His questions faded to nothing as the sight gained control, the magic coming on so fast I screamed with the force of it, the strength of the vision suffocating.
A man, Edmund maybe, holding a baby as he stood near an ocean. It was calm, relaxing, yet my body didn’t feel the emotion. I didn’t feel the cool air of the sea. I felt heat, felt the heavy thump of fear that moved through my chest. I couldn’t ignore the fear that perhaps he was going to throw the wriggling infant into the ocean.
The vision faded back into the distorted haze of the cathedral I was in, and this time, my sight showed me the medieval workers who had built the magnificent building and Ilyan standing before me as he worked amongst them. His hair was short as I had seen it before, his face spread with a wide smile as he lifted the massive stones.
Ilyan. I wasn’t certain whom I was calling to: the man before me or the man in reality. It didn’t matter; neither answered.
“You must move.” That voice came again, the foreign familiarity of it frightening.
I looked up into the overlay of sight I was surrounded by, expecting to see the voiced woman standing before me, instructing me. However, it was nothing more than a few boys fighting with wooden swords, Ilyan and his fellow workers long since faded into history.
“You must move.” The forceful voice came from a dense space of white near the door to the cathedral, the oddly shifting mass calling me toward it.
I didn’t dare question it, not with the power behind it, not with the way it rattled my bones and connected with my soul.
Looking toward the door, my vision shifted to a cathedral bare of any past or future shadows. It was now. It was pieces of glass that fell from the sky like rain. It was a white shape still standing near the door, the shifting mass looking more human the longer I looked at it.
“Move.”
I did, even while my joints were aching, even while every pull of my body over the stone cut into me, glass and rock and who knew what else falling down from the heavens. With each desperate pull of my arms, flashes of sight surrounded me: flickers of blood, sun-bathed beaches, children laughing, and dying and crying and bombs.
They surrounded me, the uncertainty frightening, but I couldn’t focus on it. I couldn’t dwell. I could only follow the voice as I moved toward it while calling to Ilyan over and over within my mind. He never responded, though for brief moments, I could feel his magic, feel his concern as snippets of what sounded like his voice broke through. Nothing more than that. It was like the connection was severed, like the strength of my sight was smothering it. Frayed wires that weren’t connected, no matter how much electricity you tried to move through them.
A rumble shook the world I was trapped in, shaking the floor as I screamed, clinging to the floor as if it was going to collapse underneath me. A crash of stone and bone reverberated through the destruction that lived in my mind. Tears streamed down my face as I reached the doors to the massive hall, my hands sore, knees screaming in agony. I didn’t want to move any farther. I wasn’t confident I could.
Clawing at the old, wooden frame, I pulled myself up, my legs shaking as the world shifted. My heart plummeted as, turning, I faced the destruction of the cathedral I had escaped. The once ornate, ancient architecture surrounding me was in piles of rubble and clouds of dust. I saw it for a moment before my sight pulled me back into that same blinding light as before, surrounding me with it.
White stretched before me in a brilliance that washed the cathedral away. Everything glowed with a white-hot heat, tongues of red and yellow licking in the distance like waves on white sand. They moved in the sunset I was trapped in, gaining proximity as I watched, as they burned everything.
Burning. The word stuck against my ribs as the light continued to move into me, my muscles constricting painfully at the realization of what I was surrounded by.
A bomb.
I was inside of an explosion.
I gawked at it, waiting for the sight to change, waiting for it to give some answer.
But it didn’t. It didn’t even so much as deviate.
It simply burned.
“You must move,” the voice came again, so close I turned, expecting again to see the formless shape of white. Instead, I faced myself … or, rather, me in a few hundred years.
I stood in the white space, staring at the vision of myself. A crown of red blood dripped over her face from her hairline, her eyes a hollow black staring yet unable to see.
I fought the need to scream at what I saw, at the blood, at the sight, at the death that echoed from her.
“Hurry, Joclyn,” the other me spoke, the voice I had heard suddenly making sense.
My heart rate accelerated in agonizing fear before she disappeared into a speck of black against the brilliant white. Black so dark I was convinced it was devouring the light, sucking it into a vortex of nothing.
“Hurry,” the other me said again.