Imbued, page 27
“Fourth, I don’t understand.”
They just shook their head. “It’s better if you don’t. It will be fine. You will live. I will live. And the danger will be gone.”
I only understood one thing, and the pain of it sliced through my heart like a knife. “You want me to leave you?”
Only then did their face fall and I saw the first sign of hesitance since they’d woken me up. “You have to. You have to take it and go. Otherwise, I can’t...and she’s going to—”
“But how do you know you’ll be safe? What if—”
“I can protect myself,” they snapped. I clenched my jaw, any further complaint dying halfway up my throat. They’d never talked to me like this before. It must have shown on my face, too, because they gave a sigh. “I don’t want to do this. But if she finds out I have it, she will destroy everything. It’s too dangerous.”
“Can’t you just get rid of it?” I cried. I almost really did cry, they seemed so serious and desperate. But then we could both stay, be together, and maybe, one day, break free.
They inclined their head, thinking. “I don’t know how to put it back. And it has to be bound to someone. Don’t worry. It will not hurt you. I can bury it in you like I bury my magic. It will be like nothing ever happened. She will never find it. You trust me, right?” they asked. There were tears in their eyes. “Because we need to do this now.”
Why were they always sending me away? Always hiding things, always telling half-truths. “I don’t want to,” I said, trembling.
“And I don’t want you to die!”
They broke down crying then, lunging at me like always, and we embraced for a long moment, so tightly that I felt their body shaking. I didn’t want to let go. I couldn’t. Only a day before, everything had been like it always was, and now...
I had no one but them. I couldn’t let go.
“I saw her maps. There’s a place not far to the south.” Fourth was whispering into my shoulder, their tears trickling down my arm. “You will find it. You will be safe. Just keep south, and keep running. I promise it will be alright. She will never get to you.”
I wanted to argue, to push back, to say I wouldn’t do it, but if Vesper really wanted to kill me, did I have a choice?
“Come with me,” I breathed.
They released me. They were smiling, but it was the saddest thing I’d ever seen. “I can’t. I have to make her believe you’re dead. Lost forever. She has a hold on me, and if I go with you, she’ll find us.” They hesitated for a moment with a painful and overwhelmed look. “She’s trying to do something good, you know. She just...needs me to keep her on the path.”
I had no answer to that. I felt small, ignorant, a dumb device in whatever twisted game was played here.
Fourth shook themself and looked at me, decisive again. “After I’m done, you will be confused. It will get better. Just head south. Don’t look back. Promise me.”
I sniffled. They were so commanding and strong, and I was so weak. “I promise.”
“Repeat it. Towards the south.”
“Towards the south.”
Fourth took a step backwards and reached toward me, two hands with palms up, holding the crystals. And at that moment, they looked so much like Vesper—the confident posture, the forcefully outstretched arms, their face, clear and eager—that I couldn’t help but cringe, just so that shame could flood me the next moment when they smiled at me. That was something that Vesper never did, and it was warm, and painful, and final.
“I love you,” they said, voice shaking. “I’m sorry. This is going to hurt.”
And before I could tell them I loved them too, something cold and white and impossibly heavy enveloped me. I closed my eyes against the glare, and I was swallowed by pain and nothingness, eaten whole by a void I knew all too well.
I was falling, drowning, and disappearing. How was Fourth this powerful? What were they doing to me?
Then I saw—amber eyes, opening up in the pearly white fog. Liquid flame embraced my body; my entire being was burning in the otherworldly heat of that power. A voice rang out, somewhere far away, echoing. Torment bit into my flesh, scooping out of my mind everything I was, turning it inside out and spitting it back into reality.
“Another vessel,” someone whispered into my ear. “Another chance.”
I froze, numb. The whispers danced around me in the emptiness. A presence, larger than I could measure, loomed above me. I’d felt magic before, even if most of the time I couldn’t perform it; I’d felt Vesper’s and I’d even felt Fourth’s spells.
This was more powerful than anything I could imagine.
“We can be together, child,” the presence murmured, hypnotizing. “We can mend the wounds. We can—”
Then another voice cut in, closer this time. It was humming a familiar, old melody.
“It’s the night, the dark night, everything goes to sleep—”
It pulled me towards it like I was bound with a rope, and I swam at it, away from the fire and the pain. The voice would protect me. It wanted to help. I knew who it was...did I?
No. I didn’t. I’d forgotten, but the amber light wavered under the force of those words, shrank, lost in the distance as I drifted away.
“The dream will get you, it will take you—”
A scream, something snapping. The sensation of triumph. A laugh.
Where was I? I tried to think, but the Hollow was too deep, too empty. I was nowhere. No one. Then an echo, from somewhere impossibly distant.
“One, two, three, here comes the dream.”
Then Nothing. Then Everything.
Familiar things. Cold stone under my soles. Dripping water on an ivy-covered cavern wall. A statue of a young woman, kneeling, covering her face. A shove at my back. The muddy ground against my feet, the moist air slipping behind my garments, the breath crawling down my throat, sore and cold, the hurt below my skin dragging my body down.
“She’s coming. Run! Don’t stop running until you’re out of the forest. Go!”
It was raining in the Argent Forest of Ylliun. I ran.
I ran for a century, through miles and miles, one foot after the other, empty of reason. I ran with a terrible secret I didn’t understand hidden inside me. I ran with the voice of someone I didn’t remember reverberating in my mind. I ran, all those lost memories following me like a relentless beast, growling at the thought of me existing, chasing me far, far away from the past.
I ran, and I didn’t look back.
The scene dissolved into darkness like ink poured into a basin of water. Spent and horrified, my mind snapped away from the memory, then away from Aesh’s vision in the tent where Sita-ku was still screaming and thrashing on the ground. I swept across all that distance, back to Shihua, back to my body, and then I was lying on the ground, Gray hovering above me.
I blinked my eyes, the view ahead blurred. There was noise around me, tense voices yelling over each other, and Gray was saying something to me too, but I couldn’t hear any of it. It all seemed distant and inconsequential. The smell of water and green things permeated the air and the source at the base of my spine flickered, overflown.
I blinked again. I struggled to lean on one elbow. Through the fear and alarm over what I’d just seen and remembered, somehow, I felt light and balanced in a way I hadn’t for a long time. I looked inward, stunned, eager to trace that change, to understand.
I didn’t have to look hard. In the space behind my forehead, a pair of amber eyes flamed up.
20
Heart thumping wildly, I tore my focus away from those eyes, directing it outside. The night of reality solidified around me. Only a group of brilliant spheres illuminated the area. The noise subsided, but only just. And I could see them now, all the people around me, postures tense, ready for a fight.
“You must stand down,” Patri Sara said in a raised, measured voice. They stood directly in front of me in a circle of ten sanctuary guards. There was panic behind their calm face, shadowed in the wobbling light of the light spheres, and a question they already seemed to know the answer to.
“We will,” Gray said next to me, “as soon as you do too.”
I tried to clamber up, and he helped me stand, pulling me up by my wrists, squeezing them so it almost hurt. As soon as I was upright, he lifted his other arm like holding a shield, and there it was, too—an arc of light, a shimmering surface of energy separating us from the others with a thin layer of spell-protection.
Half my consciousness was still back with that memory, Aesh sending me away, binding that power inside me to hide it from Vesper, and half of it, sluggish, confused, tried to comprehend what was happening. I saw Marigo behind Patri, held by two figures, her face scared, pleading. Mage-guards circled us all, spears lifted, crossbows prepared, and fingers curled, a fraction of a second from releasing projectiles and spells to subdue us. And as I glanced down, I was met with a familiar sight. Grass and underbrush lay flattened under my feet and around me, leaning away from me like I stood in the middle of an explosion.
I’d lost control again. This vision Aesh or Vesper had forced on me, and the flashback that followed, managed to do something to my magic. Something I didn’t understand, something I barely dared to look at.
And although I didn’t see bodies on the ground, dead because of me, one look at Patri Sara’s face and at the way Gray took another step back beside me, defensive, told me that it didn’t matter.
“That’s quite the trust you’re asking me to place in you,” Patri Sara told Gray, but they were glaring at me. “I don’t have the luxury of making the same mistake again.”
Gray lifted his arm higher, the shield glinting in the night. “We just want to help. But we need your help first.”
This isn’t going to work, thrummed the panic in my head. And I had no time to waste. Vesper and Aesh were preparing for battle in that tent I’d just seen, and I was so close. So close to figuring it out.
Without thinking and without hesitation, I gathered that newfound light within me like it was second nature, closed my eyes to stare into the face of that amber being inside my mind, and teleported Gray and I back to the edge of the sanctuary.
Darkness and tension twisted into a hurricane, swept us up, then readjusted into darkness and silence. As we both found our footing again, Gray let go of me, spinning around, confused.
“Why did you do that? Where are we?”
I stared at my hands, distracted by the magic buzzing along my veins, coiling around my ribs to sweep over my skin right to my fingertips. Excited, alive, wild. Where was this coming from? This power, this wholeness? The eyes in my mind stared me down, questioning, provocative. I felt awake, on the verge of something.
I could almost touch them. Answers.
Every doubt and fear evaporated. There was only the certainty. The promise. No more terror. No more pain.
“This is the place,” I whispered, looking around. “This is where she kept us.”
And it hurt like someone had awoken me from a deep dream to the world burning. My gaze wandered over the shadowy woods around us and settled on the familiar bulk of a statue.
Gray followed my eyes. “Here? How?” His voice was confused. Almost scared. “That’s not possible. I should have sensed it.”
I didn’t answer. The statue drew me in, and I walked over as if in a trance.
The cave would have been unsuspecting, hiding in a little depression in the earth covered by undergrowth and thicket, if it wasn’t for the statue. It was taller than the Confab Room back at home, standing directly where one had to descend a decline of crushed earth to the cavern entrance. The sculpture seemed ancient, moss and yellow-green lichen decorating the carefully crafted furrows and protrusions on its surface.
The tall, robust form of Riidu was depicted in a kneeling posture, bent forward, hands covering her face so that only the wild, braided hair could be seen to fall around her fingers. She was wearing a ceremonial gown, weathered gold paint glinting in the dark as I summoned a light sphere beside me. Engraved embroidery patterns showed motifs of what looked like lightning strikes or strangely geometrical figures on the stone. Although the face was hidden, the artist indicated carved teardrop-shaped little clefts all over her hands, arms, and clothes. She was called the lady of tears, after all.
“Vesper came here the same reason Shihua did later. The same reason we did,” I said. “The well.”
Gray placed a hand on my shoulder. “Calla, listen. Patri will find us soon. We need to—”
“That doesn’t matter now.”
He fell quiet. My fingers brushed one of the small motifs on the stone woman’s billowy sleeves, and the amber presence inside me trembled, its liquid power flowing around me in alluring waves. Revolt and desire reared up in me. The smaller twin of this effigy was there, so very close, just behind the cave entrance. I’d seen it a thousand times before. Vesper’s shrine.
No. Not just a shrine. A shrine with an artifact, a catalyst. Just like what I’d watched happen to Sita-ku in that tent. I recognized the harp I’d seen now. It was Lenymakon’s burning instrument. An artifact of his power dug out from some lost corrupted site. Like the ones Vesper wanted from Larin Jiyan—the ones that Gray had taken from there before her.
And although I’d never seen it from the outside, my body knew this place. The smell, the light, the flutter of leaves high above, the trickling of water—an ambiance I’d heard over and over during infinite, lonely nights. Noises and lights and scent so similar to the caves of Shihua we’d just been at that I should have known. I should have known instantly, but I’d told myself I was seeing things. Everything inside me shrank until I was small and vulnerable again in the face of this return.
It was here that Vesper had made her hideout. Protected and sustained by the well just close enough to be useful but not suspicious, so she could perform her experiments—on us and who knows on how many others before. And after...after she’d gone to the Twin Soram and started her operation with Gray—did she have places like this, scattered all over Kamphua? Filled with husks of people, mages, children ruined and discarded for her noble purpose?
None of them successful attempts to imbue someone with the potential. Only me. Perhaps Aesh, but they were different in ways I didn’t yet understand.
And what about the new imbued army? Was it working? Did Vesper have the answer, finally?
“I have something,” I whispered through the increasing buzz in my head. I focused my blurring vision on Gray. “Inside me. Something that Vesper wants.”
His eyes flashed, understanding. “You saw her again.”
I held onto the stone figure, the ground slipping out from under my soles. I closed my eyes to help keep my balance, but it didn’t help. That other presence was still there, always, daring me.
“Amber eyes...” I muttered. That glare bore into me and my source cowered, numb.
“Riidu?” I felt Gray wince but he held onto me. “No. How?”
My whole body tensed up. I had it right at the tip of my tongue. All the answers I needed, I knew them already. I’d just seen it all, I’d just remembered. I was right back where it started, and everything made sense now. Riidu had amber eyes on her rare depictions when not covering her face. Liquid orange. The golden lady of tears.
At the same time, suddenly I knew, more certainly than anything, that there was nothing in that miserable little cave that I had to see. It was dead, abandoned, empty. It was not why I came.
A rustling sound from somewhere behind made me flinch. My eyes snapped open and I whirled around to peer amongst the shades of the night, the trees, the brush, and the darkness. Not far behind the little glen with the statue, opposite of where we’d come from, there was an area of sparser vegetation and for a moment, I thought I heard something from there, whispers, maybe, or the stomping of a horse or a nugar. Our unfortunate run-in with the kootars flashed through my mind and I waited, listening.
“Did you hear that?” I sent to Gray. I turned to him—but by the time I finished the motion, I wasn’t in the forest anymore.
I was in another place. A battlefield drenched in blood and death as far as the eye could see.
It was a great green plain lit golden by a rising sun. Shadowy clumps of human forms—hundreds—marched forward on a declining muddy ground to clash with mounted soldiers in ornate coats descending a distant hill. Behind me, from the shade of a sparse forest, arrows and spears launched, slicing the air in wide arcs to reach their victims in a splash of entrails and a cacophony of screaming in the distance. Farther still, enemy arrows cutting through the air collided with shining shields of protective energy conjured above a slow procession of simply clad people. Hooks of magic burst forth from the palms of the marching figures, clasping around the throats and chests of armored fighters, taking their lives in but a short second.
The soil under my feet—purple grains soaked with blood—was rough; the air smelled of smoke; blotches of burning constructs glinted orange into my eyes far, far ahead. And beyond it all, a towering city of gold against steep green mountainsides.
Kanmane.
The vision flowed through me freely, unobstructed—I was a channel, a riverbed molded by its force. Vesper, because it had to be her, decided to put on a show for me again.
My view shook—I wanted to stop the vision and see it at the same time, my magic trembling in both curiosity and fear, pulling me into two different directions. And the presence in me teetered too—it flowed forth, blinding my view with pearly white for a second, yanking me out of the reverie. I lost my balance, the war-torn landscape pivoting around me, then I slammed back into the world—back to the hideout, back beside Gray.
