Soul of Flame (Imdalind Series #4)(61)

I saw nothing other than the blackness behind my eyes as my fingers dug into the map, Ryland’s necklace digging into my chest as I struggled to control my emotions. I could already tell it was a lost cause.

Everything picked up as the voices washed over me, one after another they came. I couldn’t focus beyond the fear, past the way my magic sped through my bloodstream. Everything blended together so perfectly that I wasn’t sure who was speaking or even what they were saying.

“He has scores of them. I don’t know what he has done to them, but if they bite you, you’ll go mad. If they bite a human… well…”

“Edmund will have an army.”

I tried to focus on the voice as it echoed through the tunnel of my mind, to make sense of it, but everything only spun violently through me.

“Hovno, if he builds an army out of the humans, he will be able to end everything.”

“We can’t wait; we have to fight him.”

“Joclyn can’t possibly fight these.”

“The sight has shown that she will be ready… Joclyn...? Joclyn?”

I was vaguely aware that Ilyan was calling my name, that he was scared. I could hear the fear in his voice, feel the waves of it in my mind, yet I couldn’t grasp it enough to pull me back. I couldn’t see behind it. All I could see was red, the flame of an ember washing over my eyes as I drifted into the fluid awareness of sight.

Except this time was different than any other sight I had been given before. This sight felt hollow, open, as if I stood before a wide valley, ready to swallow the world.

It felt powerful.

The ember burn in my eyes drifted into black before a red-roofed skyline I had never seen before came into view. The roofs were tinted in gold as the sun set around them, the beauty of an unknown city covering my eyes before a fountain of black shot through the sun. The spout of brown, muddy water faded into faces of horror as hundreds of mortals ran through cobblestoned streets, their hands and faces covered with blood as they yelled and cried in a desperate attempt to find safety from whatever had attacked them.

My mouth opened as the sight shifted, the air filling with the hollow tones of my own voice, the sound of the sight echoing in my ears.

“The death will come; the sky will fall.”

The sight flipped again to a group of people huddled in an alley, screaming and crying as the small winged creatures I had seen in the tent flew down from the mass of brown in the sky, their teeth bared as they prepared to attack.

“Smrt p?ijde, nebesa se zhroutí,” a deep, unfamiliar voice spoke through the sight, the man’s voice hollow and distorted.

The vision flashed from the alley to a foreign river, the wide, winding brown sludge turning red as I watched.

“The war begins in the dark of night,” my voice rang out as I watched myself run into a solid cliff face, the stone carved with a man atop a horse. I ran through the stone like it was little more than air, Ilyan and more than a dozen others following me.

My sight flashed from the ornate carving to one of Ilyan holding me against a wall, his arm strong as he protected me, his face hard as he faced an enemy I couldn’t see.

“Válka za?íná v temnotě noci,” the same male voice echoed around us, the sight changing to those same red roofs, bathed in firelight as they burned away, the long tongues of fire reaching into the dark night sky.

“With hell behind and hell before,” my voice spoke on its own as the fire left my sight only to see myself standing on a burning rooftop, draped in the same long cloak I had been wearing in the last image.

“S peklem zezadu a peklem vep?edu,” the voice spoke again, and this time I understood what was happening. My magic had connected to my father’s, the sight opening between us as he experienced this sight as I did, hand in hand.

“One must fall before the light,” I said as blood flowed down the dark cave floor. It trailed through the bodies of men I had never seen, the amount of bloodshed twisting my stomach even through the dampened emotions the sight gave me.

“Jeden musí padnout p?ed světlem,” he spoke the words as the blood continued to run over the stone before the sight fell on the loosely curled fingers of a hand, a hand I was sure to be dead. I waited for it to continue, to show me who was to die, but the vision faded to nothing, leaving me in the glowing red embers again.

“Je rozděleno,” we said together, our voices perfectly matched in the darkness of my sight as I spoke words aloud that I did not understand.

The sight left me just as my breathing picked up, my eyes still drifting in and out of focus. I gripped the table as I waited for the strobe in my vision to slow, to recover from the intensity of the joint sight I had been infused with.

Ilyan moved my hair aside as he pressed his cool hand against my neck, my Drak blood so sensitive that with his touch I was flooded with his words and thoughts, the images of his thoughts coming so fast they flashed in a blur of color.

“Where?” I asked, my voice so strained and elongated it almost didn’t sound like me.

“Where what?” I heard Ilyan ask in alarm, the roofline of the city flashing in my mind, the screams of the people echoing in my ears.

I groaned in physical pain as the recall left, leaving me heaving as I tried to fight through the dizziness that still felt like it was trying to move into me.

“Where… is that?”