Dawn of Ash (Imdalind, #6)(33)

It was ribbons of smoke and color that stretched away from me like cloth and air. It felt the same as every time I spread the magic from me, as every time I used the sight.

But this time, I could see it.

I could see the tendrils of my ability. I could see ribbons of sight that played the past and future like a movie reel.

I watched them move away from me in awe, a heavy vise squeezing my body and threatening to collapse me. My legs lost all feeling as Ilyan held me against him, his body frozen in this odd, suspended space.

As my head spun, the ribbons of sight shifted, their movements speeding up into a blur I couldn’t focus through. Heart pounding, I clung to Ilyan, gasping for breath, watching the vivid pattern of light and dark. Everything spun; everything moved so quickly I wasn’t sure which way was up or down or what was happening … until it stopped.

The movement ceased as though someone had pressed stop, leaving Ilyan and I hovering amongst lines of color so vibrant and brilliant I was sure I had never seen anything so beautiful before, not even in the world I had been raised in.

Staring at them, mouth agape, I watched the strings of never-ending colors stretch through the tunnel in tessellating motions of sound. I watched sight, watched life, watched sound that stretched beyond us, before us, and behind us. It was like we were trapped in them, like we were moving through them.

Staring at them, my head spun more, the heavy weight of what I now recognized as sight pressing against my chest.

A sight.

Could this be sight? I wondered. A sight inside of a stutter? The thought was as ridiculous and far-fetched as a bad sci-fi movie, but I couldn’t shake it.

Although, what my magic would be trying to show me here, I did not know. It was nothing more than color, nothing more than wavering lines that surrounded us, moved around us.

Before I could look further, the colors faded to nothing, spiraling into the ebony abyss that surrounded us. The pressure of the stutter slammed against me in disorienting dizziness as we were pulled out of the void and back into reality.

The end of the stutter jerked through me like paper and tape pulled away from one another, too much of me left behind in the void, too much of the void left behind in me. It stuck to my bones and made my spine ache.

Attempting to focus on the world I was surrounded by, I was assaulted by everything revolving, shifting. I could barely make out the church, could barely see the great archway to the left.

I was certain there were people in front of me, but even that was twisted and undistinguishable behind the ember burn now blocking my vision, the red and black of my sight growing darker.

It encompassed me with an intensity I hadn’t felt since the first time I used my sight in the cave in Italy.

The cobbles against my knees were the last things I felt as I collapsed to the ground, Ilyan’s hand a hard pressure against my back as he tried to support me, his magic attempting to connect with mine. I felt the power, felt the heat of it, only to be met with a wall of sight so powerful I screamed as the world within my sight did, as everything turned to red and fire and death.

My world was sight: past, present, and confusion.

The red city swam below me, my vision drifting lazily from above the rooftops as though I was attached to the belly of an airplane. Watching with thundering anticipation, I waited for the bomb to fall, waited for the city to burn.

Instead of what I had always seen, however, I continued flying right through the barrier, into a world shrouded with a deep blue sky and covered with a blanket of white snow.

My sight had never taken me beyond Edmund’s barricade before. Even when I had tried, I had never been able to penetrate its surface. My magic had been as trapped as we were.

Now, as I flew through the bitter wind, snowflakes falling over me in wet, little specks that shook through my spine, I could see. What was more, I could feel. I could feel the cold, feel the wet. I knew they were not there, because I could still feel the hard, cobbled courtyard against my knees and hear the voices of whoever was at the church, mumbling over us like a garbled song.

Everything was real.

The sight was real.

Shivering from the snow, I continued to soar over the barren wasteland. Eyes on alert, I searched for whatever I was meant to see, wondering what could be this close to the barrier.

There was nothing other than snow, nothing other than whiteness, until the white wasn’t so white anymore. The beautiful, untouched drifts of snow were trampled with mud, the flattened earth speckled with tents I had seen scarcely a few months before outside of Rioseco when Ilyan and I had gone to destroy one of Edmund’s many camps.

A camp that was now right below me.

They were the same.

My sight moved me closer as I searched through the tents, my eyes wide as I looked for whatever this vision wanted me to see, only to have everything freeze, the howling of the icy wind broken up by voices—one deep and guttural, another high and whiney, both mixed with the mumbling groans of fear and trepidation.

I trembled at the emotion behind the sounds, something in my heart tugging at a familiarity I couldn’t place with the heavy Czech they were using.

The heavy, Slavic accents drifted up from a small group of people directly below me. The man in the cloak stood in the middle of them, and directly before him stood Ovailia.

Everything in me tightened in fear, my throat frantic for a scream that would not come. It was the creature who had been in so many of my sights, right below me. Not in the streets of Prague as he usually was, not inside the barrier as he had been moments before, but right below me with Ovailia.