by Sarah Chorn
Beauty, to Dreshti, was invisibility and pain. It was lies, and it was vanity. It was a pair of magnificent otherworldly wings that cut her to ribbons and threatened to bury her with their weight.
And that was the problem, wasn’t it?
She had been created in love and had spent her formative years surrounded by it. Perhaps, she reflected, it was all that love that really broke her. There was only so much you could stuff down a person’s throat before they choked.
She’d taken care of the problem.
Now, she was different. She wasn’t the woman who had said goodbye all those years ago. She wasn’t the woman who had walked away. There was a lot resting between her and Lyall, an entire history. It had started sweet but then turned sour and they’d both been glad to see the back of each other.
She was crouched outside of Lyall’s barrow, after all that walking, after all that trembling and shaking, and all she wanted was a bit of silence, some rest, before she had to face whatever was happening. Her mind spun, and instantly settled on…
Seraphina.
She’d seen her in a dream and now she couldn’t stop thinking about her, that odd alabaster beauty, and the heavy pain in her eyes. The way her voice shook. She was fire, but she burned cold rather than hot, and that would make all the difference. Regardless, Dreshti wanted to go to her. She wanted Seraphina to scorch her.
She could feel things changing, new connections being forged as she was brought into a web she didn’t understand, surrounded by people she didn’t know. By the time she reached Lyall’s barrow, it was over. The city had been destroyed. Any hint of the people who lived here had been erased. The palace had been leveled, razed. Burned. The land lay quiet. It was one huge graveyard.
Sorrow carved a path through her. So much destruction. It was always like this. It hadn’t been any better when she’d ascended. Worse, maybe. Dreshti had always had a craving for pain. Mostly in herself, but she had always enjoyed watching others twist, too, and her ascension had been marked by it.
Lyall’s barrow was larger than hers. He was in the center of it, dozing, bodies lying all around him, sleeping forms. Her eyes skipped over them.
Later. She’d meet these new ones later.
For now, she needed him. She hated him, but she needed him. They were old. They had become at nearly the same time, and had shared lifetimes since. They had a connection and understanding the others didn’t.
Sometimes a person just needed to be with someone who knew who they were.
He stirred and rose to his feet, stepping over people here and there. No one moved. She doubted they would for a while. Ascending is hard work.
Lyall ran his eyes over her and then smirked. “Nice wings,” he said.
“Shut up,” she hissed at him.
“No, really. Did you do that yourself? Was it some sort of statement?” He paused, walked a slow circle around her. “Was it worth it?”
“You don’t understand pain,” she spat at him.
“Don’t tell me what I do and do not understand,” he shouted, his voice booming around them. The earth shivered under his feet, and she regretted her foolish words instantly.
He’d lost everything. Literally everything. And he’d done it himself. She didn’t understand his kind of loss. No one did. He seemed to see her apology in the softening of her shoulders. He sighed and looked around his barrow.
“It was brutal,” he whispered, sagging against the wall beside the doorway she was still standing in. “I wasn’t sure they were going to make it. And then I wasn’t sure any of us would; but here we are, and now we have hope. Now we have a tomorrow.” Lyall had always been strong and stoic, hiding everything under his skin, just out of reach. “These ones are different, Dreshti. I can’t explain how. They are raw, and far more powerful. Seraphina is… she scares me.”
Now, that did make her step back. In all the eons she’d known him, despite everything they’ve faced together, Lyall had never once been afraid.
“She’s so full of anger and has a grasp of her fire that I’ve never imagined possible. We are ants in the face of all of them. We are specs of dust before the twins. Life and Soul. Fire and Water. They will destroy the world.”
“Or raise it up,” Dreshti whispered. She stepped into the room, felt Lyall’s power cover her, dampening her own. She inspected the bodies along the walls, stopping at one, an obviously dead man.
“This one?” she asked.
“His name was Eyad. He’s the mind talent you were feeling. He is… elsewhere. I don’t know where. I suppose whoever holds his soul now will come to us. His body couldn’t take it anymore. He had been poisoned.” There was a pause. “His soul fled before the breaking happened. Dreshti, I don’t know what that means for whoever carries him now. I feel him out there. He is a wildcard.”
“Interesting,” she mused. The man who slept next to him had tears drying on his cheeks. “And him?”
“His lover, I assume. I didn’t get a chance to ask. He’s the Storm Lord.”
“And he has no idea that this man is still out there somewhere?”
“No. He wept over that body. My element is connected to his.”
She snorted. “Of course we get the star-crossed lovers.”
“They were all a mess before, and this breaking made it even worse,” Lyall said, stepping close to her, distracted by the charred bones of her wings again. “Those wings, Dreshti. I can’t decide if I think you’re amazing for what you’ve done, or if I am repulsed by it.”
She ignored him, trying to get an understanding of who was who. Along the opposite wall was another man, sleeping with his mouth hanging open. If she looked at him, she could see his skin peel away to the bones underneath.
“Him?” she asked.
“He’s an odd one. He was a plague of famine and stripped the earth down. Came down here with a girl who sucked up all the souls she could. He killed her and released all the souls she’d been carrying before the world broke, then tore himself apart over it. The fact that he fell asleep is a blessing.” There was a pause. “Dreshti, the girl was Neryan’s adopted daughter. Neryan, Seraphina’s twin, will wake up, to a dead daughter because of this man. She gave her soul to the Heart.”
Another precarious tether in the group.
Finally, she straightened her shoulders and made her way to the twins.
They were together again, their bodies glowing, limbs tangled together. They slept peacefully, forehead to forehead, nose to nose, hands clasped. They lay on a soft cushion of dirt that had been churned up in their drama. They had fallen there and would sleep there until they would wake and change the world with a blink of their eyes.
There was something almost poetic about these two beautiful beings laying like a beacon in the middle of all this destruction. Blue and orange fissures spiderwebbed out from them, disappearing into the distance, illuminated by the belly of the earth itself, pulsing in time to their heartbeats. The world was a canvas, the twins were the artists, and perhaps that made the rest of them the paint.
She loved them. She hated them. Her heart beat for them.
That’s the thing about love, she reflected as she looked at their twined, sleeping forms. There were a lot of different kinds of it. Hers wasn’t soft and gentle; not the kind that would hold someone tight until all their aches and pains were soothed away. Her love was hard. It had claws and teeth, and it tore her down until she was nothing. A beating heart casting her shadow across the world.
She felt Seraphina’s name carve itself in the tender flesh of her soul, and hated the woman a little for feeling like she belonged there.
Lyall snorted. “You look at her with such love, like you will die without her.”
Dreshti started and glanced at him. She wanted him to hurt her, to make her feel something besides this agonized yearning. To jolt her in some way so she remembered that she was alive.
She heard his cold laughter and bit out, “You think love is funny?”
�
��Theirs is a love that devours, Dreshti, and you look like you are ready for an eternity of pain.”
She was, and they both knew it. Dreshti tended to enjoy the bite of it. It kept her rooted in the here and now, kept her from losing herself in all the paths of her sight, but this was a different kind of pain. This was a yearning that made her uncomfortable. This was something that brought her beyond herself and her ability, and gave her hope.
“Please don’t curse me with hope,” she whispered to the sleeping Seraphina. “Hope is a cancer, and it will devour me whole.”
Once, a long time ago, she had tried to fix a broken man and ended up cutting herself on the jagged edges of his shattered soul. She didn’t want to do that again. She was still healing.
She forced herself to step back, to remove her eyes from Seraphina, from tracing the fine bones of her face, and the lines of her neck and shoulders, and faced Lyall, who wasn’t missing anything in what had just transpired. She felt exposed under his gaze, vulnerable, and lashed out. “What?”
“Nothing,” he shrugged and looked at her almost sadly. “I just wonder what we are going to do. This group is powerful, and they have every reason to wake up and tear each other apart.”
“We can’t separate them. Not yet.”
“No. So that leaves us with…”
Silence fell. Neither of them had any answers. If they woke up and all hated each other, then they had the power to destroy everything. The world, each other, and everything in between. She wished someone else had woken up, at least another voice, another perspective would help, offer some insights neither of them currently had.
“Let me spend some time with my sight,” she finally said.
“I’ll pull you back,” Lyall whispered, a hand resting on her arm. “The old way.”
“Thank you.”
She drifted off, to a corner of the room, and propped herself against the wall. It was harder to see here, harder to push through the layer of Lyall’s protective power, past the hard walls of his barrow, to the point where she could reach her own skill again and tap into it. Hard, but not impossible. It was like flexing a weak muscle. It was difficult, but felt good.
The stream of sight was waiting for her, like a river filled with silver that only she could dip into. She sank into it readily. She loved her sight, and she hated it. It was too easy to get swept away, and coming back always made her question her sanity, but it was necessary. This situation was precarious, and if there was anything she could learn that might help them, she had to try.
She stepped further into that river and saw… nothing.
No visions.
No pictures.
No voices.
Nothing but black.
Impossible. Something was always there, even if it was a vague image, she always saw something. That was what she was. It was what she did. Panic surged through her. What was she without her sight? What had happened to it?
She’d lived thousands of years, but suddenly she realized truly she didn’t want to die. Would losing her sight kill her?
She felt a knife pierce the skin along her ribs, just enough to make her bleed, another scar to add to the tapestry of them she wore. She cursed and blinked her way back to reality.
Lyall.
His barrow.
Seraphina.
Her heart beat Seraphina’s name, damn it.
“What did you see?” Lyall asked, handing her a rag to dab at the blood running down her side.
He cleaned the knife on his pants, her purple blood staining his already disgusting slacks. How they’d remained on him after so long was beyond her. Her clothes had rotted off. She’d had to steal some rags from an empty village and tie them around her body.
“Dreshti,” he rested a hand on her arm, shook her gently. “What did you see?”
The truth burbled past her lips before she could stop it, and she hated the tear that betrayed her by sliding down her cheek.
She whispered one damning word: “Nothing.”
END
Acknowledgements
When I was a teenager and far too cool for life, two of my brothers pestered me to read A Game of Thrones. Eventually, I gave in mostly because I wanted them to stop bothering me about it. Without them, I never would have realized how wonderful speculative fiction is. I never would have become book reviewer. I never would have become an editor. I never would have written this book. So, to Paul and Rob, thanks for pestering me about those books all those years ago. It’s strange how moments that may seem inconsequential to some, put others on roads that impact them in fundamental ways.
There are a lot of people who go into the writing of a book. My husband, who was there through everything, not just the writing of this book, but my numerous battles with cancer, my (shocking number of) surgeries, my severe spine injury, my subsequent mobility issues, battle with chronic pain, diagnoses with a chronic illness, and then my hare-brained idea to write a book. He’s been there the whole way, and never once let me give up. Every time I thought I was drowning, he was there, helping me swim.
Alicia Wanstall-Burke, Graham Austin-King, Bethan Hindmarch, my various editors, thanks for putting up with my anxiety, and my overzealous comma usage and my truckloads of self-doubt. I also appreciate your ability and determination to hack your way through the messiest parts of my book. Thank you so much for helping me create something I can be proud of.
Pen Astridge, you are the best cover designer in the world. Everyone should hire you.
Monica Simons, Bryan Young, Cassidy Ward, and all the writers with Salt City Genre Writers, thanks so much for being there when I needed to rant, needed advice, or just needed someone to listen to me moan about (insert all the things here). You guys kept me laughing and positive when I wasn’t sure if that was something I was capable of.
I want to thank all of my cheerleaders, too. From all the names I’ve already mentioned, as well as Rita Sloan, Ria Bridges, Mercedes Murdock Yardley, Erin Hill-Dowdle, Clay Sanger, and Anne-Mhairi Simpson. You guys have been with me every step of the way and your belief in me has helped me continue to believe in myself.
Huge thanks to the genre community, which I have been part of for nearly ten years now in one form or another. You guys keep me dreaming, keep pushing me, keep me thinking of possibilities and horizons. I don’t know where I’d be without the friends I’ve made within the SFF genre community, and the authors who have filled my days with so many incredible worlds, and characters. Your stories have helped me through some of the darkest moments of my life, and they have brightened my brightest days. Thank you for constantly reminding me of the power of “once upon a time.”
My dad has been writing a book for as long as I can remember. His determination to never give up has been a big influence on me, and the primary reason why, when every door looked like it was closed, I decided to punch a hole in the wall and make my own door. Thanks, Dad.
And mostly, thanks to all of you who are taking a chance on this crazy book of mine. Thank you for helping me realize my dreams.
About The Author
Sarah has been a compulsive reader her whole life. At a young age, she found her reading niche in the fantastic genre of Speculative Fiction. She blames her active imagination for the hobbies that threaten to consume her life. She is a book reviewer, freelance writer and editor, semi-pro nature photographer, three-time cancer survivor, and mom. In her ideal world, she’d do nothing but drink lots of tea and read from a never-ending pile of speculative fiction books.
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