“I know,” Sebastian said softly as he kept his gaze pinned on Ciardis’s face. Nonetheless he took a few steps back to give her room.
Room that she didn’t necessarily want, but needed if she was to start breathing normal again. When he was back a suitable distance away, she felt recuperated, and judging by the smug grin on Sebastian’s face, he knew just how he’d affected her as well.
Clearing her throat as she tried to distract herself by listening to the flutter of birds in the tree canopy above them, Ciardis’s eyes unwillingly caught on Thanar’s hair.
“What?” the daemoni prince said defensively while reaching toward his mane automatically. “Do I have something in my hair?”
“No,” Ciardis said in a wondering voice, “but you did have a distinguished stripe of silver in it the last time we met.”
Thanar snorted in disgust. “You mean that skunk stripe?”
Ciardis pursed her lips to keep grinning. Instead all she said was, “Oh, I don’t know, I rather liked it.”
The daemoni prince raised inquisitive eyebrows. “You did?” he said in a speculative tone.
“Quite a lot,” Ciardis said shyly. More than a lot, actually, but Thanar was already so vain. Telling him that the silver stripe made him look debonair would have been overkill for his ego, she knew that. Still she couldn’t stop smiling his way, imagining the stripe back as well as that extravagant court outfit he’d been wearing as well. She hadn’t mentioned it during their meeting, but it had certainly suited him well.
This time it was Sebastian who interrupted their moment with an arduous clearing of his throat.
Jumping guiltily, Ciardis said, “The point is…Christian was there and he specifically said he’d known us for about ten years. That’s nowhere near long enough to grow that silver stripe.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” quipped Sebastian. “Thanar’s pretty old already.”
Thanar sent death glares into Sebastian’s back while Ciardis giggled at the witticism.
“Still,” she said. “It troubles me.”
Thanar held out a commanding hand. “All right, let’s forget my hair for a moment. Can we agree that it might have been the future?”
Both Sebastian and Ciardis nodded.
“What about the first time?” Ciardis demanded.
Slowly Sebastian asked, “Did you notice that the palace last time was dirty but intact, unlike our original departure point?”
Ciardis blinked. “No, but you two were there longer than I was.”
Thanar nodded. “It was intact, towers and buttresses flying as if it had never been hit by bombardment after bombardment.”
“So that was the past,” Ciardis guessed.
Sebastian said, “Yes, that’s what we’re thinking.”
Ciardis gestured at the forest. “And now?”
“The present?” Sebastian guessed. “It’s hard to know. We’re surrounded by trees and nothing else.”
“Could you ask the land?” Ciardis asked innocently.
Sebastian shook his head in frustration. “Believe me, I’ve tried, but for some reason my connection isn’t working here.”
“Different reality,” Thanar grunted.
“All right,” Ciardis said with a deep sigh. “We’ve been to the past, present, and future. Now what? Do we just wait for another dark hole to pop up?”
“I hope not,” said Sebastian in frustration as he lifted his hand and gestured at the impenetrable canopy of forest and trees above them, “but we’ve been in this scenario almost as long as the others; who knows what could happen next?”
“Before something does,” Thanar said with an edge in his voice, "why don’t we figure out how and what we are doing here?"
Ciardis drummed her fingers on her dress impatiently. “That’s at least something to go by.”
She wandered in a circle muttering until she looked up at Thanar, asking, “Have you tried your magic?”
“Tried and failed,” the daemoni prince said with a shrug. “I think I could still fly, but there’s nowhere to go.”
“Well we could get a lay of the land back in the clearing I left,” Ciardis said pointed back the way she came.
Sebastian nodded. “That’s a good idea.”
“Before we do that,” Thanar said, “let’s confirm some details.”
Ciardis and Sebastian looked at him patiently for him to proceed.
“All of our magic is gone?” the daemoni prince said slowly.
Ciardis did a quick check and then agreed, “Mine is locked away as well.”
Thanar grimaced. “It’s as I thought. And none of our friends are here?"
"Not as far as we can tell," Sebastian admitted.
"So basically we have nothing on our side," said Thanar with a dark irony. "What about you, Golden Eyes?"
“Well, I think we have something: our bond,” Ciardis said pleasantly. “It obviously drew us together even though we were transported separately without each other.”
Thanar and Sebastian looked at her raised eyebrows.
Sebastian asked her slowly, “But how does that help us?”
She gave a tight smile as she said, “We’ve gotten out of worse situations than this. Besides, I think it’s our secret weapon, because clearly whoever is doing this to us has no idea who it is they’ve just messed with.”
Thanar gave her a twitch of a smile at that. He understood the irony of underestimating the triumvirate’s ability to overcome even overwhelming odds. Looking at the hope that floated in Sebastian’s eyes, Ciardis knew that he did too. They weren’t powerful because they fought apart, they were powerful because they could do anything together.
And she said as much.
Eyes firm, Ciardis said in a clipped voice, “We can do this. I know we can.”
Leaving those words fluttering on the wind, she picked up her ballgown and turned back to hike toward the clearing. Thanar and Sebastian quickly joined her but Ciardis had fire in her eyes and, at the moment, nothing was going to stand in her way.
When they got back to the clearing, it was as empty as she had left it.
She looked around not really expecting anyone to appear who wasn’t already there, but checking…waiting for a pause even…to see if the forest would divulge some new secrets. Instead the sound of wind whistling between the leaves and the chatter of fauna was the only thing that met her ears.
Finally within an area not so crowded by branches and tree trunks, Thanar took the chance to stretch his wings as he soared into the air, gaining height with each powerful pump of his wings. The freedom of being in the air must have been invigorating, but when he came back down, he didn’t have good news for them. All Thanar had to do was shake his head sadly for her to know that there was nothing that would help them in short of flying above the canopy.
Still, when he landed, he confirmed that estimation by saying, “There’s nothing for miles in either direction.”
“Nothing?” Ciardis questioned, disbelieving.
“Just forest,” Thanar shrugged. “Trees thickly clustered together are seen for miles all around. I didn’t see any breaks like this either. Though they might be so small that you wouldn’t know the clearing is there until you stumbled onto it by foot and certainly not from the air with the way these branches are overlapping…even here.”
Ciardis bit her lip.
It’s true, she thought as she glanced up and gave the canopy a frustrated look.
Even in this clearing with sunlight streaming down on them, some older trees had grown thin branches across the top, shading patches of clear land if not precisely the majority of the area they stood in.
Sebastian frowned. “That doesn’t sound like any particular geography in Algardis I’m familiar with, though I suppose it could be someone’s estates.”
“Maybe a northern one?” Ciardis posited.
Sebastian gave her an approving nod. “Perhaps, seeing all this green, I’d think it would be during a warmer season.”
>
She agreed with one half of her brain. She wasn’t really listening with the other half.
Because something had caught her eye. An edge of black in the ground. This time growing slowly as she watched.
Ciardis groaned, “It’s back.”
“Well,” Thanar said lazily as he came up to her side and Sebastian came up on Ciardis’s right, “looks like we’ll get to test this theory sooner than we thought.”
Ciardis pursed her lips in discontent but she didn’t have much else to say. She just had to believe in the bond and believe in their theory, because they had nothing else to throw at the vision turned reality.
“One last time,” she said while looking at her two bondmates uncertainly. She reached out blindly and took both of their hands.
Sebastian’s face was tense. “I hope it’s the last time.”
Thanar grumbled, “It’d better be. I’m ready to tear into some deity behind.”
Hands linked, faces resolute, they jumped into the pit of hell that had emerged as a glistening black lake at their feet. No reservations, just resolution.
25
Ciardis felt herself falling again, once more inside the maelstrom but this time she fought back. She refused to be torn from reality to reality like a paper doll being played with. Not again.
She was falling and falling. Head-first in a maelstrom.
Unable to gather her magic, she screamed. Long and hard. A guttural sound of rage into the darkness, to show she had no master. That even though they tore her from here and put her there, they couldn’t dominate her entire being.
“I’ll fight you!” Ciardis screamed. “I will.”
Just before she saw her third bit of light, she thought she heard in a distant voice with a warlike bellow so tiny it was almost not there, “Fight?”
Before she could contemplate what she had heard, though, she was reaching up into the air, and not as an individual who was diving in a steep descent. This time she was on her stomach and she had the urge to grip something.
Still half asleep, half awake, she heard a chipper voice say, “It’s been quite a while. I hope you’re ready now, Lady.”
Heart pounding, Ciardis surged up in bed, chest beating wildly as she looked this way and that like a wild woman. She remembered. She remembered everything. Slumping back down into the bed in defeat, Ciardis felt like sobbing.
The feather duvet felt like defeat, so much so that she rolled over to curl in on herself. Sebastian had been wrong. There was no other way to put it. She was in another reality. Not a different timeline; there were no more timelines to go to, after all. They’d been through what he called the past, future, and present. So this? This meant they had no idea what was truly going on.
Ciardis rolled over on her side, planting her face in a soft pillow and groaned, “What?”
“It’s time for your cohort to move out, my lady,” the servant explained in a reasonable manner. “The emperor and the advisors have already—”
The servant didn’t even get to finish her sentence before Ciardis shut out her words by blocking her ears. She didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want to contemplate it anymore. She just wanted to go home and there was nothing more to hold on to anymore.
Where are Sebastian and Thanar? she cried in her mind.
But they weren’t here, and she imagined coldly that maybe they never had been. Perhaps it all had been figments of her imagination.
But Ciardis thought about that and thought some more and she realized that by giving in to that fallacy she would be giving up. She would write off the daemoni prince as assuredly as they were writing off her.
And she couldn’t bear that.
So she uncurled her body and sat up to get out of the bed. She could at least go looking for them.
She got up with the servant still happily chirping away behind her and Ciardis had the oddest sense of déjà vu. But it was different—as if she was looking at a mirror that had been twisted and now…she was warped.
She looked around and realized that this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Seeing herself in a tall mirror again, it wasn’t with shock this time. It was horror. Her golden eyes were gone. Her tawny skin had changed. She was taller too.
Breathing in a quick manner, Ciardis shook her head in confusion as she stood up and her nightgown pooled around her now-lithe form.
Touching herself, Ciardis realized her curves were gone. Instead she was thin. She was thin and her hair, her curls, were straight.
Freezing and not knowing what to do, she slowly turned around to the servant and asked, “Who do you think I am?”
The woman stopped in mid-chatter and then smiled as she quickly said, “Well, Ciardis Weathervane, of course.”
Ciardis shook her head so hard she thought it might fall off.
“Ciardis Weathervane doesn’t look like this!” Ciardis snapped before groaning internally as she talked about herself in the third person.
The woman froze with wide, uncertain eyes like a doe in the headlights.
For the first time in a long time, Ciardis felt like laughing. The servant just looked so silly.
Well, that’s it, Ciardis thought faintly to herself. I am going crazy.
Ciardis turned away from the woman she was contemplating and wondered what she could do. She didn’t bother pulling her hair into a messy bun as she paced, though she wanted to—the stick-straight hair was getting in her way and making her massively uncomfortable to boot.
Ciardis muttered to herself as she paced, “This isn’t who I am. This isn’t who I am.”
She didn’t notice that she was scratching her new skin enough for it to bleed while she did so. If she had, she might have stopped.
On one of her intervals of pacing around the room, she noticed the servant was slowly backing toward to the door. Trying not to make any untoward movements. Ciardis ignored her; she wasn’t the reason she was this way.
As she felt her mind spiraling and her sense of self careening right along with it, Ciardis heard a tiny voice that sounded soft and musical say in her head, “Self?”
The only thing she noted was that it sounded very different from the voice that had said “Fight?” earlier, but still…it came from the same place.
It wasn’t her. And it wasn’t Sebastian or Thanar. It was someone else. Something else. Something that knew something.
Desperate in a way she never wanted to feel again, Ciardis reached out and grabbed at that voice with all of her might.
“Who are you?” she screamed.
The voice didn’t respond, though, and Ciardis was through. She was done. First she’d been in a fort castle, then a ballroom, then a field, and now a bedroom. She was being dragged round willy-nilly like someone’s toy and she couldn’t take it.
The one thing being a Weathervane had given her that she most appreciated was agency. And now she was being forced into roles that she couldn’t comprehend. So she took back that agency. Ciardis saw it as soon as she turned toward the wall. She knew what she had to do.
If they wouldn’t give her agency, she would force them to do so.
She’d take back her narrative each and every time in any way she could.
She heard the servant screaming behind her, “Stop!” but she didn’t.
Ciardis Weathervane ran as fast as she could, unchecked, unaltered, and with zero resignation she hurled herself through a beautiful glass-paned window.
She was falling before she was flying. But then the darkness came and she laughed at the brilliance. The brilliance and simplicity.
“I know I’m sane!” she screamed out into the void alone, wondering who else was there and why she was here.
No one responded, but no one had to. Because she had found her agency. She’d found her way to take the light and bring about the darkness, so she laughed as she flew back into the void.
As she was wrapped in the nothing once again, she had to wonder, Is this what the kith meant by endless darkness?
Refusing to give in, refusing to acknowledge what she wouldn’t believe. That she’d never get out of the darkness. So instead of giving in, she did what only Thanar would do.
She taunted it.
She called it every name she knew until eventually she was so tired, that she kept shouting, “You’re wrong!” ineffectually into the darkness.
It made no difference, but it kept her sane. Because she would rip into a reality and seconds later rip right back out. She didn’t care who was there. Her mother. Raisa. Her father. Thanar. Sebastian. She saw them all.
And like a diver she dove straight back out as soon as she could.
Once she thought she saw Sebastian salute her as he too dove back into the darkness.
But she couldn’t be sure; the only thing she was sure of was that they were wrong.
After the fifteenth reiteration of her life, something changed.
She was floating in the darkness for longer and longer times. Like it was testing her, assessing her.
Then it spoke, and Ciardis cried.
“Ciardis,” it said in a voice that was far louder and far closer. But different all the same.
“Darkness!” she cried back.
“No,” it said as it pulled back a little and then blasted forth with a voice so loud that she would have been deaf if they’d been anywhere else. “Life!”
This voice, too, was different.
Ciardis didn’t particularly care what it called itself, but still she asked, “Who are you?”
A new voice responded almost shyly, “We are gods.”
And Ciardis laughed the laugh of a crazy woman who finally saw the light and the truth—that it wasn’t she that was crazy. It was everyone else.
“He was right!” she shouted into the wind. “Sebastian was right.”
The gods spoke in one voice, “Yes.”
It took her moment to contemplate whom and what she was talking to. But she had no doubts that they were gods indeed. They let her stay in the darkness this time. Floating, drifting aimlessly and cocooned in a warm-seeming blanket. It comforted her in a way that falling hadn’t. As she tried to decipher them, she realized that perhaps they had been using those realities to decipher her.
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