Dawn of Ash (Imdalind, #6)(80)

“No. She is not here anymore. I took her somewhere else.”

“Where?” With a start of fear, the word erupted in long, hollow sounds stretching away from me.

I cringed, tensing as that strange magic increased inside me, the waves of it moving through me, blending with Joclyn’s as the sound of the laugh deepened, heightened.

“She loved you very much, you know.” All signs of the game she had been playing were lost in the heaviness of her voice, the sound of the echoed laugh running over it.

“Loved?” Fear and anger erupted with the single word as the laugh continued to resonate, as if someone had bumped a gramophone, the sound coming again and again.

I could feel my temper rise to dangerous levels, my anger increasing until Joclyn’s magic swelled again. The warmth of it wrapped around me so tightly it was all I could focus on, and the weight of my anger seeped away with it, the sound of the laugh fading to shadows until it was just me and the heavy familiarity of Joclyn’s magic pulling at my mind and soul.

The weight of her pressed against my chest, lying over my arms. Just as she was in the world I had come from, before I had been pulled into this place.

I stopped. The knot in my stomach spun abruptly at the revelation that was whipping me around. I had dismissed it so easily before, but there was nothing else …

“You are thinking about it again,” the child chastised. My mind focused back on that room, on the girl I held. “About where you are, about what this is. Have you figured it out yet?”

“This is a sight.”

She laughed at my revelation, the joyful sound making it clear I was right.

“Yes.” The laugh dripped off her voice. “This is where sights live, where they are created. This is a sight before it is seen, when it is full of possibilities and futures. This is the very base of Drak magic. This is where everything begins and ends.”

“But there is nothing here,” I gasped, knowing how ridiculous it sounded. I knew magic better than any. But this … This did not feel like magic. I felt no power. I felt no strength. It was only the empty space of my mind.

“Yes. Would you like to see your beginning or ending?”

I didn’t even have a chance to respond before her laugh rebounded, the sound loud and haunting. The white void I was trapped in shifted and spun as I watched, my mind aching with the change, with the force and power of the magic I was being subjected to.

With wide eyes, I watched the white meld into vibrant colors and shapes. My heart tensed at what I was about to see before the image landed on a room I knew all too well.

My parents’ bedroom.

“Your beginning first, I think,” the child’s voice whispered, her voice mellow as the mysterious magic within me spread. The light, joyful nature of it seeped away my fear as I looked in on a room I had been in thousands of times before.

It was my own space within Imdalind now, but it hadn’t looked like this for centuries. The wide bed took up much of the massive room, ancient furnishings cluttering the space. It was in this room that I had held Ovailia for the first time—her, a tiny infant; me, an adult.

Shocked, I looked as my mother lay in that same bed. Her blonde hair was wound in a long braid, the golden ribbon woven through the intricate weave. The length flowed over the bed, wrapped with my father’s, the délka vedení královsk intertwined. Just as they did with Joclyn and me, I realized with a start.

My father sat nestled against my mother, his dark hair longer, his face softer, his eyes smiling. I didn’t think I had ever seen so much joy in his eyes. I didn’t think I had ever seen my mother so happy as I did right then, as they sat in that bed, holding an infant in their arms.

I watched the scene before me, watched the father of my childhood memories. I had almost forgotten that smile, forgotten the way his eyes lit up when he smiled. I had forgotten how he used to love, that he used to know how.

“Give him the stone, darling,” my mother whispered.

Father smiled at her before he kissed her, the longing apparent as she laughed, before pulling away with the same joy in his eyes.

Smiling, he placed a small, white stone against the hand of the child. The tiny, white bead turned a violent shade of blue the second it made contact with my skin.

My parents looked at the transition in awe. Mother gasped before she laughed while Father’s smile expanded in awe.

The tiny birthstones usually took time to change, took time to connect with the infantile magic, time to pull it to that one spot. This time, it was instantaneous.

“You began there,” the voice came again as the image of my parents faded back to the void.

My head spun with the strength of Joclyn’s magic, the force of it like a confirmation.

“So this is what she is? It’s amazing. She’s amazing.” Awe dripped from me at the remarkable reality I was facing, the void seeming to be more than the empty nothing I had taken it to be. “How am I seeing this?”

“You hold the water in your body, more than any other who does not bear my blood. You have been burned for the one who speaks to your soul, for the one who came to change it all. You have survived its pain and bonded yourself to the one the mud has chosen to guide my kind. You are powerful, Ilyan Krul. I will allow you to see.” The childlike quality of the voice had deepened. The laugh that lived behind the words shifted to a darkness that wound through me, becoming an aged wisdom it hadn’t portrayed before.