Page 62 of The Oracle's Journey

I tore at my hair, my clothes, the tile shard claws wrapped around my legs, sharp edges leaving stinging cuts on my flesh. It didn’t make any sense! How could I desperately want one thing while some other part of me did the opposite? Untethered from my anchors, my grip on reality started to slip.

Ubras stopped. He limped closer to me, though he stayed out of my reach. “I want that power of yours, girl. But it’s not quite done yet. I can feel it’s so very close to Becoming, but it needs to be tempered further—hammered into something I can wield as a weapon. You’ve done a little bit of that with it; the kernel is there.” He examined me, from the tips of my hair down to my bloody ankles—not like I was a person, but a specimen in a jar.

I spat at him. He glared down at me. “How are you a princess? Foul little beast.”

“Fuck you,” I snarled. I refused to be the first to look away, even though eye contact became increasingly uncomfortable. “You’ll not be tempering anything of mine.”

“Oh, dear princess …” He spoke my title as though it were an insult, “… I have a measure of your power and what you have done with it.” He held the plaits of hair up for me to see. “I know how much you value love. It’s a weakness, you know.” He pointed to Nicolas, who was curling around himself, trying to catch his breath and stay upright. “I think between my nephew and your elf friends, I have all I need to temper you.”

My rage gave way to an icy dread, it’s cold claws clutching my heart. I felt it when my magic locked all of Nicolas’ joints. He stood in the tile shard talons, rigid, his face fixed in a grimace. Ubras hobbled towards him and sighed.

“I’ve been wanting to do this for years,” he murmured and reached for Nicolas’ face. “You won’t be needing these anymore, seer.” The old man grinned with clenched teeth and wide, wild eyes. He dug his thick, stubby fingers into Nicolas’ right eye socket. Nicolas screamed as his eye bounced against his cheek and dangled there. Ubras reached for the other eye and repeated the process.

His eyes. His beautiful, kind, loving eyes. I vomited onto the tile shards and gravel. “Stop,” I whimpered. But Ubras ignored me. He used the knife to cut the dangling orbs loose and dropped them into a glass jar.Blood poured down Nicolas’ cheeks, slowly drenching his white tunic.

“Why would I stop?” Ubras asked in a low, muttering voice, as if too distracted to truly speak to me. “I don’t have powerful innate magic like you or your monsters. I have to take what I can draw in, and there’s never enough readily available to truly do anything of significance.” He cut Nicolas’ bloodied tunic open and started carving wicked, jagged looking symbols into the planes of his chest and abdomen while Nicolas cried out. “Not nearly enough to do what needs doing.” He ran his fingers through the blood oozing from Nicolas’ cuts and then rubbed it over the wound that Lobikno had given him. It sealed shut, and he sighed.

Nicolas’s hopeless whimpers shattered something within me, reality slipped further from my grasp. But why should I hold on to this reality?

“Now I need to hone you and gather all the excess power you’ll generate in the process of Becoming. I can use that, and the tether you so kindly left for me, to siphon it all away from you. You’ll be a bottomless ewer, forever pouring into my cup.” He turned to me and waved the dagger in my face, droplets of blood spattering against my chest. I flinched and wept. What should I do? What could I do? Let go?

Ubras laughed and buried the blade in Nicolas’ gut.

I screamed.

For nine days Ubras broke me, one piece of Nicolas at a time. He burned, stabbed, skinned, and inflicted maddening pain upon my love, healed him, and started again. All the while my grip on reality slipped until I was only aware of it in the very periphery of my existence. The Oracle returned then, as if it had been laying in wait for this moment of weakness. I saw so much. Too much. Chaos overcame me while an endless ocean of possibilities opened before my eyes. Searching for an answer, I touched on each of them. Every lively and bright possibility dissipated before I could fully explore them, though, leaving increasingly dark options before me … because Nicolas was dead. I didn’t know how Ubras did it, but Nicolas was gone. I’d been through what felt like millions of these possibilities before I found one that would work. It would free me; it just didn’t matter how anymore. With all Ubras had done I’d never be Emma again.

I worked my way back though the blessing that Ubras perverted to control me. Taking that connection, I undid it on my end, re-weaving it as I worked my way down to the plait he kept inside his shirt against his skin. The perfect place for a burn. As the plait smoldered, I felt Ubras’ shock, dismay, and finally fear when he realized I’d destroyed his means of control. The pain when it went up in flames.

Only then did I come back to the reality of my body.

The first thing I noticed was the metallic tang of blood in the air. So thick I could taste it. The room was round, so I decided it must be Ubras’ tower laboratory. Jars, books, and boxes lined the rounded walls on shelves. Many worktables filled the room, most of them set up with glass and metal contraptions that reminded me of an alcohol still I’d seen in Cudcona’s chemists’ laboratory. A massive circle was painted on the floor, lined in layers with runes and sigils. I was sitting in the center of that circle on a throne-like chair. My wrists were bound to the arm rests, but I willed the ropes to simply stop existing. They turned to dust and drifted away on the slight stirring of air from the tower windows.

Close to full realization, I chose to be destruction. I chose to become death.

I chose wrath.

Already held in the grasp of my magic, like a spider in a web, Ubras stood outside the circle. He was locked into immobilization, all the muscles in his weak, old body trembling at a breaking point while I pushed his joints to the brink of separation, his face twisted into a nearly inhuman rictus. Nicolas’ body lay at his uncle’s feet. Broken in every way I could perceive. I thought he’d perhaps been beaten to death with the heavy mallet in Ubras’ hand. It clattered to the ground when my eyes settled upon it.

I got to my feet and brushed away the circle with one wave of my hand, not because it was an obstacle, but to cause the man fear. His carefully crafted protection was nothing to me. My body hummed with power, and I had such clarity of purpose. The air was heavy with power and the old man’s fear. I breathed both in, devoured it until I thought my ribs would burst. It was intoxicating. Was this what the old mage had wanted? To turn me into this and then steal it for himself? I looked back at Nicolas, but he was just an empty husk. A lump of meat like the elf I’d crushed.

His uncle, though …

CHAPTER 24

Ozanna

Icame back to myself a little at a time—a truly wretched process. My head pounded and my eyelids felt so damn heavy, too heavy to open, though I knew I needed to. I could smell Lhoris, though it was pungent, as if he hadn’t bathed in a month. And then there was the scent of blood. Some of it days old. I felt the rise and fall of his chest against my own, his breath tickling my hair at its crown.

“Lhoris,” I whispered, lifting a heavy, sluggish hand to push his shoulder and wake him. He didn’t have a shirt on. Nor did I.

Consciousness started to come in a little faster at that point. I managed to open my eyes and lift my head a little. Squinting in the wan light that came in a small, high window, I found we were laying on a bed of blood-spattered straw. The room was circular and divided by wall of iron bars—a prison cell. And there was another person behind me. Sitting up just seemed like too much, so I worked to prop myself up on one elbow. The walls tried to spin at even that slight elevation. I closed my eyes and waited for the dizziness to pass, then found I was sandwiched between Lhoris and Lobikno.

And we were all naked.

I was just too ill to care.

Finally, Lhoris stirred. He had dried blood all over his face that had perhaps come from a cut on his scalp, one eye swollen as though someone had punched him. Lobikno was still sleeping heavily, his hand resting on my hip. Lhoris opened his one good eye and likely started making similar observations while he settled into reality. Apparently, he didn’t notice his brother until he sat up. He growled something in their tongue and slapped Lobikno’s hand away from me. Lobikno startled awake and groaned, peeling his chest off my back, where we’d been stuck together with blood. Whose blood was anybody’s guess. The three of us were a jumble of contusions, lacerations, and painfully awkward misery. Lobikno had an angry pus-filled bite mark on his outer thigh, just above the knee. I had a vague recollection of doing that, but it looked days old and smelled terrible. How long had we been trapped?

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