Dawn of Ash (Imdalind, #6)(57)

Violent waves of heat ripped through me, the magic ripping through my flesh, convincing me I was being torn in two. I could feel the warm blood spread over my skin. I could smell it.

“You can’t have her!” she yelled again, the sound of her anger barely distinguishable above my agonizing screams. The sound mixed with the heat of her attack in a pressurized agony.

I clawed at it. I screamed louder, certain my head was about to implode, rivers of warm wetness flowing from my ears.

“Help!” I screamed, knowing it was no use.

I pried my eyes open, only to face her retreating back as she ran out of the cathedral at a high sprint, the sound of her retreat drowned by my screams.

“Ilyan!”

Her back was the last thing I saw before I collapsed to the ground in a ball of agony.

The sights took control with more strength, more force than I had ever felt. Sight after sight flashed before my eyes. The strength of them grew with each image until they were embedded in my soul, speaking to me, a part of me, as if they were me.

Before, I always looked into the visions. The visions always took me to what I needed to see. Right then, the sight surrounded me. It was a piece of reality, and I was a piece of it.

Ilyan, I gasped, practically screaming his name in my desperation to get his attention from where he and Risha were off surveying another part of the city.

Nothing came in return. No sound. No response. Not even the whisper of the fear I had felt moments ago. I lay there, paralyzed by the agonizing pressure in my bones that mixed with the weight of the visions until I could barely think. I lay, helpless, watching the images of children laughing in a field turn into strips of a grey-green sky.

Lifting my head toward the door, I took a heaving breath, trying to think, trying to find a way out, desperate to push my way out of the sight enough so I could move, so I could see where I was going. The sky faded to the cathedral I was trapped in, the two images casting shadows over one another, making it hard to know what was real and what was sight.

The large chapel was full of ancient pews and men in long robes while women cowered in fear of a god they didn’t understand. They moved around me, apparitions of smoke and past, people of a time long forgotten, surrounding me as though they were real.

“Ilyan,” I gasped aloud as I watched them, watched as time shifted.

The robed men were replaced with Victorian women in high lace collars and frilled dresses. A tall lady with her hair in curls walked past me, a white parasol flung over her shoulder. I looked from her to a child in knickers and a cap who ran away from a very haggard looking nun. A chill of ice rippled up my spine as he ran right through me, his body swirling into wisps of smoke at the collision.

“Ilyan!”

My arms gave way as I crumpled to the floor with such force my face compacted with tile in a thwack that resounded through my skull. The pain of before increased, the strain so much now I could barely think through it.

For a moment, I worried that what was before me was based more on injury than magic until the same booming voice of before crashed through the pain and took the last of it away, letting me see the past as it was, letting me feel the future.

“This is sight. This is real. This is pure,” the unfamiliar woman said, the loud boom crashing through me as the sights did.

“Ilyan,” I gasped, anxious to hear him now.

Joclyn! With a boom, his voice broke through the sight, broke through my mind in a rush of panic.

I relaxed at the sound, at the flutters of his magic that I felt moving through me, only to have them leave again, the connection breaking up like a flickering light bulb.

Where …? Are … okay …?

His questions faded to nothing as the sight gained control, the magic coming on so fast I screamed with the force of it, the strength of the vision suffocating.

A man, Edmund maybe, holding a baby as he stood near an ocean. It was calm, relaxing, yet my body didn’t feel the emotion. I didn’t feel the cool air of the sea. I felt heat, felt the heavy thump of fear that moved through my chest. I couldn’t ignore the fear that perhaps he was going to throw the wriggling infant into the ocean.

The vision faded back into the distorted haze of the cathedral I was in, and this time, my sight showed me the medieval workers who had built the magnificent building and Ilyan standing before me as he worked amongst them. His hair was short as I had seen it before, his face spread with a wide smile as he lifted the massive stones.

Ilyan. I wasn’t certain whom I was calling to: the man before me or the man in reality. It didn’t matter; neither answered.

“You must move.” That voice came again, the foreign familiarity of it frightening.

I looked up into the overlay of sight I was surrounded by, expecting to see the voiced woman standing before me, instructing me. However, it was nothing more than a few boys fighting with wooden swords, Ilyan and his fellow workers long since faded into history.

“You must move.” The forceful voice came from a dense space of white near the door to the cathedral, the oddly shifting mass calling me toward it.

I didn’t dare question it, not with the power behind it, not with the way it rattled my bones and connected with my soul.

Looking toward the door, my vision shifted to a cathedral bare of any past or future shadows. It was now. It was pieces of glass that fell from the sky like rain. It was a white shape still standing near the door, the shifting mass looking more human the longer I looked at it.