyed my necklace. I thought I needed that to stop the power from turning me mad—from taking over. Yet, I’m fine. It’s as if I’m restored to before my Transference. Will my power right itself, and how will I fight my brother if he comes? He—”
The Maker holds up her hand, silencing me.
And everything around us.
The light starts to shift, and the sun lowers, scattering shadows around us as the darkness grows, and the stars begin to bloom overhead in the sky.
She’s… pushing time forward, drawing night to us, until Aslendrix is overhead.
It is not a full moon, yet her glow sparkles in the newly darkened sky, and a sense of majesty cloaks us.
“I see you have been marked by my brother.”
My lungs freeze, and my palms turn clammy as I hear a voice on the air, stronger than the whispers of the forest, and there is familiarity in it.
“Aslendrix?” Fear trickles through my veins, and my mind rushes to think of all my actions over the past few weeks.
Novandia’s magic. Using my power. Stealing power.
“Hush, there is no need to fear.”
“Really, I’d beg to differ,” I say in defiance.
“Have I not helped guide you? In your darkest times?”
The fight in me softens as I remember the times I wondered if she had come to me. Those fleeting glimpses. Moments.
“What has happened to my magic?” I ask.
“Is that the question you yearn to answer first?”
I think about the other questions gathered. The ones that won’t rest, but hasn’t the Maker pointed me in the right direction for those?
I nod.
“Your magic is in a state of flux. Both Novandia’s influence and mine. You are the first.”
“The first?” I thought my brother was the first.