Dawn of Ash

by Rebecca Ethington

  “Ryland?” he asked as if he hadn’t heard, all signs of his previous boredom gone. “She saw what the blade is meant for. And she knows what you are planning. She wants to stop you.”

  So, she saw everything, then. Great.

  “I believe you are going to help me much sooner than I had planned.” His voice was dark, terrifying, and the murderer inside of me reacted accordingly: hackles up, warning lights blazing.

  Slamming him into the wall again, I placed the palm of my hand against his neck, letting the fire magic inside of me heat to a temperature that was more pain than warning, but he didn’t even flinch. He looked at me with that same darkness as before.

  “What are you talking about?” I growled, desperate to have a straight answer out of this man. I knew I was probably asking for too much. He was a Drak, so his life was more riddle than reality.

  “You don’t want to kill her,” Sain said as if he was reading my mind, seeing into a future I couldn’t even comprehend. “You need to run as far as you can. Run and hide. Don’t let anyone stop you. And if you make it, if you run, then you can have it all. You will find what you need to succeed.”

  Succeed. I could still save her.

  He had given me what I wanted, but I wasn’t sure if I could trust him after everything with Jos.

  But I already knew one thing: I would do anything it took to free my daughter.

  The fire in my blood sparked abruptly as a new magic shot into where we were, close enough I could feel it. The power behind it was unmistakably Ilyan.

  I was out of time.

  “Run, Wyn!” His arms broke free of where I had held him down, his grip like a vice against my forearms as he pushed me away.

  I didn’t wait; I ran, my feet fast as I continued in the direction I had been traveling, while Sain raced in the other direction, right to the place he had been glaring at, as if it had somehow offended him.

  The sound of Joclyn’s cries faded to nothing as the sound of my shoes grew in my ears. The slap of rubber and cement was a punch in the chest with every impact. I knew someone would hear me, knew Ilyan would hear me. I knew he would find me.

  And if he did, there was nothing I could do.

  Joclyn, Sain—anyone else, for that matter—I was confident I could defeat. But Ilyan…

  I would lose everything. And if what Sain had said was true, I had to stop them all.

  My sole choice was to keep running, to escape this cathedral and get outside where Ilyan couldn’t reach me.

  Easy.

  I had done it before. Anytime I needed an escape, anytime I couldn’t look at Thom’s slowly deteriorating face, I left. And considering the way Joclyn’s cries had somehow disappeared, Ilyan was very much preoccupied.

  I needed to get to the tear in Ilyan’s barrier before anyone saw me.

  So, I ran.

  I darted through unsuspecting Skȓíteks, their faces full of horror as they looked toward the cries, their focus on whatever might be going on over there. As I darted through them, the questions started flowing, the shouts of fear loud as they asked me for information, begged to know if we were under attack, what was going on. Drawing attention to me, to the person who should be running toward her best friend instead of running away.

  The more they yelled, the more they looked, the more I ran.

  “Wyn!” I recognized that voice the second I heard it.

  Risha always sounded like an elementary school teacher, and if I thought it had ground on my nerves before, it was nothing compared to right then. Nothing compared to the one quick glance I gave her, my toe pressing against the hole in my shoe, against the bare ground and sending magic right to her.

  I didn’t even see her fall.

  But I heard the screams.

  I heard the terror and the waves of magic that soared toward me.

  Sain had said not to let anyone stop me, and I wouldn’t.

  Risha was the start of that.

  With one swift movement, I put up a shield, my body disappearing from view as a dozen or more attacks collided with it. The bangs and explosions of colliding magic ignited the courtyard in waves of color.

  I barely saw them. I just focused on my destination.

  At my freedom.

  As I raced down a corridor, the sound of my incessant pace broke apart as I climbed the stairs of the old bell tower, taking them two at a time in my desperation to escape those I was confident were following me.

  Old brick and open casements flashed by me as I kept my pace up, moving faster as the cries in my ears increased.

  Mommy! Don’t let him hurt me! Daddy! No!

  The top of the bell tower opened like a fan, the tightly wound staircase expanding into the small, cylindrical room that led to the red sky, to the small crease in Ilyan’s barrier that would let me escape without his help.

  I had used it a hundred times before, and I would use it again … for the last time.

  A slight shimmer in the barrier hung right over my head, the glistening patch of white so faint I probably would have never seen it if I hadn’t been hiding up here, staring blankly out into the city as often as I had. But I had seen it. And it hadn’t taken me long to figure out what it was.

  A tear, a rip, a ripple.

  It was a way out, a way to escape my own pain as I had so many times before, venting my own pain and frustration with Ilyan’s permission.

  In a way, I had resorted to mass murder to deal with this stress. While I had killed off the Draks before, it was the Vilỳs this time. I didn’t really want to be responsible for the extermination of several different races of magic, but in this instance, I was more putting them out of their misery.

  A win-win.

  Right then, however, it was an escape route.

  With one leap, I soared off the old bell tower and into the air, letting the wind catch me as my magic supported me, throwing me toward the shimmering line of color. I braced for the impact, for the way Ilyan’s shield would grip against my body and try to trap me inside of it.

  With one strong push, I shot through it, feeling the heat and weight crowd against me before it released me to the other side, my wind disappearing with the weight, sending me into a free fall. Hot air and an endless nothing soared past me as I tumbled to the ground below.

  I should have been frightened, and perhaps I would have been if it had been the first time I had journeyed beyond Ilyan’s barrier. However, I was ready.

  With a snap, my magic moved just fast enough to stop me from hitting the hard ground on the other side—well, hitting it hard enough to do some damage. I still hit too hard, my knees slamming into stone, hands barely able to stop me from face planting into the loose gravel.

  That wouldn’t have been a good look.

  Heaving, I froze, staring at the old, filthy asphalt as I waited for some scream, for some shout, for some clue someone had seen me.

  There was nothing except silence on this side of the invisible barrier, the stillness of a world that had been ripped and devoured by the creatures that would now hunt me.

  That I would now hunt.

  I might have been safe from Ilyan, but I was far from safe.

  Moving myself to standing, I pressed my hand against my jeans, making sure the hard ridge of the blade was still in place before I took off into the dark alley I was facing, knowing there were darker things before me.

  A city—no, a battlefield—that, for the first time, I didn’t know if I would come back to if I even could.

  I took one look back at the place that had become both a prison and a sanctuary, the image of Thom on that bed a stab in my heart. Longingly, I tore my focus away from the cathedral before I let the alley swallow me, silently praying he would be okay and that somehow we would all get through this okay.

  Our daughter included.

  “Wyn?” The single syllable sounded all distorted and wobbly as it reverberated around the cathedral, the fear in my voice causing it to tremble even more.

  My he
art rate picked up into a violent tattoo as the sight burned in my mind, pulling to the forefront of my recall, to her awed face, her hands covered in blood, an incapacitated Ryland below her.

  Frozen in fear from the sight, from what was going to happen, I gaped at her, trying to figure out how to stop her. But no, this wasn’t something I could stop, because this was something that had already happened, something she had already done.

  “What did you take out of Ryland?”

  She stiffened as I did, my joints becoming a rigid mess as the lies she had been spewing for the last few minutes came to a head.

  “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “Wyn? What did you do?”

  She still wouldn’t look at me, her lies pulling at me and making the painful reality of what I had seen even harder to swallow.

  The pulse of her magic washed over me, the reaction increasing my anxiety even further. She felt dangerous. I had never felt anything quite so out of control before: the strength of her power, the fury behind it. It scared me.

  I couldn’t help it; I brought my magic to the tips of my fingers, ready for what was to come, the violent sound of my heart beat reverberating in my ears.

  “Wyn?” I asked slowly, my hand extended toward her as I tried to get her attention, eager to bring her back down to earth. My hand wrapped around her wrist in a move I hoped would calm her, no matter how much the contact scared me.

  I should have stayed scared. I should have stayed away.

  With that one touch, her magic answered, the same flame and fire as minutes before ripping through me.

  My body writhed as darkness smothered me in a stifling heaviness, the weight making my heart race and muscles tense. I couldn’t think beyond it.

  Attempting to fight it, attempting to fight her, I took a frantic gasp of air, fire erupting in the dark of my eyes. Sight blazed through my mind in a pillar of light that broke through the black, my magic catching fire as it showed me bright red flames engulfing the city, licking the red roofs and engulfing the decimated buildings.

  I had seen this vision before. It was familiar. Except, this time, it wasn’t. This time, Edmund’s red barrier was gone, and the peaceful yellow sun hovered over the city as if it wasn’t being eaten by ash and flame.

  Watching in fearful awe, I pulled out the differences, watching the city die as my heart raced. The speed increased as the sight shifted to that of an army thousands strong, marching into the streets of Prague as it burned. The sound of their march echoed through my sight, reverberating off my panic, the heavy pace divergent to the gentle snow falling over where Ilyan and I stood on top of a distant mount, surrounded by a dozen tattered people.

  Huddled together in the chill of the snow, we stood, watching the army, waiting for an attack we knew we could not win.

  Then, with a painful ache, with a rip that spread through my chest in agony, I saw what I had missed before: the mound of dirt behind where we stood, the single red rose resting upon a fresh grave.

  It was then I noticed who was missing from our ragged army.

  With my heart breaking, my sight accelerated, spinning as everything reversed. Again, I saw the death of my beloved brother, the handkerchief placed on his face, and the bright red blood that spread over it. I saw his body placed in that grave behind were everyone stood.

  Shovelfuls of dirt fell over him, one after another. It was then that the snow that fell over us shifted and changed, the delicate white flakes mutating to heavy wet drops of the deepest crimson. The color cascaded over us all, staining our faces, our skin, our clothes. It asphyxiated us in the smell of iron, each drop mirroring the emotional agony of my heart that I could never hope to explain.

  No one moved; they just let it cover them until everything was red and white.

  I waited for the sight to continue, desperate for it to end. Instead, I remained trapped in the blood-soaked brilliance as a voice broke through the vision like shattered glass, my heart seizing at the proximity.

  “Oh, Ilyan is going to kill me.”

  Wyn’s voice was clear, the Czech vibrant, but it wasn’t part of the prediction. It wasn’t something within the vision that my magic was giving me. It was real. It was reality.

  The two had never mixed so clearly before.

  I knew she was next to me, but I couldn’t see her. I saw nothing except the sight that stormed through the fire in my eyes.

  Images flashed in a quick and vibrant succession, moving faster as my horror amplified. My confusion as to what was happening was so heavy I couldn’t focus on the future playing before me.

  With a jolt, her hand pulled against my arm as the hot air of the cathedral ran over my skin, and I could smell the familiar aroma of smoke from a magical explosion taking the place of the iron and blood.

  I was aware.

  I could feel it all.

  And yet, I couldn’t see. I was still within the sight.

  For the first time, I was in two places—fully aware of the world yet still trapped in the paralyzing sights that continued to move faster. The images were more violent than anything I had seen before.

  “Joclyn?” Wyn’s voice broke through the divination as something shifted, as the sight began to change and slow.

  Just as before, when Wyn’s magic had burned through me, I saw her covered in blood as she knelt beside Ryland. This time, however, I saw clearly what was lying in the pool of blood in her palm.

  It looked like rock, the jagged fragment a little larger than the size of a thumb, the deep red color vibrant even against the sheen of Ryland’s blood.

  The whispers of my magic screamed in horror as I watched the heavy fluid drip over her fingertips like a leaky faucet. With wide eyes, she stared at it, the greed on her face growing into a type of awe I had never seen in her.

  The fear in me increased as the deep Drak magic screamed inside, as it pulled and begged and warned me of something that frightened me more than the double reality I was trapped in.

  The Soul’s Blade.

  I had heard of it. I knew what it could do. I didn’t want to believe the dark magic it held. I didn’t want to believe what I was seeing since so much of what my prescience had shown me had been broken.

  The sight shifted with a snap, my chest tensing from the abruptness of it. Now there was an image of her with the blade, kneeling over a bloodied body, the jagged thing protruding from her hand. Another snap, another jolt and now she was in a foreign forest, hunting something I was certain was also hunting her.

  Sight after sight came, raging through me as the warning flowed heavier.

  “Give me,” I gasped, unaware if the words had actually broken through the sight and made it out of my throat. “Give it to me…” I looked toward her, gasping from the pull of the magic, knowing she had the blade on her.

  “Stop her!” The same unfamiliar voice that had haunted my sights came again. Its meaning was clear, the warning obvious.

  I had to change this.

  My mouth opened in a wide, panicked scream as my sight shifted to the image of Wyn, her short frame standing tall before me in the middle of the cathedral, just as she had a moment ago—before the fire, before the sights. She stood there, yet her image was distorted, shrouded in the shadow of sight. The reality of my friend before me was overlaid with that of precognition. Bright flashes of her with the blade, her fighting, and Edmund smothered the image of the real world as if the magic of the Drak was projecting itself over reality.

  “Wyn,” I said, my voice distorted as it moved through the sight, the depth of it similar to the voice I had heard within my sights so many times before. “You need to give me the blade. You don’t know what you’ve done.”

  I reached toward her again, reaching through the sight of a bridge crumbling into a river, the image swirling through the air like smoke. My fingers clawed at her, desperate for her to see, desperate to stop her from doing this, from going down that path. I couldn’t.

  “No!” she
screamed at me as she stepped away, her magic flaring in a tangible wave of warning.

  I gasped, the magic feeling like a wave of water smashing against me, the power of it sucking the air out of my chest. I tried to regain my strength, to regain my breath, but neither came while my heart pounded with more urgency, more desperation. I needed to stop this.

  “Wyn, please.”

  I barely got the words out before I watched her jerk again, the movement twisted as she jumped, a dark cloud moving over her eyes with a hatred and animosity I didn’t think I had ever seen before.

  I saw her mouth move, but no words came out. The shadowed overlay of sight pulled her in and out of focus, her anger blended with the image of Ilyan’s death, the same haunting vision that had been stalking me coming to full force.

  Blood flowing over rocks, away from his lifeless hand, his eyes lost and forgotten. I stared at it, wishing I could look anywhere else, wishing I could see anything else. However, it was death or the blade. It was all connected.

  “Wyn,” I gasped, a heavy desperation leaking through me as the sight that was bleeding through reality shifted. The image of my best friend spread and fluctuated before me, as if there were two of them—one who raised her hand toward me before the other one did.

  I felt my magic flare in fear, my heart racing as I looked into the face of what Wyn used to be, who she was raised to be. For the first time, I saw the eyes of a killer and instantly knew what she was going to do.

  What she wanted to do.

  “No!” she screamed, the sound ringing over the cathedral as I tried to scoot away from the attack that spread from her hand.

  I watched as the distorted mirrors attacked me in turn, one after another: first my sight then my reality.

  My sight gave me a perfect warning of what was coming.

  I should have been awed. I should have been amazed at what was happening. However, I couldn’t think past the terror gripping me. The fright was a debilitating force as I struggled to move my weak body away from an attack I was positive would kill me.