Crown of Cinders (Imdalind #7)(92)

My sight spiked as I fell, the image of everyone running toward the city clear, only to have everything plunge to black with the impact of my head against the frozen earth.

The hollow memory of screams rang in my ears, the sound fading into the same black I looked into, my magic growing and swelling as it taunted me with sight.

However, there was nothing.

The heavy weight of the nothing pressed against my chest, spinning inside my head so fast I wasn’t sure what way was up anymore.

Then it stopped. Everything settled as the sound of my own breathing broke past the black in quick and fearful gasps.

“It has broken,” my own, older, voice cut through the dark.

The calm settled in my heart before I was plunged into color, my mind swarming with image after image as they flashed past me then slowed as the yell of the woman pulled at them, showing me bits and pieces of what I had missed, of what Sain had blocked.

Sain and Ovailia stood in an unfamiliar room. Sain ran his hand over her skin gently, his words soft when he whispered in her ear. The affection was not returned, however. When Sain was not looking, her face twisted, a hatred I had thought was only reserved for me glinting in her eyes. The hatred infiltrated the sight, the walls around them dripping with it before they faded.

My sight picked up into a sprint as flashes of cathedrals and funerals and tents and caves moved past me, some familiar, some new. Everything was confusing until my focus pulled toward a large stadium, Sain walking across the center of the empty arena.

My heart took off at once, this was something I hadn’t seen in weeks, something new.

With a smile and a flourish, Sain opened a large door, and a mournful whimper seeped from the dark in a haunting melody. It cut into my heart, twisting in my stomach, against my ribs. Sain, however, smiled wider, his eyes glinting with delight.

My soul turned to ice at the look, an anger I hadn’t known rising up. I would have stuttered right to him and destroyed him if I could, but this was the past, and the twisted man was no longer there. Still, the need remained, following me as I was pushed back into the quick succession of sights.

The images slowed as I caught a glimpse of Cail holding me in the forest, taunting Sain with my existence before his knife moved over my throat. The image immediately shifted to another of the wide pool I had seen before.

The water was still and calm, unmoving. Meanwhile, the ghostly shadow I knew to be me flickered in and out of the scene, appearing and reappearing with each painful beat of my heart.

I disappeared with a thud, watching the pool in expectation of my return. Instead of myself, it was a bright blue reflection against the water, a single dot of light floating above and below the surface. My eyes widened at the sight of it there, something pulling me toward it, needing to be with it. I could feel my magic swell with the need. But before I could act, it all vanished, plunging me through flashes of sight before settling on a something I had seen before.

A little boy ran down an alley, attacking the swollen and poisoned Vil?s with ease; the power beyond what a child should be able to do.

He turned the corner, running past a stone storefront and into what was unmistakably the cave. It took me a moment to realize the change, to notice the stutter within the sight.

I stared at it, confused as to its meaning. I had seen this before. I knew that child, but he lay buried beneath the snow behind me. This scene could never be, and yet, here it was.

He ran into a darkened room where Ovailia stood, disheveled and broken in the dark, her bare feet bleeding against the stone, obviously waiting for him.

“I got it,” the child said in a panic before the door closed behind them.

The voice pulled me from my expectation, hitting me hard against the chest.

It wasn’t Jaromir.

It was Míra.

“Wonderful, and my brother?”

“He was in the blue room, the one where the fight broke out…”

“Stay here.” Ovailia rose in the dark, standing before the girl in a red dress that was ripped and stained with mud. “I will retrieve my brother, and we will finish this.”

Ovailia held out her hand in expectation, Míra stepping toward her as she pulled a jagged shard of red stone from her pocket.

A blade.

Ilyan.

This was it. This was how she was going to kill him. And Míra was going to help.

I had been wrong. I had been wrong from the beginning. The girl wasn’t going to save him.

She was responsible for his death.

The thought hit me when the sight shifted again, pulling me back into the large, carved hallways of the cave. Zooming amidst them like a mouse trapped in a maze, the motions pulled at the panic Ovailia had given me.

The emotion grew as the frantic movements continued, growing faster and faster until they stopped, freezing in place at the sight of a little girl standing in the middle of the hall, a child I had seen before, blood dripping over her face.

She stood there, her dark hair hanging limply around her face, blood dripping from her hair and hands into pools of red and black. Rosy looked at me with eyes as dead and black as her mother’s, made it clear she could see me, even in sight.

“This is where I died.”

The pain in her voice pulled at me, ripping me away from the child and dragging me back down the halls I had traveled, right into the room I had seen time and time again.

But this time, it was not the little girl who stopped the movement. It was Ilyan standing with the same death in his eyes, standing with the same blood dripping over him.