As we soared toward it, my hand extended as I shattered it with a pulse of energy so wide and powerful I wasn’t sure where it had come from, that I was capable of producing it.
“With hell behind and hell before,” I said as we moved through the barrier, watched fire devour the buildings behind us, watched us move through the bleeding cliff face. One after another, the sights came, the quick succession of them spinning through me before they once again slowed to the same river of blood I had seen before, the thin streams of dark fluid moving through the deep grey rock of the cave floor, spreading over the smooth valleys of the ancient floor.
“One must fall before the light,” my voice was dead as I followed the sight, as my heart raced at the image of the same hand, the fingers loose and lifeless. I expected the sight to fade to red as it had last time, for the vision to end and the final unfamiliar words to drift past my tongue, but it continued.
The hand turned into an arm, a strong arm with a wide burn of black water along the bicep, a strong shoulder that held me every night and wide empty eyes that I loved so much.
Ilyan.
“It is divided.” The last words drifted past me, but I barely heard them. I couldn’t even make them out against the scream that ripped out right after, the panic and desperation that had gripped me.
That had ripped me apart.
Ilyan’s arms embraced me like a vice as the scream continued. I fought the need to fight the hold, to run away and find my father, to beg to know how to change what I had seen, to find someone to tell me that the sights were not infallible as I had once thought.
I had fought that acceptance so hard. I had fought my father as I fought to save my brother.
They couldn’t be true.
I had wanted so hard to believe. To be able to use my ability to change the future.
I had before.
Somehow, seeing this sight…
Something had changed. It wasn’t like it had been before with my father. The magic was stronger, the truth of what I had seen almost screaming at me.
I didn’t know how I could deny that.
Yet, I wanted to.
As I looked into the startling blue of his eyes and saw the fear and worry reflected back, I needed to. I couldn’t let that happen.
I couldn’t lose him just as he could not lose me.
I could feel his magic grow as he calmed me, feel his panic and worry fill me as he searched for an answer that, while I knew he needed, I would not let him see.
Before he could find it, before he even had a chance to see, I pulled the sight out of my mind, locking it away in a bind that I knew even he could not break.
I would protect him, even if it meant sacrificing my own life.
I loved him that much.
And you would do anything for the ones you love.
And I would do this.
WYN
Sixteen
I needed to find them.
They had been in front of me, only steps ahead.
I could still hear the echo of Thom’s heightened anger as he and the Drak had reappeared in front of me. His uncharacteristic anger had been frightening as the crowd around them shrieked with their seemingly miraculous appearance, cowering away from the bloodied men who had burst forth from nothing.
Or at least, that was what I had thought.
I had been wrong.
I had watched them scurry away from Thom. I had watched them cower in fear as the earth began to shake with some deep quake I couldn’t place. However, I was so focused on the verbal assault that Thom and Sain were waging that I hadn’t seen what was really happening. I hadn’t seen the towers of Vil?s descending on us until Ryland had screamed in fear beside me, his magic erupting in an uncontrolled attack.
The anger in Thom’s face twisted into his own fear as I turned toward the boy who had gone into full attack mode, his magic ripping from him in waves of weapons and energy that sliced through the air in a desperate move to get the vile creatures off him. To somehow escape the pain, escape the attack.
I knew it wasn’t possible.
Not with the flock of creatures that had fallen upon on us, the numbers so many that we were trapped in a cave of leather wings. The momentary break in the wall revealed Thom and the others had gone. I only hoped they were safe. I needed Dramin to be safe.
I moved my hands as quickly as I could, ripping the Vil?s from the sky and throwing them into the air away from me, my magic flaring into them the moment my fingers wrapped around their gnashing bodies, burning them alive with one touch, destroying the beasts with nothing more than a simple flame.
The mortals around me screamed in fear as they ran, trying to fight the wicked beasts, running from me in what they perceived to be a new enemy. They ran and tried their best to fight, only to be felled, anyway. Their screams only grew, fear and anger mixing with the distant sound of a car.
And still I fought.