Burnt Devotion (Imdalind, #5)(65)

The sensation was familiar, but here, among all these people, I did not know if it was one I should be having. I didn’t know if they should know of my true nature.

Cover my eyes, I pleaded, knowing what was coming and not wanting anyone to see. Not wanting them to know the full extent of my powers.

It was how it had been for so long. It had been so crucial for Ryland not to know, I had assumed the rule here would be the same. However, Ilyan merely chuckled, his arm tightening around me as he pressed his lips to the hollow underneath my ear.

“I will only cover your power if you truly do not want them to see, mi lasko,” he whispered, his voice deep and heady. “There is no need to hide anymore.”

His grip against me was a comforting weight, the love that swelled from him a strength I didn’t expect.

It was more than pride at what I was and what I had become that swelled within him, however. It was more than a need to show his people the Siln? they had all been waiting for. It was admiration. It was a deep-rooted love and support that worked to build me up, to set me free, and to let me be without fear of recourse, of judgment.

I could hear the thoughts clearly within his mind, the desire to let me be who I was. To support me as I became what I needed to be. What I wanted to be.

I clung to him as the dizziness grew, as the strength of his arms around me increased, and the awed support only grew.

I didn’t move. I didn’t turn into him, despite the fact that part of me so desperately wanted to. I let the sight come. I let it swell and grow as my vision burned red, and my magic surged, pulling my mind away from the present, away from the stale air of the room and the faded screams of the massacre that was slowly dying. My vision faded from red to black as the startled gasps of Ilyan’s subjects faded to nothing, the sound of screams and fear overtaking them.

I braced myself for the sight, for the guidance, for the future, for some new insight into what we were facing.

However, nothing was new. I had seen this before.

Only days before as we stood around the map, in the sight that Sain had pulled himself into, the vision that had made me question everything.

How sights work, if I could trust them, if I could even trust my father.

If I could trust anything.

It was the same sight, yet something about it was different. Something was pulling at the deep threads of my magic and begging me to watch, whispering at me to see.

The red roofed skyline of the city we were now trapped in drifted into view, the setting that of the wide river as a glittering trail of gold. I had seen this city. I had walked through it as the sun had cast its last rays.

I watched it set now, waiting for the next piece of the sight to come, waiting for the towers of Vil?s to erupt into the sky. Then, like a movie, like a camera set too far in on zoom, that vision panned back, speeding away from the red rooftops to the roadway I had only just seen, except this time it was whole, and the sun was high in the sky.

I had seen it set. I had watched it dip down, the sky turning as red as the rooftops.

No, I realized with a panicked fear. It wasn’t the sun. It was the shield. It was the magical barricade that Edmund had cast around us.

Only moments after the realization filled me, the world exploded with noise, the earth shaking as the Vil?s exploded into the sky, the roadway collapsing in on itself, the buildings and people that surrounded the once safe structure moving into what quickly became a prison wall.

I could hear the screams as the attack began, saw the people run through the streets that appeared to be far below me, the dingy brown of the Vil?s tracking each of them down.

The whole thing was much more frightening from this angle, the dimmed colors of what I knew now to be a sight of the past mostly unnoticeable.

I had lived this, after all.

The screams echoed in my ears as my mouth opened wide in the maw of sight, the depth of my voice sounding dead against the scream of death within the sight and the gasps of surprise without. “The death will come; the sky will fall.”

The same words seeped out of me like syrup. I was surprised they were not different given the change in the sight, though the meaning behind them was. The barrier that covered the sky shimmered in the bright sun before I was sucked back into the city, right to the group of people who were huddled in the alley, the ones I had seen before.

The ones I had seen minutes before.

I could see the boy that now lay unconscious behind me amongst them, his face stricken in fear as he clung to what I now knew to be his mother.

The river came next, or at least it should have. Instead of the wide river that ran through Prague, it was the same room we now sat in, the same boy on the floor where he now lay, my hand pressed against his skin. I only saw a glimpse of the magic, felt the pull of my own move beyond the barrier of sight when the vision shifted.

The same boy stood in the darkened city, the buildings crumbling and derelict as he fought a mutated Vil?, his hands sparking with light and magic. The knowledge of what would happen to him, what he would become, and the possibility that he wouldn’t be as infected as Edmund had hoped was a balloon of possibility inside of me.

“The war begins in the dark of night.” I didn’t even have time to register what I had seen before the rumble of my voice filled the room. The same river from before stretching before me for a breadth of time then flashed to the same cliff face I had seen before with the man on a horse carved into the ancient surface.