In A Burning Room

by TS Ward

  ———

  A sharp pain tore me from sleep. My hand sought out the source behind my ear and found only that scar.

  A feverish heat dampened my skin.

  My mouth was as dry as this desert wasteland, lips chapped, and as I rolled onto my hands and knees, I coughed so violently I swore I tasted blood.

  Warm sunlight clung to my skin like a blanket that I wanted to kick off. I was buried in the heat of it. An aching moan cracked up my throat to match the sound of the Sailer's wood.

  “Sparky? You okay?” A voice asked.

  I thought it was Jack but my ears were cotton deafened. It could have been any of them adopting the nickname. It could have been a voice in my head that I only imagined hearing.

  Strong hands pulled me from the ground as the coughs turned into dry wretches. They hauled me across the sway of the world to lean me over the side of the Sailer.

  The ground moved too fast—too fast—too fast—

  I hated the taste of bile and I hated the way the boat rose and fell over the vicious dunes so damn fast. I hated the heat of the sun in the Wastes and the way it melted my brain.

  An arm wrapped tight around me, hands held my hair back, and another hand offered a canteen as I ran a sleeve across my mouth.

  “I’m fine,” I choked out, but I felt apart from my body.

  My arms were liquid and my bones full of air and my skin was a fire that needed to be doused. Nothing felt real. Maybe this was a dream. Maybe it was all a dream, maybe I was just dreaming in the dark room and seeing the things I wanted to see—why would I want to see this, to feel this?

  Something cold snaked down my throat and struck my teeth with dozens of icy needles. I coughed, forced it out, and then I was pressed into the cradle of the Sailer’s deck and the rail. The taste of metal was on my tongue with the salt.

  “By the stars, Sor.” I heard the words whispered close by. “Ellie…?”

  From the stars, by the stars, to the stars—Astra said those words. I didn’t know when it became a curse, but it did, and not just from my mouth.

  “I’m fine—”

  ———

  My fists cracked the shining surface of a frozen lake. A web of lines stretched outward from the hole that I created.

  I kicked against the cold depths that gripped me tight, angled my body to drag myself on blue hands against the mirror that this lake had become. Gasping for breath, I slithered on my numb limbs to safety, and glanced back as the hole froze over and the scars from my fists healed.

  The air was crisp, dark, tinted blue by a blue moon and blue stars—millions of them that looked much closer than they had before. Reachable, rather than distant. Touchable.

  I stood in the middle of the lake as the water dripped off me in ice sheets. It turned me to a reflection of the mountain that I stared up at. A dress made of ice and snow, a crown of icicles that pierced the curls of my hair, and a body that was made of unmoving stone. A Beckett, through and through.

  Empress, a voice whispered.

  It was the wind over the rock set before me and the halo glow that was cast over its peak from a glimmering silver star at the pinnacle. A being of light curled around the sharp point.

  Tendrils of wind carried snow down the cliffs and across the frozen lake to wrap around my shoulders.

  The sharp snowflakes touched my cheeks and caught in my hair, landing heavy on my eyelashes. I was frozen where I stood, pinned to the lake by icicles that shot through my bones and nailed me to the spot. My heart thundered.

  Empress. The voice was a scratch against the ceiling of the world. Empress, do you breathe? Do you breathe with us?

  I struggled for words that lost their grip and fell back down my throat. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t say anything—I didn’t even know what to say, no more than I could figure out how to unhinge my jaw to let the cold air fill my collapsing lungs.

  The only response I could come up with was, I’m not an Empress.

  Everything as it should be. Everything according to plan.

  Weren’t those the words that Pilot had said? What did he say, about letting this god in?

  Fill your lungs, Empress, swallow the world whole.

  I cracked my rusted jaw open.

  ———

  The world spun too fast, but then I was lying on my side and it was slowing down. Hands cradled my head and a whisper met my ear.

  “I thought I said not to do this again, Sparky. It’s too damn hot in this desert for this to be happening. Don’t close your eyes. Stay awake. Hey. Hey! Soren—”

  ———

  What’s happening? I asked myself, but I didn’t respond. No one did. Nothing did.

  ———

  Bright light shone against my eyes, harsh and painful. Even behind squeezed-shut eyelids white splotches formed against the vibrant orange-red of blood vessels beneath thin skin.

  I was chilled to the bone. The air stung like paper cuts doused in alcohol. My arms didn’t respond. My legs were full of cement. A burning weight pierced my skull.

  “Is she waking up?”

  “Give her more anaesthetic.” Ellie.

  “She’s had more than is safe—”

  “What’s safe is her not waking up during this procedure! She's a Sceptre. Her body can handle it.”

  My heart felt trapped by a cage of ribs too small for it. It thumped and convulsed violently. A muscle spasming. It was the only thing I could feel, other than the numbing cold and the fire behind my ear.

  Procedure was not a safe word.

  Anaesthetic was not a friendly word.

  I tried to open my eyes but they were glued shut by the white light. I tried to open them with every ounce of strength I could muster.

  This didn’t feel right. This didn’t feel good. This didn’t feel like a dream.

  A squeak of a noise was all that I could force out of my dry throat, and then I gagged on the air that was forced into my lungs—a mask, a mask pressed over my face, and I didn’t remember how it got there.

  I didn’t remember where I was.

  Something touched my arm, something impossibly warm. It tapped the crease of my elbow roughly.

  “She knocked the drip out again.”

  “Put it back.”

  “I'm trying.”

  “Quickly!”

  I couldn’t move, but I tried so damn hard. I couldn’t open my eyes, but the bright light filled them until I was blinded.

  I was on a cold metal table.

  Terror froze my blood. Nothing about this felt right. Everything in me screamed against the sharp paper cut feeling in my skin, the heat of hands wrapped around my arms, the forced air that filled my lungs, the brightness of this damn light—the liquid drip in my skull and the smell of chemicals.

  I remembered.

  I remembered the girl standing outside the dark room with a gun and—no, that wasn't right. This… the tank. The static. The pain. Is that what this was? Some nightmarish combination of memories?

  “Shh, sweetheart, relax. Just go back to sleep. Shhh.”

  I didn’t want to sleep. I wanted to get away.

  My eyes snapped open, finally, and I jerked my entire body against the restraints that held me down. Pain drilled through my gut.

  Ellie leaned over me. A surgical mask covered half her face and plastic covered the rest. She held up a finger to tell me to be quiet but her gloved hand was covered in blood—my blood—and the panic in me surged. The beeping in the background went haywire.

  The paper cut feeling was a bit more like sharp static now, coiled inside every inch of me, and I screamed—

  I want to wake up. I want to wake up now.

  “Do it!” Ellie screamed, “Do it now!”

  My mind was a kaleidoscope of sound and colour. It twisted and turned and filled the void space around me with images that I couldn’t wholly grasp.

  It was uncontrollable.

  An unstoppable ride that I needed to get off before I lost my
self.

  Black sand, the ocean, the fountain in the garden.

  Make it stop, I pleaded with myself, with anything that was listening, make it stop, please, make it stop, make it stop!

  You’re the one in control, this god’s voice circled me. You make it stop.

  How? How? How?

  Choose.

  I closed my eyes, and I reached out. My fingers brushed against a cold and wet thing—something like water that didn’t stick. My hand met with something on the other side, warm and soft and breathing, the smooth texture of fabric under my palm and the tense muscle of a body underneath, and then nothing.

  There was nothing.

  The sensations and the sounds whispered around me were gone. I was left in the darkness of closed eyes and the strange not-warm-not-cold air that wasn’t quite intangible.

  I opened my eyes with a bit of wariness, fearful that the darkness wouldn’t go away, fearful that what I had done was not the right thing to do but—

  ———

  My father stood on the shore.

  His eyes widened when they fell on me. His lips parted. The moon highlighted the sharp features of his face and for a moment, he was Pilot. He was Pilot older than he was now, Pilot in a suit and with some ounce of surprise and shock that was never there.

  But this was my father, not Pilot, who took a step toward me into the calm surface of the quiet and starry lake. He froze when the chill reached his skin.

  “Soren? Is that you?”

  This image had been burned into my mind before. “Who else?”

  He took another step forward, and another, and another, the sound of the water broken by his physicality in this state. It was loud in the still air, echoed like an avalanche off the mountains. An avalanche of ice and ash.

  When he reached me, he sank down to his knees and took my hands in his. “I’m so sorry. I never wanted any of this for you.”

  “You never wanted this? You—you had a choice. You chose these things, meaning you wanted this. I want answers, not fake apologies.” I lifted my chin and squared my shoulders as I spoke as calmly as I could, but flames gathered inside my chest.

  His eyes were wet and entirely unlike him, and the sight of it reminded me of that day in the garden behind the Manor—I felt the pain in him as much as I saw it and it knotted up my guts as he spoke in bursts. “I didn’t. I don’t. I don’t. I want you safe. I want you happy.”

  “You want me to dream,” I growled.

  My blood began to boil electric fire. It showed in my voice. It showed in my face that reflected back to me in the shine of his eyes and the water that rose up in mirror-smooth surfaces around us as a box. Water that ate the stars and dissolved them and spread them out in new patterns to be pieced together by longing and curious eyes.

  “You want me to dream despite knowing what that does—not knowing what that does. You want me to suffer for your sake, for your cause, that I don't even understand. You want horrible things to happen to me and you forget that the very thing that you want brings you this. I am sleeping, father, I am dreaming. I am in your dreams. Do you know the things that I could do here, to find out the answers I want?”

  He worked his jaw and struggled for words while his hands squeezed mine tightly. “Do not forget yourself. Do not let those things feed you lies. You are not a god in this place, Soren, you are a guest.”

  “What things? What lies?” I breathed out. I tasted the embers that sparked against my tongue. “You tell me that I can be so much more than Emma ever was. You tell me that I have a gift that needs to be woken, that needs to be used, that you want me to use it, and now you’ve changed your mind? Now you want nothing to do with it, because why? I might use it against you?”

  “Because it will be used against you if you go too far in a place that is not yours! There is more to Emma than what was in that journal, there is more than what we know, but you will be an Empress, not a god, so do not act above yourself. Do not think that because you have the power that you should use it because that is a path that will break you down to dust and put out the stars in this sky.”

  The way that he looked at me was unnerving. The calm that filled him was sudden, overwhelming, like the hurricane passing overhead playing the opossum. There was fury, I knew it, but I couldn’t see it.

  “Do you think that’s what I want to hear right now?” My hands left his and formed shaking fists at my sides. My words sounded stilted and carefully selected. “That I should just sit back and let things happen? You kidnapped a child. You stole him. I will not allow that. Give him back or I will use everything that I have to take him back and no god in this world or the next will be able to stop me. Is that clear?”

  He tried to reach out to me again, but I stepped away.

  “Is that clear?”

  He laughed softly and worked a small smile onto his face.

  I sank down to my knees in the chill of the water and reached for his hands again. He looked through me now, as if he’d lost his grip on the lucidity of his dream.

  “Answer me. Tell me, do you understand?”

  “Soren?” He breathed, his eyes glossing over me. “What are you doing out here without your shadow? You know it’s dangerous. Go home. Tell Mr. Talon shadows don’t leave what they are cast by.”

  “Jack?”

  ———

  “I’m here,” a voice murmured in my ear.

  Darkness and starbursts clouded my vision and faded away slowly, and the raw world grated against my senses. I swayed against warmth and a rumble that felt like an earthquake.

  I was calm and more still than I had felt for what seemed a century of a kaleidoscope sky twisting fractals across the backs of my eyelids.

  “I had the strangest dreams,” I mumbled, pressing my hand against the chest that held a quickened heartbeat.

  “It’s okay, Sparky,” he whispered, and then the world fell away from me. “No more nightmares. I’ll be here to fight them off. Go to sleep.”

  24

  A soft breeze worked through the tent. The camp was quiet, barely awake.

  I was curled up on a cot.

  A light blanket draped over me and a cloth soaked in water rested across my forehead. An arm hung across my waist with the blanket, thin fingers resting loosely with a ring on the second from the left.

  I twisted around carefully, pulled the cloth from my head and tossed it aside, and turned to face her.

  The raven woman slept soundly, a hand pressed between her cheek and the thin mattress. Her dark eyelashes rested against desert-weathered skin as she breathed softly, peacefully, with her bird boned chest that rose and fell like shallow waves in a calm lake.

  Warm light danced across us. It shone through rips in the fabric of the tent that shifted in the wind. It felt like sunrise in the sun-sweet meadow in my dreams, in the summer, with the wildflowers that opened to the sky and basked in the gentle warmth.

  Roam’s hair was soft, shiny, pulled back in a ponytail. Stray strands fell across her face. I reached up carefully and brushed them back with gentle fingers.

  I wanted to know her.

  This woman was one I had seen before, in photographs that went missing and the odd time in my reflection when I felt just a little older than I was.

  I felt older now.

  I felt lost in an ocean of time and confusion with exhaustion forming white caps on the waves. I felt as if I was missing a part of me, and I wondered if she felt this way for me. I didn’t know how I left, but if she felt an ache of hollowness in her chest and the longing for sleep to heal a headache that throbbed between the temples—I was sorry. I was sorry that I made it that way, and that it was only gone for a few days.

  I wanted to know her. And I needed Percy.

  She’s dead, Soren. She isn’t coming back, she will never come back. She is dead and you need to get that through your head.

  But this was her.

  I didn’t remember her, but I knew it was. I knew her face was the same
as the statue and the same as mine—only, her eyes were brown and I had my father’s.

  She was a statue. A memorial. I stared at it while the Lumen dragged me screaming across the green lawn, past the soldiers who stood in perfect unison and complete silence and the one with the eyepatch and the red hair.

  She’s not dead. She’s not! I screamed. Liar!

  Fitz. Fitz was there, but not Jack.

  Roam shifted, and her hand left me to reach up to her face. She rubbed away her tired eyes before nestling her hands together, and blinked as light danced over her. She woke slowly, and when she saw me awake, she smiled.

  “Hey, baby,” she croaked, “How are you feeling?”

  “Like the weight of the world is on my shoulders.” I huffed a laugh. “Like I’ve been chained to a rock at the bottom of the ocean.”

  She was quiet. “They told me what you did.”

  “What, brought the Empire to them, to Percy? Let him be stolen?”

  The ache of it was reflected in her. In the small lines just under the inner brow, at the sides of her nose.

  “The blue shroud, someone called it. Said you stopped bullets, that you caught a soldier thrown two floors down. Said you fried a Lumen. And Ellie’s been telling everyone what you did for a man dying in an alley.”

  “Singing my praises to distract from the truth of it.”

  “Politics,” she scoffed, and rolled her eyes with a sly smile before she became serious again. “That might be it. You know Ellie’s well versed in it. But—Jack told me what happened, too. He’s noticed what it takes from you, why you’ve been so feverish. The thing in your blood, baby girl, it’s more of a muscle than magic. You shouldn’t strain yourself with it.”

  I sat up. The revulsion twisted my gut. “Don’t strain myself? As if it's a choice I make every time I close my eyes, to wake up in an exhausting dream that never seems to end? Everyone wants me to embrace this goddamn thing. You included! But now, now it's don't strain yourself. Now it's don't use it, don't be tempted. Even the rebels, by the damn stars—do they want to kill me or crown me?”