Without the slightest warning, I was plunged back into the maelstrom of light and sound. My head spun violently as my magic swelled, Joclyn’s right alongside it. With a twist of my stomach, the flashing prison filled with images that moved so fast I could barely focus on them. I knew that, with each image, with each flash of past and future, what I saw would be permanently imbedded into me, stored within my memory.
With a jolt of fear, Sain screamed in my mind, a young Dramin cowering below him, as the man held the boy against the wall of an alley.
A flash filtered the image to that of Edmund standing over Ovailia as he cut down her back, the flesh ripping open as she screamed and begged for mercy.
Wyn disrupted the scene, the girl barely a child as she sat, playing a game of marbles, simply to erupt in anger, her rage engulfing her in flames. Massive balls of fire soared around her before submerging her body, her skin burning away from the bone and creating something darker than I had ever assumed her to hide within her.
Her screams lingered in my ears as the image shifted to the French countryside where Joclyn walked by the house I had built for her so long ago. Her hair blew in the wind as she looked out at the waves, tears streaming down her cheeks.
My heart rate intensified at the image of my beautiful mate, alone, before it faded to me as an adult, teaching my brother Markus the traditional marriage braid. His smile was wide at his fortune, at being safe from our father, at what the following night would hold for him. That precious image shifted to his murder days later, that heartbreaking moment a flash of color in my mind. The haunting echo of Edmund’s laugh rippled through me before I was plunged into the belly of Imdalind, into the tunnels I had blocked many years before, right to the deep wells of the earth.
Sain, my grandmother, the first of the Trpaslíks, and the first of the Vil? gasped for air at the side of the wide well of Imdalind. The Vil? wriggled as it coughed and sputtered for air, its bright blue wings unfurling from the sticky muck like a hatchling. With a scream, its sphinx-like face twisted as it awakened from whatever life it knew before.
One after another, they came, images of past, present, and future wound together so tightly my head swelled with the information, with the emotion carried on the back of them. I could barely process, could barely think. The throbbing ache amplified before the calm voice of the child came again, the voice high and haunting as it cut into the images bombarding me.
“This is sight as Joclyn knows it.”
Joclyn’s magic wound around my soul as the visions continued to slow. Like slides in a movie, they came and left, slowing until I was staring at myself from a time long before.
“This is sight,” Joclyn’s voice filled me, her magic pressing against me as I searched for her, unable to see anything except what the vision was showing me. “This is true.”
Everything moved in overdrive, my soul frozen in fear as I watched myself walk down the main hall in the middle of Imdalind, right to the first pool of sight that the Draks had used for centuries.
It was the exact scene from hundreds of years before: Sain surrounded by Draks, their bodies still as they stood, enveloped in capes. He walked around the pool to greet me, everything silent as he spoke at a speed I could not comprehend, leaving the ‘me’ of the past alone by the pool’s edge as I stripped off my shirt. Water rose up before me like a pillar, eating away my flesh as it connected with my magic.
“This is the end,” the child whispered as the sight I had seen a hundred times before swelled within me, my heart ready to see Joclyn, to see what I had committed to memory so long before. To see that moment when I knew she would be mine.
But it wasn’t.
It wasn’t anything like I had been shown before. The words were the same, but the images, the meaning…
Everything was different.
In one moment, everything I had been working toward, everything I had expected, was shattered.
“There is one among us…” The familiar words were spoken in the unified voice of the Drak, the sound hollow and familiar.
The sight pulled me away from the massive cave, away from the water, and into a different sight, into the black and fire, into a world that was full of terrifying screams.
“… who seeks to change the magic, someone who seeks to kill the magic.”
Screams filled me as I watched a destruction I had seen before. Instead of the dangers, instead of my father’s laugh, I saw him. I saw him stand as he ordered the deaths of hundreds, Sain cowering by his side, his hands and feet in shackles.
My heart ached as the blood flowed, my father’s laugh matching the voice of the Drak in perfect harmony.
“He seeks to kill the magic for his own personal gain. We see him as he fights, as he sheds the blood of us, as he sheds the blood of others. We see him as he stops the reign of magic, as he stops the time of ours.”