Dawn of Ash

by Rebecca Ethington

  The images were not only moving backward; they were being sucked from my mind. They were being drained from me, as if I had never seen them, drained from the world as if they never were.

  The scream increased as the pain in my head did. Whatever was happening to me was turning me into a sniveling fool. Even when my father controlled me through the Black Water, the pain had never been this severe, this debilitating.

  No matter how much I tried to fight it, nothing could take the weight off. Nothing could free me from the prison I was trapped in.

  My mouth opened wider as the scream grew in octave, the sound more musical than it should have been for the amount of pain it represented.

  I listened to the sound, vaguely aware of the beauty behind it until it began to change, to swell and condense into words.

  Words I understood, even if I couldn’t control them.

  “The gift of future has been restored,” I said, keenly aware I was not the only one talking. I could hear Sain’s voice right alongside mine, which meant the sharp scream I was positive belonged to Joclyn was echoing the exact same thing. “The magic was spread too wide but has been returned. The son will rise, the son will fall, and all the blood will cease to flow. The time is now. It grows too late. Kill the fool before the slate. Love no longer seeks revenge. Your power has come to an end.”

  I cringed as it continued, a million hidden meanings seeping from behind my lips as my mind tried to make sense of the clues. However, the sights I knew would guide me were erased and untraceable.

  The pain in my body lifted as my eyes snapped open to the barracks where I had collapsed. The voices of dozens of confused and frightened Chosen rumbled like bees, the smell of rosewood and antiseptic strong.

  Glowering at the forest of bed legs before moving, I fought through the ache that rampaged my body, knowing I couldn’t stay here if I wanted to finish my task.

  Blonde hair falling down my back, I tried to look as elegant and frightening as I always did, but these people had no idea who I was. Even though they had reveled in me at my first appearance, they had just seen both Sain and I collapse to the ground.

  That wasn’t doing anyone any favors.

  They all looked at me with the fear I had come to expect, but this wasn’t based on the fear of death. It was based on the fear of confusion. I would have to change that.

  I needed to take control of my one clear asset first.

  The sharp clack of my heels echoed through the large room as I walked toward Sain who was still lying on the ground, curled into a ball like a despicable child.

  “Get up,” I growled, my foot moving swiftly as I rolled him over, the man flopping onto his back like a lifeless puppet. “You’re pathetic.”

  “They know,” he said, his voice dead as he looked at the ceiling.

  “They know what?” I snapped, my lips curling as I watched him, waiting for something more, but he lay there, his eyes lifeless as he stared straight ahead. “What happened to the powerful man in the courtyard? You’re pathetic.” I spat,

  His spine straightened a bit before I turned away from his pitiful display, unsurprised to see all eyes on me. I was going to have to play this a different way. I wasn’t certain if I should be frightened or excited by the new game plan. Then again, it didn’t matter. They had no idea what was coming.

  Smiling sweetly, I took a few steps toward one of the girls closest to me. She was young, perhaps not any older than her mid-twenties. Her face was scarred and ravaged by my father’s wonderful creations. The deep cuts hadn’t even started to heal, thanks to the poison in them. It was something I knew was causing her great pain, but that was nothing compared to the pain I was about to show her.

  “Hello,” I said sweetly, careful to put as much honey in my voice as I could. I was convinced I had overdone it by the look of even further confusion the woman gave me. “Sorry about all that. It seems your queen summoned Sain and me into a sight. Her magic has been a bit out of control lately. It affects all Drak’s when it does that.”

  “You’re a Drak?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Is the queen okay?”

  “What is happening?”

  The questions came in a barrage, words crowding around me as I stood.

  “I am one of the first,” I said, the lie comfortable against my tongue. “I hold the Drak magic within me.”

  I will not permit you this. You are not a Drak. The voice ran through me, the same one from the sight, and I flinched, the smile slipping from my face as a fear I didn’t quite comprehend seeped through me. My memory tried to pull at the sight in an attempt to understand, but it was long gone.

  “You saw.”

  I jumped at the voice so deep that I spun in fear, my eyes wide as I came face-to-face with the same powerful man I had seen in the courtyard.

  His eyes were hard, his jaw stiff, a power I had never felt before flowing off him. I felt it against my skin, warm and wanted. Sighing, I was lost for a minute in the strength of it, in the strength of him.

  “You saw the sight,” he repeated, the strength in his voice growing.

  “Yes.” It was the only word I could get out, but it was enough.

  His eyes narrowed slightly before he smiled. The grin was wide and beautiful. “Perfect,” he gasped, his joy confusing me. “You’ll work perfectly.”

  “Sain?” I asked as he stepped away from me to face the confused people who were still intently focused on us.

  “Is she a Drak, Sain? I thought you were the only one of the first?”

  “No, but she is special.” The once again pious man walked through the beds like a god. “Ilyan sent her to help you. She has found something that can cure you even faster, help your magic grow.”

  My grin spread wider as the woman closest to us recognized our presence for the sinister warning it was.

  “How?” she asked, the admonition in her voice evident.

  “Sain, darling.”

  His back straightened even more as the room of confused Chosen looked between us. My magic continued to move toward him, the memory of the man I was bonded to so strong I was starting to have trouble breathing.

  “Yes, my Ovi.” He said, using the nickname that, for the first time in centuries, made me melt in an oddly pleasurable way.

  He stepped close to me, closer than he had since the night of our bonding, and even though his hands did not move to touch me, his distance still secure, our magic had completely wrapped around one another in a fusion of power that was dancing a very dangerous tango.

  “Am I of your kind?”

  “You are part of me,” he whispered.

  I hadn’t expected that.

  “We need to leave,” he hissed, his strong voice low enough I was positive only I had heard him. “Every Drak was pulled into that sight. They know what I’ve done.”

  “What have you done?” I asked, a small spark of elation twisting through me, the danger that surrounded us making it grow.

  “You will know soon enough.” He smiled. “You are going to help me.”

  Reaching forward, his hand gripped mine, his magic flooding me in a warm bath I couldn’t help sighing from. It was a sigh that did not go unnoticed.

  “I have to leave here.”

  “Leave?” The elation drained from my body as my agitation skyrocketed.

  “Yes. Now.”

  “I will leave when my job is done,” I corrected him, dropping his hand from mine in anger. “Your place is here.”

  “Not anymore, Ovi, and if you and your father want use of my sight, we are both getting out of here now.”

  He had barely finished speaking before his eyes plunged to the color of sight I had seen so many times before, sight I had always been told was only possible with Black Water, and yet, he stood before me, a mug or pitcher nowhere to be found.

  Something serious was going on, and I had no idea what, which agitated me more.

  Straightening my shoulders, I turned from the man,
seeing the invalids’ faces still full of a barrage of emotions. So far, with the exception of the girl who lay right below me, fear and distrust were not among them.

  Perfect. It would make my job easier.

  A wicked smile spread over my face as I turned back to Sain, whose eyes were back to their deep green.

  “Your plan will work. Wynifred is gone to us. We must move.”

  I didn’t need to ask how he knew what I was planning, how he knew my concern over the loose end I had released inside of Ilyan’s confines. I had seen the black of his eyes, and if he said I would succeed, then I would not doubt it.

  My smile stretched.

  “Wait for me outside,” I instructed.

  His own disreputable smile matched mine before he swept from my side, departing through the solid door without a second glance, leaving me to wonder, once again, exactly who he was.

  I watched the door close before turning back to the scatter of people whose eyes were still focused on me, although fear had begun to take the place of curiosity.

  Not that it mattered, anyway. In no more than a few short minutes, all anyone would hear was their screams.

  “Mommy.”

  I knew that voice. I knew the joy behind it, the calm. I knew the excitement and the way it was just about to laugh.

  I had heard it so much in my life that I could not forget it.

  I had heard it enough in the last few months, too. Then, it was different. Then, it was frightened and haunted. Then, it was smeared with blood.

  This was not that.

  This was beautiful.

  “Mommy?” It came again, like she was calling to me—to me. Wherever I was, whoever I was.

  I was having trouble keeping track of it. Despite knowing the voice, everything else was foreign and confusing.

  I had been here before, I realized. I had been in this white, shapeless space. I had been in this place where my body was nothing and everything.

  How had I gotten here?

  The last thing I remembered was the city and running away from the cathedral in an attempt to save my friend, to save myself, to save my daughter. I remembered the dimming light of the sun, a strange pull taking over me. I remembered Edmund’s greasy smile as I walked toward him, unable to control it, unable to stop. The shard in my pocket, the thing I had left the safety of Ilyan’s cage for, had betrayed me.

  It was more than that, though.

  It was the sound of my scream that reverberated through my ears, the painful pressure of a stab in the center of my hand. It was seeing his smile, feeling his hands on my body, knowing I no longer controlled it.

  I no longer controlled anything.

  Until this moment, when that voice—the calm, beautiful voice of my daughter—pulled me out of the painful prison and into this void, this familiar space of nothing and everything, of nobody and everyone. I was floating amongst it, part of it. It was strangely calming.

  “Mommy?” The voice came again, eagerness I didn’t recognize pulling through it. “I think she can hear me this time!”

  A garbled voice I couldn’t quite make out cut through the fog in answer, the sounds oddly distorted as they ran over me.

  “Okay,” Rosaline’s little voice squeaked. “Mommy, open your eyes. I’m here.”

  Eyes.

  I didn’t have eyes. I was nothing, the same as when I had felt this before with Ryland and Sain …

  Like a battering ram, it hit me—the memory of that moment, of Sain telling me to find my body, of promising I really existed, that this comforting mist of nothing wasn’t me.

  I wasn’t me.

  But that voice…

  That beautiful voice…

  It was real.

  And if I was real, if this was real …

  I opened my eyes.

  I opened my eyes to the dark grey stare of my daughter, to her little, upturned nose, to the dimple that sprouted on the right side of her face when she smiled, to the curtain of dark hair that fell around her cherub face.

  She looked at me with this amazed shock, with so much happiness flowing through her that the last memory I had of her meant nothing, and this happy, little girl, this girl with the dark eyes so expressive they took your breath away, was all there ever was. Everything else was a cruel nightmare.

  “Rosaline?” The single word broke away from my shock, soaring from behind the mind-numbing disbelief that had filled me.

  “Mommy!” she screamed with tears running down her face, long streams of salt water that ran over my cheek and pooled in my hair as she fell on top of me. The lanky strings of her arms wrapped around me in a familiar embrace I had never thought I would feel again.

  “Rosaline!”

  I couldn’t think beyond the numbing happiness that had overtaken my body, the way my heart swelled and throbbed and ached and screamed, and every emotion and every fear and every impossibility flew out of me like a thousand blood-soaked birds. They were stripped from my bones and ripped from my soul.

  The guilt of failing my daughter, the fear of never seeing her again. The pain of loss. The agony of a love never returned.

  It all fell away.

  She was right there, in my arms.

  And none of those things mattered anymore.

  “Rosy,” I sobbed. “My darling girl.” I wasn’t even convinced the words were distinguishable from my cries. Neither of us cared.

  Rosaline sobbed harder, pressing her face into my neck in the burrowing motion that was so her. “I’m so glad you can see me this time!”

  “This time?”

  “Yes, when you were here before … I tried … You couldn’t see … But now you are here!” She pulled away then, smiling through her tears with the same joyful light I had always loved.

  I fought the need to pull her back into me. The elated weight in my heart was so unfamiliar I didn’t know how to handle it. It was going to explode out of me. In some ways, I wouldn’t have stopped it. That way, Rosy could feel it, too. Looking in her eyes, I was positive she already could.

  She smiled bigger, her little hand pressing against my cheek as she leaned into me, kissing me on the nose as she always had. The memories mixed with reality so thoroughly I couldn’t help it; I had to ask.

  “Is this real?”

  Rosy’s face fell, her brow furrowing as she pursed her lip in the five-year-old pout I had seen millions of other children do before and after her. My soul soared from watching it line her face.

  “That’s a difficult question.” The reply came from beside me, the adult, masculine voice even more familiar to me than that of the child who was sitting on my lap. After all, his held centuries of familiarity, centuries of time together before everything had shifted. Then, after Rosy, after me, it had changed, and he had never been the same.

  Yet here, sitting beside me, he was the same.

  “Cail.” It was more of a gasp than a word.

  “Hey, sis.” He smiled, moving from where he stood in the oddly distorted forest to sit beside us, leaves crunching, twigs snapping at his movement. “It’s been a while.”

  He sounded so much like the man I had grown up with, the foolhardy and mischievous best friend who had practically raised me. There was enough pride in him to snap anyone to attention, but so much love and compassion hidden away.

  The anger in his eyes that I had seen for so long was gone. The twisted smile melted back into the impish scowl he had always reserved for me.

  “Cail,” I said again, fully aware I was caught on repeat. My eyes flashed between him and Rosy, the latter’s smile increasing with each glance, her tiny thumb continuing to play circles over my cheek.

  “Wynifred,” Cail said with a laugh, picking up a twig from the ground before him, the mutilated thing vanishing into thick tendrils of smoke at his touch.

  “Am I dead?” I asked, unabashed, the solitary logical answer falling into place with a jolt of adrenaline.

  Normally, the thought would bring fear, but there, surround
ed by my family, it didn’t seem like such a bad ending.

  Cail smiled, however, his head pulling into a small nod. “No.”

  “Then how…?”

  “You were here before with Sain and Ryland…” He didn’t even finish the thought; he let it hang while my brain spun in circles around it as Rosaline leaned into my chest, wrapping her body around me like a little monkey. “We were here, too.”

  “The blade.” My voice was hollow and monotone, a weird emptiness opening through my chest.

  The calm smile he’d had faded into one of fear and anger, the sharp lines of his face reminiscent recoiling through me, reminding me of the person he had been for the past three hundred years.

  “Yes.” His voice was as hard as the look that had overtaken him.

  “I’m inside of the blade again.”

  “Well, your soul is, yes,” Cail provided, his voice still a harsh line of pain. “Your body is another story.”

  My body.

  My body that was being forced to walk toward Edmund, the man who had sought control of my magic since the day the fire awakened. The man and his terrible daughter who had looked at me with eager grins, who didn’t even flinch when I screamed. They smiled, exactly as they always had: twisted, vile, malevolent.

  I didn’t need any other explanation.

  I knew.

  I knew because I had seen Ryland under the same kind of control, seen him turned into a puppet, controlled by the same piece of blade that had brought me here last time, the same piece I had pulled from Ryland’s heart. The same blade sitting in my pocket.

  And Sain knew.

  He had seen where I had gotten the blade. He had told me to run, and I had trusted him, but I had seen him standing in that street, right by Edmund with that same haunting, out-of-place smile as before.

  I should have known better. He was working for Edmund …

  “What is he doing?” I asked, uncertain if I was referring to Sain or to Edmund—not that it mattered anymore.

  “Walking around the cathedral, trying to make you show him the way inside.” It was Rosy who answered, her body not so much as moving from where she lay against me. However, her voice had lost all of the excitement, dragging in a kind of exhaustion that sent the mother in me into high alert.