Crown of Cinders (Imdalind #7)(113)
“Do not worry, Rinax; she is the right one,” Frain said. “I can feel the earth magic in her, as well. Even the part she gave to Timothy’s daughter is there, barely hidden.”
“So, I’m somehow magically unable to die?” I asked, my mind still stuck on the conversation of a moment ago.
“You see the future and conjure spells, and this is the magic you doubt?” Rinax hissed with a roll of his eyes, his wings smothering me in cold as he hovered inches from my face, the close proximity causing me to flinch. “I have never known someone so ridiculous.”
The pit in my stomach grew with each word he spoke, falling farther and farther to my toes as his truth became clear.
I swallowed, my magic flashing again as sight blossomed before me, image after image of magic and Míracles rotating inside my mind: Dramin’s healing; Wyn’s revival; Ilyan’s impossible stutter, his connection fusing with mine. They came one after another until they ended with the image of Ilyan and Ovailia locked in battle. I felt the desperation to help, that knot of need twisting in my stomach.
With a flash, the images left as I looked back up at the stubborn Vil?, his eyes glistening with smugness.
I bit my lips together in a tight line, staring at him dead-on. He was right. I knew he was. Still, something about the way he looked at me was making me very stubborn to admit it.
“See?” he shot, his attitude bristling more. “We are not dead … just as you aren’t.”
“Not yet in this life,” Frain added, her smile a calm shadow that soothed away my pride.
“But we are. The first four … We have all passed from the world long ago.”
I looked from Frain to Chyline as the two women moved closer to me, a haunted sorrow painted on both their faces. I stared at them, my mind spinning on its axis because of what she had just said, refusing to comprehend.
“How can that be?” I asked, still trying to understand. My heart stuttered painfully, the organ encompassed in the dread that had filled the air.
I knew magic could do something so crazy, yet I was lost as to how it could be.
“Perhaps the better word is not dead, but passed. We cannot die because, as the first of our kind, our magic is bound to the earth, just as you are. We have been here for centuries, waiting for you,” Frain said, smiling gently.
“For me?” I asked, yet more confusion rising up.
Rinax took flight with a grunt of disappointment, a trail of light speeding from him as he soared away from us, a string of complaint and what I was sure were profanities following behind him.
“Don’t mind him,” Frain said with a smile. “Vil?s are not known for patience.”
Rinax huffed angrily from where he hovered somewhere in the distance. The only thing that remained of him was a solitary blue light suspended elegantly in the dark.
The ceiling and walls were indistinguishable. For all I knew, the cavern went on forever, stretched throughout the core of the earth in an abyss. Only Rinax’s light gave me some idea of the space, thanks to the massive black pool his light reflected off of. Exactly as I had seen in my sight.
“It was him,” I gasped as my magic shook inside my bones, placing the clear image from my sight, from this moment, into a perfect overlay. “That is where my sight wanted me to be.”
“What do you mean?” Frain asked, pulling my attention back to her.
With a hiss of pain, I pulled myself into a fully sitting position, my hands pressing against the rough stone floor of what I now recognized as a cave. “My sight showed me this. It wanted me to be here,” I gasped, each word tightening my chest painfully. “It wanted me dead.”
“No, child.” Ilyan’s grandmother smiled, her hair shimmering as though it were made from light. “It wanted you home.”
Home.
Something about the word pulled at me, tugged at my heart and pulled me right into sight. My pained chest gasped for air as the same cave reemerged before me, only brighter. Everything was clear and crisp, as all sights of the past were. The clarity in the sight was as alarming as what was in it.
Myself, the same self I had seen in that haunting white sight. The same who had prompted me to the underground river, standing on the edge of the massive pool.
Gasping in shock, I watched myself, my heart plunging to the ground, terror gripping me as I stared at the water’s edge, the two of us breathing in deep synchronization. The water below her began to bubble, swirling around her calves as she waded in. Her own gasp of shock rippled across the silence as the surface broke with a torrent of bubbles, four small bodies appearing just below the dark water: two boys and two girls, one of the boys blue and wrinkled.
“The four,” I gasped to myself in recognition, my mind still reeling as I tried to understand what I was looking at and why I was there.
My heart tensing, I watched myself rush deeper into the waters, pulling the blue boy out in desperation.
“No, no,” her frightened voice echoed around the cave as she worked to revive him. “You can’t die on me, boy. We need you.”
The other four, just children, made their way to the banks and circled around her as the older me worked in a panic.
She compressed his chest once more before she turned her head, placing her ear against his chest as she listened for a heartbeat, her eyes looking straight at me.
Straight into me.