Gaia Awakened

by Cassie Thorne

  “You wouldn’t,” she says weakly.

  But we both know I would.

  Something changes in Titania’s expression then. She darts away from me and begins to rustle her wings, searching for an escape route. With a growled spell, I conjure a tiny cage of lightstorm around her figure. The Queen of the Summer Faeries gives a small shriek and hurls herself forward, only to be flung back by magic.

  She’s trapped.

  “So what’ll it be?” I ask her. “Either I can send you to the Midnight Forest, or you can give me the spell I asked for. Your choice.”

  Titania flings a desperate bolt of lightstorm at the cage, but the magic instantly rebounds back to her. She lets out a panicked wail and tries again. And again. And again. I let her work out her frustration for a while. It’ll be easier than trying to force her to talk.

  Eventually her shoulders sag and she slumps against the cage in defeat.

  “Fine,” Titania mutters to herself. Then, louder: “Fine!” She whirls around to face me. “You want the spell, Aidan? You can damn well have it.”

  I flinch at her use of language. So does she.

  “I found the spell in an annex on the highest peak of the Mountains of Kore,” she continues. “Did you know there was an annex there? Neither did I! It consisted of exactly one spellbook, hidden in a cave system. There were stalagmites and stalactites growing in spikes all around it. Almost as if someone didn’t want it to be found. And do you know what the book was called, Aidan?”

  I stare at her for a long moment. The Queen of the Summer Faeries is glaring back at me defiantly, her fingers clenched into tiny fists. Finally, I say, “Don’t tell me you found The Goddess Codex—”

  “I didn’t,” she says, emitting a wild shriek of laughter. “I found The Paige Codex.”

  What the fuck?

  “This had better not be some kind of joke,” I say, my voice suddenly hard. I’m not playing around when it comes to Paige. “Tell me exactly what you found.”

  “The book was all about that girl,” Titania spits out, jabbing a finger across the library. “Whoever wrote The Paige Codex claimed to know the future. They wrote that you’d ask me to find a memory spell. That you’d turn into a dragon to save a human. That you’d fail to resurrect a goddess. And they wrote that if you used the memory spell, the stalemate would end. The war would be over!”

  “So you do have the spell—”

  “Didn’t you hear me?” she asks furiously. “They didn’t say who would win the war. If you fail to resurrect Gaia, that means Jasper will defeat us. This must be the very spell that allows it to happen. Or did you forget how many of my own people I had to sacrifice for your cause? I’m not going to just give you the spell, Aidan.”

  “Jasper isn’t going to win the war,” I say. “You can count on it.”

  “You think you’ll win?” Titania gives another, wilder laugh. “You lost any chance of winning when you let Gaia burn in that tower. And now you want to risk our realm for the sake of a human.”

  “I would risk everything for her—”

  “You would value a filthy human more highly than the creatures of your own realm?”

  “I would value her more highly than myself!”

  “This is a powerful spell,” she says darkly. “You’ll both need to speak it to generate enough magic. Even if you succeed, it will flood her mind with raw lightstorm and cause more pain than either of you can bear.”

  “I don’t care, Titania.” I’m losing what little patience I have left. “Give me the damn spell or I’ll banish you to the Winter Realm this time. I won’t ask again.”

  She stares at me for a long moment before spitting out the words. “Memoria revelare. And get your heart checked or you’ll regret it.”

  I exhale a sigh of relief and dissipate the cage of lightstorm. “Thank you—”

  But the Queen of the Summer Faeries is already gone.

  Great. I’m probably about to have a Faerie rebellion on my hands, which means I should do some damage control and send Titania her gift of strawberries right away. But I finally have the spell I’ve been looking for. I’m this close to learning why Paige is so important. One way or another, she’ll cause the stalemate to end. The war will be over. And after we speak this spell, I’ll know exactly why.

  When I return to Paige, she’s sitting cross-legged on a rug, her dark tresses tumbling over her bare shoulders as she pages through a manuscript. She’s so engrossed in reading that she doesn’t even notice my presence. After a moment, I clear my throat and she looks up.

  “Your collection, Aidan.” Her eyes are burning with passion. “It’s better than anything I ever imagined.”

  I grin. “I promise you’ll have time to look through everything later. But right now we need to speak a spell together, if you’re willing.”

  She hesitates, then reluctantly sets aside the manuscript. “That sounds ominous.”

  The tremor in her voice almost makes me change my mind right then and there. I don’t want to hurt Paige with a spell. I don’t want to hear her screaming in pain because of me. But we both need to know what happened to her mind.

  And sometimes the truth is worth the pain of knowing it.

  “I have a spell that can reveal what happened to someone’s memory,” I explain. “We’ll be able to figure out why there’s so much magic inside you. Something else is going on here, Paige. I know you can feel it too.”

  She’s already on her feet, gazing up at me. “I want to do it.”

  “Are you sure?” I grip her shoulders and look into her blue and green eyes, inhaling her strawberry scent. “It will hurt you to peel back the layers of magic and bare the truth. It will hurt you more than anything you’ve ever known.”

  She doesn’t even hesitate. “It’s like you said, Aidan. I know there’s something else going on. I can feel things sometimes, things that don’t belong to me. I want to know what’s happening to my own mind.” Her eyes are blazing with determination. “I don’t care how much it hurts.”

  Fuck. This is why I love her.

  “Memoria revelare,” I say. “If we both speak the memory spell at the same time, we’ll be able to see the truth.”

  “Memoria revelare,” she repeats carefully.

  I nod and lean forward, touching my forehead to hers. “On the count of three. One...”

  “Two...” she whispers.

  I hesitate. But I’m not worried about what will happen next. Because I know, more than anything, that Paige is more powerful than this spell.

  Her pain won’t break her. Not one bit.

  If anything, it’ll break me.

  Better to do it fast, like ripping off a bandage.

  “Three,” I say firmly.

  And then we speak in unison: “Memoria—”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Paige

  “—Revelare,” Aidan and I say. Or at least that’s what I think we say, because as soon as the last syllable passes through my lips, my mind explodes with pain. It blisters throughout my entire body, ricocheting back and forth endlessly.

  It burns everywhere it touches.

  I scream.

  I scream and I scream and I still can’t hear anything.

  The world around me is disappearing, only to be replaced by a void that makes me feel as if I’m drowning in a vast ocean filled with planets and trees and constellations made of ice. I’m so far below the surface I can’t even remember what the sun was like.

  I just wanted to know why I have magic. Why I keep seeing memories that aren’t mine.

  But instead the spell unlocked the part of me that wanted to remain hidden.

  It’s shattering me to pieces.

  I fight the pain with everything I have, but I don’t know if it is or will ever be enough. This is exactly how I felt when Summer died, only a thousand times worse. The memory spell is unraveling the fabric of my life to weave a new pattern.

  The pattern is as beautiful as it is intricate.

/>   It’s not my pattern.

  “Paige?”

  I slowly open my eyes to find that I’m no longer drowning. Instead I’m standing in the kitchen of my old apartment before it burned, gazing down at a strawberry cake embedded with striped candles.

  Next to me, lighting the candles with a match, is Summer.

  For once I know exactly where and when I am, because this is one of my favorite memories of all time. It’s my birthday a few weeks before everything burns. After I blow out the candles, Summer and I drink and eat cake and have sex until three in the morning, when we finally fall asleep on the mattress with our limbs tangled together.

  At sunrise, he proposes to me.

  But the memory is changing even as I remember it. Hungry flames are flickering at the walls of the apartment, tearing it into glowing fragments that recombine to form a new memory.

  No, not a new memory.

  An ancient one.

  “Paige?” Summer asks again.

  But even as he speaks my name, his body is torn apart and reassembled into someone else. A man who looks the same as Summer and Aidan, but is also drastically different in a way I can’t easily identify. His green eyes glitter brightly, as if they really are made of emeralds, and his skin has an ethereal radiance to it.

  I don’t have to ask to know he’s a demigod.

  He is the very essence of summer.

  Everything else is different as well. Our apartment has become a castle kitchen with stone fireplaces and multiple pantries. All around us, tree nymphs are kneading bread dough and assembling fruit pies. On a wooden table rests a beautifully frosted white cake decorated with berries and ivy and a ring of wax candles. It’s no longer my birthday but the anniversary of the day Gaia created the seasonal realms, allowing the Earth to survive.

  “Gaia?” the demigod asks me.

  “No,” I manage to say before the last glowing fragment settles into place and the memory sears itself into my mind.

  When I try to remember my birthday, it’s gone. All I can see is Gaia’s celebration. The same thing is happening all across my mind, to every memory I’ve ever had, and it feels like a kaleidoscope of time is splintering inside me.

  My entire life is being used to recreate the memories of a goddess.

  I’m fracturing.

  “Paige?” This time the voice belongs to Aidan. Something about the way he says my name brings me back to the present. I like that he’s worried about me, but at the same time I hate him for doing this to me. Even though he warned me the spell would hurt, he never said it would erase all my memories.

  “Did you know this would happen?” I whisper.

  “Never.”

  When I open my eyes in the real world, I’m not sure if we’re even still in the library. Massive green vines like serpents have burst in through the glass ceiling and windows, and red rose petals are drifting down around us like bloodied snow. Everything looks completely different, as if we’ve been gone forever and the world has turned upside down in the meantime.

  We’re floating several feet above the ground.

  The only reason I haven’t fallen is because Aidan is holding on to me. Two leathery wings are protruding from his back, keeping us in midair. His body is partially covered in scales and crackling all over with lightstorm.

  He knows I’m being erased by the spell. He doesn’t want it to happen either.

  But he looks exactly like Summer.

  I jerk away from Aidan in confusion. The instant we stop touching, I collapse onto the floor as the fires in my mind all go out at once. My heart is clenched so tightly I think it might transform into a black hole and suck every emotion and thought out of me.

  “I knew I’d seen your eyes before,” Aidan says hoarsely. “Oceans and forests.”

  “What are you talking about?” I ask, even though I don’t want to hear the answer.

  He says it anyway. “You’re Gaia.”

  I sit up, vaguely aware of rose petals tumbling from my hair. “I’m Paige.”

  “You didn’t burn in that fire,” he says, not listening to me. “You must have done something to alter the fabric of reality. You changed my memories as well as your own, and then you became human. That’s why you’re so powerful. That’s why your eyes are blue and green. That’s why you remember who I am, even if you don’t want to admit it—”

  “Stop talking about us like we’re the same person!” Every word he’s saying is like a stab deep into my heart. “I’m not a goddess, and my name isn’t Gaia.”

  “Believe me, I know you’re not the same person.” His gaze flickers to my lips. “But people change, and you’ve just changed more than most. Gaia never would have risked her life to save mine. So you’re a human named Paige now. But thousands of years ago, you were a goddess named Gaia. I’ve been searching for The Goddess Codex when it was you I wanted all along. It’s only a matter of time before Jasper figures it out and comes after you.”

  But I’m barely paying attention to what he’s saying. I’m starting to panic over not being able to remember Summer correctly. In every memory I have, he’s either Aidan or the blinding demigod, the one who was more terrifying and intense than anyone I’ve ever known.

  I have to remind myself of Summer. If I get back to my apartment, I’ll be able to remember what he looked like. I’ll be able to prove I’m Paige and not some goddess named Gaia.

  I’ll be able to remember everything.

  “I want you to open a portal,” I say to Aidan, jolting to my feet. “I want you to send me back to my apartment on Earth.”

  “Jasper will attack you again—”

  “I don’t care! If you won’t help me, I’ll do it myself.” I try desperately to remember what he said in the Winter Realm. “Terra... terra convertere...”

  I don’t expect it to work, but the air cracks open in front of me anyway. Through a narrow fissure, I can see a terrible battle taking place on Earth in the future or maybe the past. People killing each other in a war that encompasses the entire planet.

  A war that hurts me to the very core.

  “Fuck,” Aidan mutters under his breath, slamming the fissure shut. “Are you even listening to me, Paige?”

  “You’re the one who’s not listening!” It takes all my effort not to scream at him. “If you really believe I’m Paige, you have to send me back to Earth. Please, Aidan. I need to make sure my memories are real. I need to make sure he was real.”

  Aidan winces slightly and touches a fist to his ribcage, as if my words have pierced him right in the heart. He shakes his head tiredly before opening a portal. “Just don’t go outside, okay?”

  I immediately step through to find myself back in my apartment. Ignoring the flowers and greenery still everywhere, I begin to search for my cell phone in the living room. But I feel wild and unsettled, as if I’m on the verge of having a panic attack, and I keep accidentally knocking over piles of books onto the mossy floor. For some reason at least half of them seem to be spellbooks, even though I know they used to be novels and textbooks.

  When I finally find my phone, I scroll through the hundreds of pictures I’ve taken, searching for a photo of Summer.

  I can’t find a single one.

  No. This can’t be happening. Either Willow is trying to get me to move on in the cruelest way possible, or I accidentally deleted his pictures without realizing it. I have to fix this. I have to find Summer before my heart implodes.

  There’s a photo album inside my bedroom. He’ll be there.

  “Paige.” For a second the voice is so deeply familiar that my response is instinctive.

  “Summer—”

  Too late, I realize Aidan is right behind me. He’s the one who said my name.

  “What did you just say?” His green eyes are practically piercing through me.

  “Nothing,” I say, looking away.

  “No,” he says intensely. “I’m not letting you get away with it this time. You said Summer.”

  Af
ter a moment, I reluctantly meet his gaze. “Summer was the one who died in the fire at my old apartment.”

  He says the last thing I expect. “But I’m Summer.”

  I almost laugh at the ridiculousness of it. “You’re not Summer.”

  “I rule the Summer Realm, which means I’m Summer,” he says. “Don’t you understand, Paige? Our memories were altered to make us believe the other died in a fire. But I’m right here. You know who I am. You’ve always known.”

  “You’re Aidan,” I say, turning around and heading for my bedroom.

  “I’m Aidan and Summer,” he says, following me closely. “You don’t have any pictures of Summer, do you? I’m willing to bet you barely even remember what he looked like.”

  “I remember him,” I say quietly. “I remember him with every fiber of my being.”

  “No,” Aidan says. “You remember me.”

  He trails me into my bedroom, where my mattress is covered in the same moss that has spread across the rest of my apartment. Vines drooping with red roses are curled around my furniture, and I think the apricot tree in the corner used to be a chair.

  The photo album should be in my nightstand. I wrench the drawer open.

  It’s empty.

  Aidan grabs my wrist and spins me around to face him. “You said you trusted me, Paige. If anything that happened between us was real, you need to use the healing spell I taught you. You need to heal your mind.”

  I stare back at him for what feels like an eternity. Finally, I reach out to a vine and pluck a red rose. “Corpus medicatum.”

  Nothing happens.

  I shake my head and start to back away, but Aidan’s fingers tighten around my wrist and crush me against him. His musk surrounds me not even five feet away from where Summer’s books are lying on my bed. He isn’t Summer and he could never be Summer.

  But as I stare up at him helplessly, a rush of chaos engulfs my mind. There’s a deafening roar in my ears that I can’t drown out no matter how hard I try. It feels as if I’m standing on the edge of a precipice, about to fall to earth.