Unbroken (First of the Blade Book 6), page 21
“How can she be dying? She’s a Porapeth.”
“Porapeth are not immortal. So we have seen. They live a long life. Many creatures live a long life. But they are not immortal. I would have thought Abigail had told you that as well. And Aneadaz, Timo, and the other one tore parts of her away.”
“She didn’t say anything about seeing it coming.”
Imogen moved her hand next to Abigail’s hair, running her fingers through it. It was thin, wispy. “Perhaps she didn’t look at her own path.”
“But she was afraid of it. She didn’t want to die.”
“No,” Imogen said, knowing this from her past experience with Abigail. “It wasn’t a matter of not wanting to die. I think she’d recently come to prepare for it.” She ran her hand along her head. “And learning about Benji, about what happened after, I think, removed her fear of it.” Imogen stood back. “I think you will have to help her with this next part of her transition.”
“What next part?”
“The one all beings of magic have to undergo. She is magic, much like Benji was magic, and much like Master Liu.” Imogen looked over to see the beam of silver light still hovering off in the distance, though not getting any closer, as if Master Liu’s fragment recognized what was happening here and didn’t want to get too close, because he wanted to leave space for whatever was happening to Abigail. “And I don’t know what Abigail might do, if she might provide you with anything, but if she does…”
Lilah hesitated a moment. Then she leaned down and took Abigail’s hand, squeezing it. “Maybe I could have the Porapeth gift.”
“Maybe,” Imogen said.
“What if she doesn’t give it to me?”
“It is hers to give or not to give,” Imogen said. “And if she chooses not to, understand that she may have seen something.”
Could she have seen something about Imogen?
That didn’t seem right. Benji had made it clear that he could not see anything when it came to Imogen. He had tried, and he had attempted to follow what he had seen, wanting to observe anything he could, but he had not been able to do that. So why Imogen?
That was a question that Imogen had often had. Why her?
Abigail took a deep breath.
Zealar flew overhead, building power, though he did not release it. The ground had been leveled around where he circled, leaving a barren landscape littered with the bodies of monsters out of a nightmare. Most of them were made of stone, though some were twisted hunks of broken wood, and still others were pieces of sharp metal that gleamed in the fading daylight.
“Imogen?”
She turned back.
She had thought it was Lilah calling for her, but it wasn’t. It was Abigail.
Abigail looked up at her. “I see,” she said, her voice faint, wispy.
“You will join Benji,” Imogen said.
“I see,” she said again.
“What do you see?”
She rolled her head to the side, and as she did, she squeezed both Lilah’s and Imogen’s hands. Then Imogen felt a strange trembling.
It was soft. It was a light whisper, one that joined her, swirling into her mind. The sense was faint, but distinct. A fragment of power. And then it mingled and merged with what she believed to be Benji.
Next to her, Lilah gasped.
“I can feel it,” she said. “She gave me a gift.” She looked over at Imogen, and then she frowned.
Imogen had been given a fragment of Abigail, a bit of her Porapeth power, though Imogen wasn’t sure why. It mingled with the sense of Benji deep inside her, as if they were meant to be united.
Then there was a burst of light. Silvery light. It went streaking up overhead, and out, toward the sky.
Abigail may have given Lilah and Imogen fragments of power, but she had not given all of it. Most of it went up, joining with the sky, with the stars. And with Benji.
“What did she see?” Imogen asked, looking over at Lilah.
“I don’t know.”
There was nothing here, really, other than Abigail.
At least, not that Imogen had seen.
She ran her hand along the ground, feeling the rock, and feeling the energy that was here. There had to be something here that would help her understand just what Abigail had been after, and what she had detected. But even as she focused, feeling the energy all around her, Imogen could not tell what more was here. She just believed there was something more.
She spread her hand out and around, tracing the stone, and then she began to push.
This time, she pushed using what she had been given by Abigail.
It was a strange thing to do, stranger still in that it seemed easy, relatively so, to do. She could feel the energy, and Imogen began to detect that power, and that connection, so that she understood just what she might be able to do. By holding on to the connection, she could feel something more, and she recognized that there was a certain power within it.
It was that power that combined with what Benji possessed. It seemed faint, but it was simply a matter of trying to make sense of it, a matter of understanding the power that was there, and a matter of feeling what it was, and how it was. The more she felt of it, the more certain she was of what she detected.
It was what Abigail had provided. It was the connection that she had gifted. And Imogen saw.
She spun suddenly.
It was significant, and enough so that Imogen could feel the energy but could also feel the way that it was rising within her.
“Did she show you this?” she asked, focusing on Lilah.
“Did she show me what?”
“What I see. I see…”
Several of the silvery strands of possibilities circled around her, giving her more to focus on, but she did not know what to make of them. Power coalesced, and she attempted to understand that power, but she found that she could not. She saw bursts, and it took her a moment to realize what it was.
It was Aneadaz.
“She ran from him,” Imogen said. “And I know where he was sending these creatures from.”
“What do we do?” Lilah asked.
Imogen wasn’t sure. Aneadaz was the real threat, as was Timo, and this Chauvan, but for now, it was primarily Aneadaz. She had to find some way to overwhelm him, but she wasn’t sure what that would involve. Aneadaz was a fragment, and magic could not be destroyed, just transformed. She knew that.
There was a question in Lilah’s eyes, which mixed with an uncertainty that Imogen understood. Could they stop Aneadaz?
A silvery form floated near her. “We need to go,” Master Liu’s fragment said.
Imogen looked at him. “What do you mean, we need to go?”
“Can’t you feel it? Our people need us.”
While standing there, she began to feel a trembling of power.
It was faint. The distant, vague sort of sense was such that she couldn’t quite detect the source of it, but the combination of Benji and Abigail opened up different possibilities from what she’d had before. More than that, she had gained a level of control she had never had before. She forced those silvery strands out from her, straining to better understand.
“I see,” Imogen said, and she turned to where Lilah was crouching next to Abigail still. It was strange for Imogen to know the possibilities, but stranger still was that those new possibilities felt different than what she’d ever seen with Benji’s gift.
But it wasn’t what she could see on her own.
She didn’t have the knowledge to do that. She didn’t have the experience. There was what Benji offered her, but even what Benji offered was not enough. It was only once Abigail began to add her connection that Imogen began to see something more to make sense of it.
I see.
And she did.
“You will need to use the Porapeth gift to know what is here,” Imogen said. “In time, you will be able to see the possibilities. Right now, I don’t know how to control the gift myself, though the addition of a bit of Abigail’s power to what Benji provided gives me more than I had before. I can see the possibilities in ways that I could not before.”
Lilah watched her. “But I don’t see those same possibilities. I feel like they are there, but I do not know how to control the gift.”
“And I’m not sure that I will be able to help you find any way of controlling it, either, only that there are possibilities. It is not a matter of control.”
“I can feel incredible power.”
“Yes. As you will.” Imogen closed her eyes for a moment, and she began to see the various possibilities before her. And she knew what she needed to do. “It is time for us to find Aneadaz.”
“You know how we can? If we can?”
“Oh, I know that we will.” Imogen could see it. And as she focused on the possibilities, she also saw something else. If she were to bring others with her, if she were to bring her people with her, they would not survive. This was something that she had to do, that Lilah had to join her on, and surprisingly, the fragment of Master Liu had to help.
With a burst of Lightning Strikes in the Storm, Imogen carried them up toward Zealar.
Eleanor had stayed atop him, waiting.
“We just lost another Porapeth. The last Porapeth.”
“What does that mean?” Eleanor asked.
Imogen breathed out heavily. No more Porapeth. It was the end of an era, the end of power. What would it be the beginning of?
Chapter Twenty-Six
The group of three traveled for a while atop the renral before Imogen realized Zealar didn’t go in the direction she had thought he would.
“I think we’re not headed the right way,” Imogen said.
The renral carried her out and away from where she thought they were supposed to go.
But then she wondered why. Hadn’t she seen where they needed to go? And because she had seen it, she had thought to convey it to Zealar. But as they traveled, Imogen began to question whether what she had seen was right. Could Aneadaz somehow influence what she observed?
He had drawn on Porapeth power, so it had to be at least somewhat possible.
And Zealar seemed to know that, carrying them to where the renral knew they needed to go, bringing them back to the Heart.
“Why are we going this way?” Lilah asked.
“I don’t know. I was showing Zealar an image,” Imogen said, realizing how strange that sounded, but also knowing that was exactly what she had been doing. “And this is where he’s brought me. Why is that?”
Eleanor had been quiet, but as soon as she took in the scenery around them, that changed.
“Are you not connected to the renral the right way?” Eleanor asked.
“I thought…”
Maybe it wasn’t how she was connected to the renral.
Maybe it was the image.
And though she attempted to do so, she could not push all the way through the image. Something seemed to resist her.
At first Imogen wasn’t sure what it was, but the more she focused on it, the more she began to see just what it was that she had been viewing, and the more she recognized what it was.
The image had been incomplete.
Not only had the image been incomplete, but it had been modified.
It seemed impossible, but Zealar’s intrinsic resistance to magic allowed her to see through what was ahead of her. She saw the Heart, the base of the plateau. She saw where she had first seen Aneadaz, Timo, and Chauvan. She saw the creatures. That was the true image. Finally, she focused on what she saw off in the distance. Energy.
And Zealar streaked toward it.
The ground below her was a roiling landscape of Leier destruction. Their homes. Their villages. Everything about the Leier had been taken away from them. No differently than it had been taken from the Koral.
They fragmented my people.
“What are they doing?” Eleanor asked.
Imogen looked at what Eleanor had indicated, and she saw the circling of the renral. There were dozens of them, and they were making a strange, fluctuating pattern as they hovered in place, power cascading down.
And Zealar was heading over the top.
Imogen frowned. “I don’t know.”
“It seems they’re creating magic,” Lilah said. “Can the renral do that?”
“Well, we’ve seen that the renral have a resistance to magic, and from what I’ve seen, they also have a way of creating magic, though it’s different than anything else that we have encountered. So…” She shrugged. “I guess that’s a long-winded way of saying yes. They can.”
“It’s amazing,” Lilah said, her voice a whisper. “I remember you talking about the renral and the power you’re able to summon from them, but I thought it was tied to your connection to the renral, not that the renral themselves were able to do anything quite like that.”
Imogen could feel power flowing, the renral shifting their complicated pattern to something new. She didn’t understand the pattern but saw flashes through the possibilities of what the renral demonstrated. More than that, she began to realize this power could add something to her own.
Zealar reached a point above the other renral.
An image flashed in her mind. Imogen knew what she needed to do.
“Go with Zealar,” she said to Eleanor and Lilah. “Defend the Heart. I don’t know what they intend with these dark creatures, but we need to defend against them.”
“First?” Eleanor asked.
“This is something I have to do.” She took out Master Liu’s stone, into which he had once again retreated as they had departed Abigail’s cabin. “And I think—no, I know that I’m the only one able to do this. I’ve seen it.” She looked back at Lilah, holding her gaze. “And if you focus on the gift you were given, you will see it as well.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means this has to happen.”
With that, Imogen jumped.
Even though she had separated from Zealar, the connection remained. Power flowed through him, and she borrowed even more of it.
She streaked down through the renral, down through the circle that they made, and shifted from Lightning Strikes in the Storm, which she had been drawing upon, to Petals on the Wind, before shifting from that into the renral pattern. It was the renral pattern that she needed. That was what she had to add to in order to succeed, though even as she dropped, Imogen wasn’t sure that she could succeed in this. But it was the only thing she could see. It was the blinding bright light.
And as she came to land, she realized she was not alone.
She looked over. Lilah was there.
“What are you doing?” Imogen asked.
“I saw something, too.”
That was the only thing that Lilah was able to say to her.
Imogen felt power streaking toward her, and she had just enough time to react to it.
She spun, blade outstretched, Tree Stands in the Forest.
Renral power coursed along the branches of her Tree.
“I thought I would find you again,” a familiar voice said.
She looked ahead. Timo was there.
Imogen had Lilah wrapped inside her Tree, protecting her. She didn’t know if Lilah had any way of creating her own barricade, but this would at least offer a measure of protection until Imogen had to attack.
“You can release them. They won’t hold. We’ve created countless fragments. It is over, Imogen.” Timo motioned toward the renral circling overhead.
He was thinner than she remembered. His hair was cut short. His eyes danced with a manic energy. And there was something about him that seemed angry in a way that Timo had never been before.
Not only that, though. He looked powerful. He seemed to be radiating a distinct energy beyond what Timo had ever possessed.
“They’ve held you back so far, obviously, you and your master.” Imogen looked around and realized that it wasn’t just Timo, much like she had suspected. There was this other figure—Chauvan—and the fragment of Aneadaz.
He glowed with a bright silvery light. The energy emanated from Aneadaz, and he seemed to be drawing upon even more power.
He was drawing upon the Heart.
It was making them stronger.
Had he been here the entire time?
Timo laughed. “Are you only now seeing it?”
“Am I only now seeing what?”
“Think of all the searching that you’ve done. I’ve been here, watching. We have all been. And you’ve gone on your little quests, thinking you could save them. But you have strengthened him.”
Not upon the Heart, Imogen suddenly realized.
He was drawing upon the Leier and the Koral. Somehow.
Timo didn’t move. He didn’t need to. “You brought them all here, concentrating this power. And thankfully, you made it easier for us. Keeping them here, keeping us all here, has allowed us to draw what we need. This was a place of power long ago. A way to concentrate it. Store it.”
Imogen blinked.
Store it?
There was only one thing she could think of. Fragmented power.
It had always been said that her people went to stand among the stars and watch over the living, but what if those fragments had stayed here in the Heart?
Her extracting that dark power had only helped Aneadaz.
“If you still serve him, then you know he’s not going to give you anything,” Imogen said.
“Oh, but there is where you are wrong,” Timo said. “He has made his promise to us. To me.”
“You would take the promise of a dead Sul’toral?”
Timo glanced past him. “Is he dead?”
“He’s a fragment.”
“No. When you killed him, he did not fragment. He remained intact.” Timo grinned. “And because he did, he grew stronger. And now you can do nothing.”
“What do we do?” Lilah whispered.
“We have to use what we see.”
“I don’t understand how to do that yet. Abigail never taught me… Wait.”
With that, Lilah jumped forward.
And she lunged at the one known as Chauvan.
Timo chuckled. “She is inexperienced and poorly trained. She won’t last long against him.”
