by David James
“I think,” he said as his fingers traced imaginary lines down my arm, “that we should run away.”
A shiver stole that moment from me-
ran with it up and down my body until that moment found a place in my heart and beat beat beat away the desperation of my darkness.
This was a different kind of magic.
“We can’t run away,” I breathed. “Where would we go?”
“Does it matter? We would be together and this world would be behind us.”
“It doesn’t work like that; we will always be a part of this.”
Still, the blood whispered underneath.
Samuel sighed. He pushed a hand through the golden curls of his hair and said, “I’m tired, Magda. I’m only seventeen and I’m exhausted from this Warrior life. This war between us and them, the Order and the Orieno, will never end. Some days I question if I was ever meant to be a Warrior. I get tired of killing things, you know? Tired of the constant fall of blood.”
I nodded.
“I know,” I lied.
He said, “I wish I was someone better for you.”
“Samuel,” I said. “It’s not you I’m worried about.”
I did not hate her, but I despised her eyes.
Her freedom.
“Emaline?” I asked. “Do you ever wish you were a better person? Different than who you are?”
She smiled, laughed. “Never! Do you?”
She did not know pain.
The curse had skipped her.
“Sometimes,” I said.
She would never be this witch I was becoming.
“Do you still believe in the choices we have?” I asked.
“Look at me,” Samuel said. “Let me see your eyes.”
“Why?”
He pulled me close. “As long as I can see them, I will always believe in hope, Magda, and hope is what makes our choices possible.”
~
Thirteen moons passed since that night on Sang Noir; thirteen moments of the same night killed by different lives lived.
Thirteen remembered words, gone and lost.
“Do it, Magda,” Momma whispered. “Do it.”
“I can’t.”
I thought, I honestly can’t.
My heart will break.
Samuel.
Samuel’s heart will shatter.
“Do it or the boy will die,” she said.
I thought of Samuel and said, “We both will, Momma. No matter what, this curse will kill us both.”
“You, a different way than him.”
“There is only one kind of death, Momma.”
Her cold hand on mine, she said, “That’s where you’re wrong, Magdaline. Death might be the end of us all, but the roads we take to find it matter even more than when we do.”
I shook my head. Words bubbled in my throat and popped out to this: “I want to choose a different way for him to die.”
“You can’t. Once the Legend of the Dreamer leaves my lips in two nights time, you will be the only one to hold the words. You must live this life alone. If you deny this spell, you will doom the boy to love the witch you will become. You will sentence him to a path so horrid he will want to die a thousand deaths just to be saved the sight of you.”
“He wouldn’t.” My throat began to close against words I couldn’t say, pieces of love I wanted to keep inside me forever untouched by reality. “Samuel is different.”
“He isn’t,” she said. “Before, I thought your father was a different man, Magdaline. I thought he was brave and kind. I thought that he loved me enough to defy the witch’s curse. But when he saw me that first night with blood crusted to my lips, the knife he slit across his throat proved even love cannot break a bind as great as destiny.”
Samuel.
I felt his name cut my lips. “Samuel.”
Felt three words bend and break the strings that kept my heart beating: I love you.
“Do it, Magdaline. Save him.”
I felt the cold slide across my third finger. The sharp blade seemed to dig inside me even when it wasn’t near my skin, and as my blood dripped
dripped
dripped into the silver goblet I could only think of the thirteen moments that had passed before me.
Thirteen drops of blood; one for every word I missed.
“Your eyes gave you away. They are almost as beautiful as your name.”
Three more for words unsaid.
I love you.
Sixteen drops defined my life.
In that final moment before the spell began to shape itself in the night, I understood; there was a price to pay for everything. We loved, we lost. We lived, we died. We smiled, we cried.
I closed my eyes against the violet of my curse-
against hope.
Blood.
Heavy, heavy blood.
Blood would always be my price.
Blood would be my everything.
Chapter Three
Cruel Darkness
The spell choked me.
The unfathomable world above Sang Noir began to dance in an unquiet symphony of chaos; sky and clouds began to burn, one thousand flames on fires dressed in fury. Lightning sparked across the sky, cracked with a terrible and savage grace; fingers pulling, wanting, moving toward power. Stars slowly faded until even they could not live; shards of memories, pieces of light lost; breaths stolen to keep the darkness alive.
The spell was boundless as it choked the world.
I closed my eyes against it.
“Taste it,” Momma said.
My head moved left and right. No.
“Do it,” she urged.
No!
Inside my chest a different storm began, one that took my breath and stole my voice; a harbinger of the unforeseen magic of witches.
She asked, “How many drops did you bleed?”
Sixteen.
“You must breathe, Magdaline. You will die if you deny your destiny. Breathe.”
I breathed and-
died and-
lived and-
died again.
“A life for a life. Dying and living,” Momma whispered. “That’s what this spell feels like, I was told. Such a twisted thing love is in this dark storm of magic. It cannot breathe, Magdaline. It suffocates in the blood until the magic sets it free. That is why your lungs feel so heavy, so useless; it is the love leaving you to join the spell. The darkness must fill you as you become it. That is the first step.”
But it didn’t feel like that, not at all.
I whispered, “Sixteen drops.”
It felt worse, like losing my heart; feeling its beating stop inside me as my life lived on.
“Sixteen drops,” she repeated. “Why sixteen?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
I felt her laugh before I heard it. “You do know, Magdaline. Tell me why you bled no more and no less than sixteen drops to kill your love.”
Love-
was the answer, the curse.
It was the end, the beginning; the torment, the ironic heartbeat of this spell that took love and banished it.
Against the sounding thunder, I whispered, “Love. Thirteen words made me love him. Three words I couldn’t say beat in my heart for him.”
One finger pushed back my hair and traced a line across my neck. “Sixteen words to fill your heart, my daughter, and sixteen drops to break them.”
When I opened my eyes, the spell took me, and I began to see the world in violet shades of real and not real.
“See the truth of who you will be,” Momma said.
I said, “I am not who you want me to be just yet.”
“In two days, this darkness will be everything you are. Feel it. Live in it. Breathe from it.”
I breathed-
Samuel.
“I remember when my mother died,” he said.
As my hand traced a path from his arm to his chest and found the place over which his heart beat, I rested my hea
d there and breathed in silence.
It was enough, that silence; quiet enough to be as loud as we needed it to be.
He whispered, “I don’t remember the day she died, but I remember the days after. I remember the way my heart felt, Magda.”
His hand found my back, warm.
His falling tear found my cheek, cold.
And though his words were whispered, I felt them in my chest as though they screamed. “I remember my heart feeling like it wasn’t beating at all. Not too fast, like they said. Not too slow. Just, not. My entire body carried on when my heart refused to live.”
My head rose and fell with each breath he took, and when his heartbeats pounded up from inside his chest, I pressed my head closer against him.
I heard and felt and loved him living.
I whispered, “I’m sorry.”
He said, “But not now. My heart has changed.”
sixteen breaths.
Sixteen seconds of Samuel, stolen.
Momma touched a hand to my chin and pulled my face flush with hers. “Are you ready?”
With her help, I felt myself nod. “Yes.”
“Drink,” she said. “This kind of spell must kill you both. Your heart, his soul. You must taste the spell, touch it to your lips and whisper the words for it to shape its destiny.”
The goblet touched my lips cold, made them part until my throat opened and that sip, that metallic sting of power dripped into my stomach.
Cold filled where warmth evaded.
“Save him,” she said.
As my heart began to change, as darkness began to twist its heartstrings black, I whispered sixteen words, “To save his soul, with a single kiss from true love’s lips, I curse him dead.”
The night took my voice and held it in places filled with light until all was dark. My words screamed in bolts of lightning as they vanished. It cried in clouds as they faded from red to gray to black. My spell drained the moon until the shape of it was nothing more than a hollow void in a vast darkness of sky.
~
Day became-
night became-
day again.
On Sang Noir, I waited for his heart to find me.
Light spilled off the mountains as the rising sun peaked behind Ashfall. Thin clouds ran across untamed moments of endless blue, moving with the wind away from me.
The spell had faded from the world and lay dormant on my lips, waiting.
When I saw him, it began much like before:
The sky, burning.
His smile, radiant.
I felt him close, felt him breathe.
But this time I did not run, did not cut against the wind. Instead, I let it slice into my back and sting away the moment that once was everlasting.
“Magda,” he said as his body met mine.
“Tell me something, Samuel,” I said.
His hand glided down my side. “Of course.”
“What would you do for love?”
His tongue traced his lips. “Anything.”
“And to keep it safe?” I asked.
He leaned toward me, his nose touching mine, and in that small fraction of warmth I felt a drop of something cold drip down my cheek.
He said, “You are my heart, my love, my Magda. I would do anything to keep you safe.”
The wind took his voice, and for a moment I wondered if it would take mine, too. So quiet, the breaths of this wind. So infinitely quiet.
He smiled and put his hand on his heart.
His gentle words crashed against me. “I feel you here.”
“Kiss me,” I said.
He whispered, “What are you doing to me, Magda?”
“Saving you,” I said just before our lips touched and my heart crashed to this:
“I love you,” he said.
I whispered, “You don’t even know me.”
“I know your eyes.”
My cursed violet eyes.
I said, “I can’t say it back yet.”
Because of my eyes, I would never say it.
He didn’t know who I would become.
“You don’t have to,” he said.
“Why not?”
He smiled. “I told you before, Magda. Your eyes tell the truth even when you can’t.”
“And what do they say now?” I asked.
He said, “I love you.”
“Let me see your eyes,” he said so softly.
I leaned close.
Closer.
“Samuel,” I said. “Just close your eyes.”
I brushed my lips to the ice of his cheek.
He whispered, “So beautiful.”
Slowly, his eyes closed.
And then my heart began to cry.
My voice broke. “Samuel. Please come back.”
Samuel.
I touched his face, his lips-
and tried to breathe life where it was lost.
“Samuel.”
Samuel.
Needing, “Please don’t leave me.”
Wanting, “Come back.”
Desperately, “I love you.”
I love you, Samuel.
As the strings that bound my heart in love broke, the cold and cruel hand of reality began to take hold. Something like darkness took that night from me, took every moment between Samuel and I and colored them a wicked violet.
Me, a piece of hope that wasn’t; the shadow of a girl one boy once thought I was.
Samuel.
My eyes were that violet-
my heart that cruel darkness.
Chapter Four
Beautiful, Dark Things
It lived.
My heart lived even though I told it not to.
Each step I took toward Ashfall marked one step back, one step away from where Samuel lay. One step toward the future I could not escape.
Dead, my heart lived.
A certain slant of darkness took the noon sun until its burning brightness was killed by the ghostly gray of winter rain clouds.
Ages, it seemed, took place in those moments between Sang Noir and Ashfall; I could not stop my destiny now, could not step back into what the past once was. I could not stop my heart from hurting no more than I could stop the rain from falling-
down from the mountains-
down from the violet of my eyes-
down.
~
Beauty had taken this town.
Buildings twined in ivy vines rose before me in the brazen shine of the shy sun. A dust of snow kissed the air and the tops of trees, moving slightly with the hesitant wind blowing down from the mountains. Night was unseen, but tall, iron pillars lined the streets, bursting with enchanted fire to warm the icy air. Laughter colored the faces of Order members like the shadows of flames, stoic smiles set against Warrior’s strong pride.
Ashfall was a happy place full of happy people. With the rain gone, it seemed beauty was everywhere happiness wanted to be. And yet, as I walked the streets toward my mother’s home, the weight of grief clung heavy to my shoulders and I could not find my smile.
Though I did not see them, eyes saw me-
blind to the truth of things beneath.
The church where my mother lived rested on the edge of Ashfall, balanced between the dark of the forest behind it and the light of people before it.
A place caught in shadows.
Step by step I walked, the hallowed ground cracking beneath my feet; pebbles of the past breaking as I walked my future’s path.
Above, a foreboding shadow of the sun lifted behind the cross that stood tall on the roof, and I wondered what it would take to make the heavy earth fall as I did.
Before the black door, I paused. Waited. Took one last moment for myself to breathe, to remember.
To forget.
I wondered about the stars from time to time, wondered why they blinked so brightly when everything around them was constantly dark. I wondered if they were the void in the sky, or if the sky was the void of stars.
>
“What are you thinking, Magda?” Samuel asked.
I moved closer to him, pressed my back against his chest and let his arms fall around me.
One day more and my curse would take me.
“Do you ever wonder about the stars?” I asked.
I felt his lips on my neck. “What do you mean?”
I said, “Do you ever wonder why they exist?”
“I guess, maybe,” he said. “We have stories in the Order, but sometimes I wonder about the world, the sky. What’s beyond this life.”
I nodded. “How can this world be all there is, Samuel? The sky is so vast, so infinite in darkness at night. How can there be nothing beyond what we can see?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe there is.”
I closed my eyes. “I want there to be.”
“Something more than this?”
“Yes,” I said.
A silent moment lingered between us.
He whispered, “I don’t want more than this, Magda. I don’t want anyone more than you.”
I opened my eyes to a star shooting across the beautiful dark blackness above me.
I wished-
a horrible, secret wish I would never say.
“The sky,” I started, “is so infinite, Samuel, that even the stars do not know where to fall. They are forever changing, the stars. They are beacons, and they seem to be everlasting. But then they blink and fade and die before we can even see the difference.”
“What are you saying?” he asked.
The words caught in my throat before I could push them back down, stuck in a place between what was said and unsaid. And then, “I’m saying no one knows what forever will bring, Samuel. No one.”
“I do.”
I laughed, sad. “You don’t.”
Against my back, I felt his chest fill until the rapturous beats of his heart echoed mine. “I do, Magda. I promise you I do. I know that you and I, this beautiful thing we’ve started, is something that we will have forever.”
I said, “People die, Samuel. They change. They fade just as the stars do. Beautiful things can’t stay that way forever. Especially not when they are surrounded by so much darkness.”