Chapter 5 Unbidden Gifts #3
me when the first shadow beings had begun to organize themselves from chaos into civilization, and the emotion she was feeling was their emotion, preserved in the vine's dark heart like an insect preserved in amber.
The vision lasted only a few seconds. The figures, the violet sky, the heat of the dark stone beneath her feet, all of it dissolved as abruptly as it had appeared, and Sera was back in the clearing, her hand still pressed against the memory-vine's thick black trunk, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps, her heart hammering against her ribs.
The nightbloom in her pocket flared once, a pulse of silver light so bright that it illuminated the entire clearing, and then subsided.
Oren was beside her. She had not heard him approach, but his hand was on her shoulder, warm and steady, and his voice was close to her ear, calm and measured and carrying an undercurrent of something she could not quite identify.
"What did you see?" he asked. Sera described it.
The violet sky. The figures of light. The city rising from shadow.
Oren listened without interrupting, his hand still on her shoulder, and when she finished, the silence that followed was long and weighted with implications that neither of them was ready to articulate.
"That vine is over forty thousand years old," Oren said finally.
"I have Read it myself, many times, and I have never extracted an image with that level of clarity.
The emotional content of such ancient records degrades over time, becoming impressionistic, fragmentary.
What you described was vivid. Specific. As though you were watching it happen in real time.
" He removed his hand from her shoulder and stepped back, and she saw in his faded gold eyes a mixture of wonder and something that looked uncomfortably like concern.
"Your ability is developing faster than I anticipated.
Much faster. This is not necessarily a good thing, Sera.
Shadow abilities that outpace their wielder's capacity to manage them can become unstable.
You must be careful." *** She was careful.
Or she tried to be. But the Garden was alive with emotional resonance, and her new sensitivity to it was like a wound that would not close, every brush of shadow against her awareness delivering a rush of sensation that she could not always process quickly enough.
She learned to shield herself, partially, by concentrating on her own emotions and using them as a kind of filter, allowing through only what she chose to acknowledge.
It was exhausting work, the emotional equivalent of holding a door shut against a persistent wind, and by late afternoon she was usually trembling with fatigue, her temples throbbing, her nightbloom pulsing rapidly against her hip as though it too were straining against the effort.
Oren also introduced her to Weaving, the discipline of shaping shadow into solid or semi-solid forms. Here, Sera's progress was far less natural.
Where Reading felt like opening a door that had always been unlocked, Weaving felt like trying to speak a language she had only ever heard in passing, her mouth struggling to form sounds her tongue did not recognize.
Oren placed a handful of loose shadow on the warm stone before her, a lump of darkness that writhed faintly in her palms like a living thing, and asked her to shape it into a sphere.
She concentrated. She visualized. She drew on every ounce of the botanical precision that had served her so well in the Sunlit Realm, approaching the shadow the way she would approach a delicate graft, with patience and care and the steady hands of a practitioner who understood that living things required a specific kind of touch.
The shadow resisted. It gathered beneath her fingers and then scattered, losing coherence the moment she tried to impose a shape on it, and what emerged from her efforts was not a sphere but a lumpy, flickering mass that pulsed erratically and shed wisps of dark vapor like a dying candle.
She tried again and again, her frustration mounting with each failure, and by the end of the first Weaving session, the stone before her was scorched with erratic patterns and Sera's hands were shaking with a fatigue that was different from the emotional exhaustion of Reading, a physical weariness that settled into her bones and made her joints ache.
"Your Sunlit nature is fighting your Umbral abilities," Oren explained, examining her failed attempt with the clinical interest of a scholar observing an unexpected result.
"Your mind approaches shadow as an external material to be manipulated, the way a potter approaches clay.
But shadow is not clay. Shadow is emotion given form.
You cannot shape it with precision and logic alone.
You must feel the shape you want to create and allow the shadow to find its way to it.
This is the fundamental difference between Sunlit and Umbral approaches to knowledge, and it is the difference you will need to bridge if you are to become what this realm requires you to be.
" Sera bristled at the phrase "what this realm requires you to be," a reaction that Oren noted with a knowing tilt of his head, and she spent that evening in her chamber staring at the ceiling and thinking about the difference between studying a plant and becoming one, between understanding the world and belonging to it.
The distinction felt important in ways she could not yet articulate, and she fell asleep with the taste of silver on her tongue and the memory of the memory-vine's ancient vision pulsing behind her closed lids like a second heartbeat.
It was during one of these afternoon sessions, on the fifth day, that Malakor appeared.