Vortex Chronicles: The Complete Series (Air Awakens: Vortex Chronicles)

by Elise Kova

  Soldier or a Knight. She could fight. The thought hovered in her mind for a long second. Vi opened her mouth before closing it again slowly. Would she fight against her grandfather?

  On one side of this war was her grandmother, on the other her grandfather. Her heritage versus her Empire. Though it wasn’t even her Empire anymore. Vi let out a groan and held her head.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  The door at Vi’s right opened suddenly, the young woman from earlier in its frame. “She’s with us—I mean, she’s not. But we’ll take her in.”

  “What?” Vi wasn’t sure if she said the word in her surprise or just thought it loudly.

  “Come on, inside with you.” The woman grabbed her arm, helping Vi up.

  “See to it that none of you are caught out past curfew,” the Knight cautioned with a pointed look at Vi before starting along.

  “We’ll follow orders,” the young woman called back. Without another word, Vi was ushered inside a tiny foyer connected to a narrow stair. There were no other doors and the top landing was dark enough that Vi couldn’t make out much. The woman locked the door and leaned against it with a sigh.

  “Thank you,” Vi said softly.

  “Don’t thank me, thank Granny. She was the one who said I couldn’t leave another woman out there to fend for herself.” She looked Vi up and down and added with a mutter, “Though you seem perfectly capable.”

  “I still appreciate it.” Vi didn’t comment on her capacity to defend herself.

  “Well, show that appreciation by not making us regret it.” The young woman ran a hand through her short-cut hair. “The name is Lucina, by the way.”

  “Nice to meet you, Lucina.”

  “Do you remember your name? Or is that gone too?”

  “It’s gone too.” Vi didn’t know what compelled her to hide her name. No one knew of Vi Solaris in this world. Her name, however unconventional it was, would mean nothing.

  Yet that was precisely the reason why she didn’t want to share it. Her name was precious—the only thing that was truly hers that she still carried. Even the watch around her neck was different than the one she had received from Fritz. Her mother’s watch had been destroyed, the replacement from Taavin now hanging in its place.

  Call out to me. Some of his final words thrummed across her thoughts like fingers dancing on the strings of a harp. When you are settled, call out to me.

  “Well, I’ll need some sort of name. Can’t just say, ‘Hey, no-name girl,’ whenever I need you.”

  “How about Yullia?”

  “Yullia it is.” Lucina ascended the stairs. “Granny is sleeping, so don’t wake her.” Her voice had fallen to a hush. “Granny sleeps in the living area on the first floor. I have a room on the second floor. You can take dad’s old room.”

  Before Vi could inquire further, Lucina pressed a finger to her lips as they emerged onto a landing area that was utilized as a living space. There was a kitchen, a sitting area with distinctly low-profile, Western furniture, and a cot in the corner where an ancient woman snored. Lucina headed up a ladder in the corner to the floor above. Vi followed as silently as possible.

  “You’ll be in here.” Lucina opened the door immediately to the right at the top of the ladder.

  “Your father won’t need it?”

  “Dad’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” Vi said. But her tenderness seemed to confuse the young woman. “Did… I say something wrong?”

  “Half of this city is dying or dead. It’s weird to hear sympathies and I don’t want them.” Lucina shrugged and hastily changed the topic. “Remember, we don’t have anything for you. All you’re getting is a bed. If I even catch you looking at our food—” She drew a kitchen knife from her belt “—I won’t hesitate to kill. No one would notice or care about another body.”

  Vi lifted a hand, placed her fingers against the flat of the blade, and pushed it away. “I’m not going to give you reason to fear me,” she said firmly, locking eyes with Lucina. “I mean you no harm.”

  “Well…” Lucina hadn’t been expecting Vi to take the threat in stride. She tucked the weapon back in her belt. “See that you don’t.”

  The young woman started for the ladder and descended quickly. Vi made a point to close her door loudly enough that Lucina would hear it—but hopefully not too loudly that it disturbed the sleeping old woman whom she had to thank for this hospitality.

  The room was small. A bed, a chest at its foot. A narrow window, barely large enough to let light in, faced the blank wall of another building.

  Vi sat heavily on the bed, sinking her face into her hands, her elbows on her knees. An ache ran so deeply within her that she didn’t know where it stemmed from, or what hurt most. Physically, her body felt fine. No, great. Not even the scars from Ulvarth’s shackles marred her wrists. Yet her joints seemed to protest every movement, as if they carried an invisible weight.

  Quiet had never been so loud.

  “What is going on?” she whispered to no one. A hand dropped to the watch around her neck. Magic pulsed under her fingertips.

  This watch—no, not this one… but a watch nearly identical to it had connected her with Taavin. It had begun this whole relentless series of events that had chewed her up and now spit her out in a place she had no business being.

  “Curse you,” she muttered, burying her face in her hands again. She didn’t know who she was cursing. The goddess, Taavin, fate itself? All of them, curse all of them, for all she cared. “You told me to summon you? Summon a dead man?” Vi laughed, a sound that was crazy to her own ears. “Fine, Taavin. I’ll honor your mad, last wish. Narro hath hoolo.”

  The words sparked in her mind, bright and true. Meaning poured from them into glowing lines of yellow light that spun from her like ropes of fire. They connected to form familiar glyphs.

  From those glyphs came the outline of a man—a man she thought she’d killed with her own hands. A man whose brilliant green eyes could not be dulled by the sands of time no matter how many times they were turned over.

  “T-Taavin?”

  Chapter Two

  He stared at her for a long minute before looking around the room, much as he always had whenever she’d summoned him. As though this interaction was perfectly normal and planned.

  As though she hadn’t killed him hours before.

  The facts compounded on the surreal nature of her current state, making it feel as though she watched him from outside of her body. Their roles were reversed. She was the specter, and he was the real person.

  Because nothing about her world could possibly be real right now.

  “I see you’ve found some quiet corner to hide in.” He breathed a sigh of relief. “Where are you this time? I don’t recognize this place.”

  “I don’t recognize any of this.” Vi was on her feet, working to keep her voice quiet. The building was sturdy and seemed well-built. But Lucina and her grandmother would definitely hear if panic got the better of her and she began to shout. Vi took a staggering step closer to him. “Taavin… where are you? What’s going on? Are you all right?”

  Her hands reached for him as she drew closer. Closer to the man she had killed. Closer to the man who had held and hurt her. Nearly close enough to touch, to reassure herself that this wasn’t a psychotic break.

  Taavin’s fingers wrapped around hers. They weren’t as solid as she remembered. Was this identical to how she’d first spoken to him in Shaldan? He’d seemed so real then, as though he’d been standing in the room with her. Now, the ghost of magic wriggled around his body. It created a barrier she couldn’t seem to cross.

  He uncurled one hand and pointed his index finger at the watch over her chest. “I’m here.”

  “The watch?” Vi looked down at the faintly shimmering glyphs that hovered over the token. “Yes, I remember it connects me to you, but where are you?”

  Pain flashed through his familiar emerald eyes. Taavin opened his mouth, then close
d it, as if unable to find the words. His finger had yet to move. “I’m here.”

  “In the watch?” Vi dared to ask. Taavin nodded. “But… how?”

  “The watch was the key to it all.” She remembered him saying as much in Risen. “In it were my memories… all of them. In it, the Champion’s future is ensured and preserved. In it, my consciousness now lives, so I may guide you.”

  “I don’t understand.” She wanted to. Vi repeated his words mentally, but she couldn’t siphon out the deeper meaning clearly hidden beneath them.

  “One moment.” Taavin gave her hand a light squeeze and, without further warning, stepped away. He stretched out his arms before him and curled his open palms, as though holding an invisible book. His lips moved with low whispering tones; it must have been some kind of Lightspinning, but Vi couldn’t make out a single word. She suspected that even if she could, she wouldn’t have understood them.

  This was a magic the goddess had given only to him.

  The glyphs above her watch spun faster. Like a spigot, magic poured from the necklace into symbols that hovered between Taavin’s arms. He watched them carefully as they piled, one atop the next, shifting and changing. The green of his eyes faded to the same pale blue as his magic, glowing brightly in the dark room.

  Finally, Taavin lowered his arms, the light between them vanishing into the still air.

  “All right, I think I’ve cobbled together the swiftest explanation that will make it easiest for you to understand,” he began. “You met Yargen, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  Vi sighed and closed her eyes, thinking back to her interaction with the goddess. She remembered pain, then life, then Queen Lumeria—who hadn’t actually been Queen Lumeria, but Yargen masquerading as the sovereign.

  “She told me… That she was restarting the world,” Vi paraphrased. “Returning me to a time before her power had been turned against itself, and destroyed.”

  “Exactly. You know what time you’re in, yes?”

  “Norin fell in three hundred twenty-two.” Vi raised a hand to her forehead and shook her head. “Just saying that aloud is madness.”

  “Yet you know it to be true. You can feel it in your marrow, just as you can feel Yargen’s power. This will all be easier if you don’t try to fight the truths before you.”

  “Don’t tell me what I can and can’t feel,” Vi snapped. She was a rope fraying at all sides. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be curt,” Vi said hastily. “It’s a lot to process is all. I was just thrown back in time and now I’m talking with someone akin to a ghost. Not to say I’m not happy to see you, but…” She trailed off in the wake of Taavin’s tired smile.

  “I understand. You’re not alone in feeling jarred by all this. From my perspective, I just died for the ninety-third time and it gets no easier.”

  “Ninety… third?” Vi repeated. He seemed determined to look anywhere but at her.

  “This point in time is the furthest at which Yargen can remake the world with the limited power she had,” he continued, determined to ignore her probing stare. “So it is where our work must begin. Your job is twofold. Foremost, your goal is to ensure the birth of a new Champion and another attempt, should you fail. While doing so, you must collect the crystal weapons in order to consolidate Yargen’s power once more and prevent Raspian from ever being set free.”

  “So I am to change the past?”

  “There is no past—not the past you knew, at least,” he said gravely. “The only time that exists is the one in which Yargen exists. The world you and I knew, the world we were born into, is no more. She lives in this world now, in you.”

  “But this world exists along the same lines of fate… so it appears identical,” Vi said, remembering more of what the goddess had told her. She sank heavily onto the bed behind her. “My mother, father, brother?”

  “They do not exist, yet.” He was silent for a long moment, then added softly and apologetically, “And the Aldrik, Vhalla, and Romulin who will exist, will not be the ones you knew.”

  She looked down at her hands. They were trembling again. Her whole body shook. Vi felt painfully cold, like no matter what she did, she’d never be able to warm up again. “I wanted to save them.”

  “Preventing the Crystal Caverns from being tampered with is how you will save them.”

  “No, the family I loved is gone—you just said so.” Vi tilted her head up to the man as if pleading with him could change the terrible fate she found herself in. “The world was in danger, so I did everything I was told; I did everything to stop it from ending. I did it all to save my family.”

  “And this is how we will stop it so your family is never in danger again.”

  “The world—my family—merely ended at the hands of a different tyrant!” Vi was on her feet again, pacing. Her magic crackled, stronger than ever before, ready to collect in her palms and burn the whole broken world and all its pieces. “Raspian didn’t end the world, so Yargen did? So we could try to fix a new version of it? How does that make any sense?”

  “The timeline we were on was a failed future. It made sense to abandon it.”

  “The timeline.” Her hands shook harder. “Don’t call it a ‘timeline’ as though it’s just dates and facts in a book. There were people, Taavin. Hundreds of thousands of people. A whole world of them. My family was in that world… and they’re all gone now.” Vi didn’t remember approaching him, but her fists knotted in the simple tunic he wore—the same garment he’d had on when she’d found him in his room that fateful night. A night that might as well have been a thousand years ago. “Yargen killed them all.”

  “Yargen is life. Vi, don’t think of it as them dying.” His hands wrapped around hers again. His tone was soothing. “As it stands now, they never existed in the first place. But fate can see them born again in this world—a world you will save. You saw it yourself, the end of the world.”

  For a brief second, her eyes were as haunted as his, as visions of her falling before a dark god flashed across her mind.

  “If we had remained in that world, Vi,” he continued, “the cycle of light and dark would’ve ended. Raspian and Yargen would’ve battled again. But since she was weak and didn’t have all her power, he would’ve killed her for good. There would’ve been no eventual return of the goddess, no great war, no subsequent age of light. Darkness and death would’ve ruled forever. It was the end.”

  “You’re saying no matter what… the life of everyone in that world was forfeit? Every beautiful, hidden corner, every person, all would’ve been destroyed?” Her voice quivered alongside her hands. She had been born into a dying world and she was the only person to survive it.

  Vi felt profoundly unworthy of each breath she took.

  “Yes.”

  “I thought, as Champion, I could save it. Save… them.”

  “You were chosen for this world, where you stand now. It was the last Vi’s failure that doomed the world you knew.” A ghost drifted around his words, one that seemed to cloud his vision whenever his eyes settled on her.

  Ninety-three times. His earlier words stuck in her mind.

  “How many times have we had this conversation?” Vi whispered.

  “What?”

  “How many times have you explained all this to me?”

  “I don’t know what you’re asking.” The lie was so obvious Vi had to bite back bitter laughter.

  “Yes you do. I know you too well, Taavin; I see behind any mask you try to wear.” She swallowed, her throat drier than the Waste. “This isn’t the first time I’ve asked, is it?” Taavin pursed his lips together and narrowed his eyes. “How many times, Taavin?” she reiterated. And then, just to twist the dagger, added, “How many times have you died by my hand? Has the world been rebuilt? How many times have we tried and failed to stop Raspian? How many other Vis failed?”

  She didn’t know why she was asking. She’d already figured out the answe
r.

  “Ninety-three.”

  Somehow, hearing it from his lips was worse than she expected.

  Vi’s fingers slowly uncurled from the man’s garb. She smoothed out the wrinkles thoughtfully, almost gently. The motion was a stark contrast to the torrent of anger brewing within her. Abruptly, she went to the narrow window. It was her only source of fresh air and she desperately needed to take a breath.

  “Ninety-three times,” she finally repeated quietly. The world had been destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again, over and over, ninety-three times. It was incomprehensible to her.

  Mortal minds weren’t made for this.

  Vi stared at the stone wall outside of the window, willing the wind to blow, to feel some movement in the air. But everything was stagnant, making a hot day only hotter.

  “What makes you think we can do this now?” Vi asked without looking at him.

  “Nothing.” That drew her eyes back. Taavin elaborated without further prompting. “I don’t know if we will be successful this time, or the next, or the time after. But I have faith eventually we will. I have to, otherwise we are trapped in this torturous vortex forever, always spinning, down and down.”

  They were cursed. She’d known it on Meru. He’d confirmed it now.

  “How long have you known this was our fate?”

  “Only when you used the word thrumsana. It unlocked the stored memories from my past selves in the watch, returning them to me. Then, I knew what must be done to finish the turn and start anew.”

  Vi narrowed her eyes slightly. She vividly remembered the power that had been unleashed when she used that word. Just as vividly, she remembered learning not long before that Taavin had betrayed Vi and her father to the Swords of Light. That wound had yet to be mended, and now Vi wondered if they’d ever have the chance. Did she have any right to still be angry with him for a father that no longer existed?