Runebinder (The Runebinder Chronicles #1)(83)

“With this smoke I purify you,” she said. “In body, mind and spirit, you are clean.”

If only it were that easy.

She drew the smoke about her, smudging herself, and then raised her hands to the heavens.

“On this night, we call to you and beg for your guidance. Like a fire in the dark, we seek to bring light to this world. Let us be the flame, the star. Let us be the way to wholeness.” She swept her arms down and looked at her clan, then gestured to the blanket on the ground. He just stared at her before realizing she wanted him to lie down. He did so, staring up at her as she continued waving the smoke over his body.

She knelt by his side and placed the herbs on a patch of dirt, then whispered in his ear, “Close your eyes, Tenn, and let the drums guide you. Delve deep into the earth, to where the Ancestors sleep. They will guide you from there.”

For the briefest moment, she rested her hand on his temple, the lightest butterfly of a touch. Then she stood.

The drumming began.

It reverberated in his bones, made his whole body vibrate. It was a pulse, a heartbeat, the very hum of life. He had worried he wouldn’t know what to do, that this was all some smoke-and-mirrors bullshit, but the moment the drumming started, he felt himself fall. His body became heavy. His Spheres flared into life. And like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, he felt his consciousness sliding into the soil.

Stars streaked across his closed eyes as the tunnel took him deeper, deeper, his mind or spirit or whatever it was riding the beat of the drums like a horse into the underworld.

The tunnel seemed to stretch on forever, and soon he forgot that he was actually lying on the ground beside a bonfire. It was like a dream, that world, and it slid from his mind as another reality woke him.

After an eternity, or no time at all, the tunnel opened before him. He stepped into a cavern that glowed white as snow, light coming from every crystalline surface. Water swirled at his feet, but it wasn’t cold or warm or wet. It had a presence, a vibration like static, and it made his whole body hum. He looked around at the vast expanse, at the great stalactites dripping down from a ceiling that glowed the dull gray of a wintry night sky. Something splashed at his feet, a ripple that drew his gaze down to the shimmering waters.

A tiny fish swam against his calves, its scales glinting silver and light. He knelt down. The fish didn’t swim away, and in that moment he realized the fish wasn’t reflecting light, but creating it. The creature glowed like a platinum star.

He reached into the water. It felt like sifting through electrified smoke. He cupped his hands.

The fish swam between his fingertips. It tingled, sent chimes flurrying across his skin. Its light grew.

Light spiraled through his arms, twisted around his chest. He felt his skin dissolve, his body unraveling into tendrils of radiance as he floated, hovering above the water in a cave that was more than a cave. It was a body, a womb, a heart.

He looked down to the water that shone like a mirror, at the fish that was a constellation of stars. He saw his reflection as fluid as smoke, as luminescent as moonlight. It glimmered like a thousand dancing fireflies.

It changed.

The face that stared back was no longer his. The waters now showed a boy his age, a boy with burnt hair and rings in his lower lip. His eyes breathed galaxies, a thousand suns whirling like the lights that swam across the water’s surface.

Tenn reached out to touch the boy and felt the entire earth hum with need. Find him, find him, and for a moment, he forgot himself, why he’d come there, all of it replaced by the one need to reach out and touch this boy he had never seen. But that movement caused the water to ripple, and the boy’s face vanished in the dust of stars.

How do I find him? Tenn asked, or thought he asked.

The lights kept moving, tracing patterns over the water, tracing a pattern that burned into his mind. Over and over the lights moved, the runes glowing so bright it was blinding. Nearly a dozen of them, each thick with meaning but becoming so much more in sequence. He could barely keep up with them. Could barely figure out their meaning as they flashed over and over—he caught only whispers, only traces of meaning, and he prayed that recognition was enough. They filled him, burst through his senses—the rush of vertigo, the thunder of hoofbeats, the exhilaration of wind in his hair and the horizon opening, opening, expanding and contracting as he sped to meet the rising sun. The sun burned through him, the runes seared to memory. Light was everything, everything, light and movement and an ecstatic, shimmering truth.

Find him, the spirits sang. Find him and be whole. Find him and make the world whole.

Then he felt the drumbeat change.

He didn’t hear it, but he felt it. It tugged at his bones, pulled him up by the scruff of his neck. Like a puppet on a string, the drumbeat dragged him away, light fading as the tunnel reappeared, whirling around him in shadows and tremors of sound. All of it vibrating, vibrating, a second heart to echo his own. The tunnel went dark. And, like a diver bursting from the tide, Tenn broke back into the world of firelight and sound.

He sucked in a deep mouthful of air, his whole back arched as though possessed. One inhalation, and he fell back to the earth. His body was weak, spent, like it had been inhabited by something else, something that had used him up and left him lying in the dirt beside the fire. But he felt good. Ecstatic. The power was faint, but the light of the cave still hummed in his veins.

The drumming shook and fell apart, cascaded into a cavalcade of beats that faded to the hiss of rattles. Then silence. The crackle of fire.