Dawn of Ash (Imdalind, #6)(58)

“Move.”

I did, even while my joints were aching, even while every pull of my body over the stone cut into me, glass and rock and who knew what else falling down from the heavens. With each desperate pull of my arms, flashes of sight surrounded me: flickers of blood, sun-bathed beaches, children laughing, and dying and crying and bombs.

They surrounded me, the uncertainty frightening, but I couldn’t focus on it. I couldn’t dwell. I could only follow the voice as I moved toward it while calling to Ilyan over and over within my mind. He never responded, though for brief moments, I could feel his magic, feel his concern as snippets of what sounded like his voice broke through. Nothing more than that. It was like the connection was severed, like the strength of my sight was smothering it. Frayed wires that weren’t connected, no matter how much electricity you tried to move through them.

A rumble shook the world I was trapped in, shaking the floor as I screamed, clinging to the floor as if it was going to collapse underneath me. A crash of stone and bone reverberated through the destruction that lived in my mind. Tears streamed down my face as I reached the doors to the massive hall, my hands sore, knees screaming in agony. I didn’t want to move any farther. I wasn’t confident I could.

Clawing at the old, wooden frame, I pulled myself up, my legs shaking as the world shifted. My heart plummeted as, turning, I faced the destruction of the cathedral I had escaped. The once ornate, ancient architecture surrounding me was in piles of rubble and clouds of dust. I saw it for a moment before my sight pulled me back into that same blinding light as before, surrounding me with it.

White stretched before me in a brilliance that washed the cathedral away. Everything glowed with a white-hot heat, tongues of red and yellow licking in the distance like waves on white sand. They moved in the sunset I was trapped in, gaining proximity as I watched, as they burned everything.

Burning. The word stuck against my ribs as the light continued to move into me, my muscles constricting painfully at the realization of what I was surrounded by.

A bomb.

I was inside of an explosion.

I gawked at it, waiting for the sight to change, waiting for it to give some answer.

But it didn’t. It didn’t even so much as deviate.

It simply burned.

“You must move,” the voice came again, so close I turned, expecting again to see the formless shape of white. Instead, I faced myself … or, rather, me in a few hundred years.

I stood in the white space, staring at the vision of myself. A crown of red blood dripped over her face from her hairline, her eyes a hollow black staring yet unable to see.

I fought the need to scream at what I saw, at the blood, at the sight, at the death that echoed from her.

“Hurry, Joclyn,” the other me spoke, the voice I had heard suddenly making sense.

My heart rate accelerated in agonizing fear before she disappeared into a speck of black against the brilliant white. Black so dark I was convinced it was devouring the light, sucking it into a vortex of nothing.

“Hurry,” the other me said again.

Before I knew it, I was running toward it, running despite my aching joints, despite gasping for breath. The fear mounted at what had happened and what I would be facing.

There was only the sound of my frantic breathing, the black spec before me taking shape, molding itself into the bodies of two people.

I could see their outline, see the way they held each other, feel the way their power moved around them.

No, not around, not between. Away. Away from them.

I had been wrong before. They weren’t consuming this power; they were creating it.

They were the bomb.

Continuing my run toward the pair, I looked around for some clue as to what I was supposed to see, what insight this was supposed to give me. There was nothing. No matter how much I ran toward the two figures, I wasn’t getting any closer.

My fear was increasing, my panic stuttering through me.

“Joclyn!”

The familiar scream pulled me out of the world I was trapped in, the two figures replaced by one I would recognize anywhere—the way he moved, the swing of his hair so familiar to me now.

“Ilyan!”

He ran toward me as I toward him, my body stuck within the blinding sight, his running through it until I could see the wild worry lining his normally bright blue eyes.

I saw him, but I saw so much more.

I saw him from two hundred years ago, running like a shadow through the ancient halls, his face wide in terror as he raced away from something. The fear in him was more than I had ever seen before, the strength of it infecting me.

“Ilyan!” I sighed, collapsing in his arms as the frightened shadow of the ancient man continued to run past us, a scream breaking from the sight and ringing in my ears. “What’s coming?”

I felt his strong arms, but all I could see now was the fear in his eyes, the scream on his lips. Before I knew it, the scream was coming from me, the same voice I had heard before yelling from somewhere around us.

“Run!”





“He’s late.” My father’s voice was a growl from where he stood beside me, the heavy frustration that was intertwined with it putting me on high alert.

“I’m aware,” I said to no one in particular.

Of course he was late. Sain was partially reliable at best; it would make sense he would pick today, when my father had chosen to meet with Sain inside the city, inside the dome, to push the limits of what was acceptable.