Page 14 of HeartTorn

She looked back at him briefly. For a moment the stern lines of her face broke, revealing something I had never seen on her features before: fear. “Pray for us, good master,” she said, a tremble in her voice. “Pray for us all.”

Then she turned and, pressing Tassa close to her heart, hastened through the palace. Her stride was so long and quick, I struggled to keep up with her. “Make haste, Taar!” she barked every few paces. I was panting too hard to question her.

All around us was mayhem. I glimpsed faces I’d known my entire life so twisted with fear as to be almost unrecognizable. Everyone we passed cried out to my mother, begging her foranswers to questions they scarcely dared ask. She spoke to no one and never slowed her pace. So stern was her face, that crowds parted to let her pass, me trailing at her heels.

We made our way through the palace and out to the central courtyard, where Mahra stood waiting. I hesitated to draw near to the great licorneir. While Onoril was a familiar friend, my mother’s heartbound seemed beautiful and otherworldly. Almost frightening. She was in distress that day, her ears pinned back, her nostrils flaring. I could not hear her song, but flame flickered across her withers and down her forelegs, revealing both her power and the trouble in her soul.

“Mahra,haravel,”my mother said, stretching out her hand to touch the licorneir’s forehead just beneath the base of her horn. “You must carry them, my love. You must flee this place as hard, as fast as you can. Get them to safety.”

The great licorneir shook her head. I felt the anguish in her protest, but Mother drew her close so that she might rest her forehead briefly against her cheek. “You know my love for you,” she breathed. “Beyond words, beyond song. And I know you love me too. It is by that love I beg you—do this last great act for me. Save my children. Save them from what is coming.”

Mahra threw back her head, uttering a sound so desperate, it could shatter hearts to hear it. Tears coursed down my cheeks, and I protested helplessly, “No, no, no!” as my mother placed first my sister than me on her licorneir’s back.

Then Mother gripped my hand and pressed something round and hard into it. “Remember,” she said, gazing up into my eyes. “Remember who you are, Taarthalor. Someday you must return here. Someday you must drive these monsters from our land. Until then, be brave,luinar.”

Luinar.

The word echoed inside my head, a word I had always and only associated with my father. Now she spoke it to me with a conviction that felt like the weight of worlds.

Before I could answer, Mahra turned her head around and fled that courtyard with my sister and me. I looked back once, straining to peer over my shoulder. I saw my mother standing there in the center of the yard, hands clasped as though in prayer. For the first and only time she seemed to me so . . . small.

Then she was gone. Not because we had left the courtyard or passed beyond range of vision. No—she vanished in a sudden fall of darkness, so absolute, it was like blindness itself. The same darkness which surrounds us even now, only far greater.

A darkness which seemed to cover our entire world.

I cannot begin to describe that ride. I clung to Tassa, who wept, bowed over Mahra’s neck and mane. I wept as well, shamelessly. The horror of that darkness threatened to fill me up from the inside like drowning waters.

But Mahra’s song sustained us. I did not hear it at first, but it was there all the while. Slowly but surely I became aware of it, shining starlight surrounding us in a sphere of glowing power. She ran as she sang, like a shooting star, streaking across this new black universe.

Sometimes throughout that ride, I would look to the right or the left and see other lights out there in the darkness. Fellow stars, winking in the night, racing for escape alongside us. I even felt their songs occasionally as they sang out through the black. They were other licorneir riders, trying to outrace the evil which had fallen upon our world. Searching to find the sun once more.

One by one all those lights went out.

For days Mahra raced on without breaking stride. Tassa and I should have fainted from pure exhaustion, but Mahra’s song kept us alive, vibrating in our bones, in our souls.

Only once did the great licorneir herself stumble; only once did her song falter. That was early on in our flight, before we’d even left the boundaries of the city. I believe it was the moment my mother died—the moment Mahra herself suffered the indescribable agony ofvelrhoar—hearttorn. Her pain was such, she should never have been able to continue as she did.

It is testimony to the love she bore my mother that she never weakened again throughout the rest of that ride. She carried us on and on, through the darkness, singing all the way.

In the years which followed, I have come to understand that the citadel was, most likely, the epicenter of the spreading darkness which smothered Licorna. Then, however, I could not begin to guess the scope of the annihilation surrounding us. It seemed endless and eternal, and by the end of our journey, I had all but forgotten an existence before and ceased to hope for an existence after that horror.

Then, as abruptly as it had fallen, it ended.

One moment we were in the dark. The next Mahra’s heavy footfalls thundered against the turf of an open plain beneath a cloudless blue sky. There was no civilization to be seen, no cities, towns, no shepherd’s huts. Just empty countryside, lifeless save for a breath of wind, which blew through the grass in gentle waves.

My mother’s licorneir staggered to a halt, blowing hard. For a few moments her song continued, but even my exhaustion-numbed ears could hear how swiftly it began to fracture. Tassa and I fell from her back, shuddering and exhausted to the brink of death. We could do nothing but lie in the grass and stare up at a sky which had become unfamiliar to us.

I remember turning my head slightly, glimpsing Mahra’s eyes fixed upon me. Through my own weariness, I felt the stab of her pain. Pain which I shared—her lost rider was my lost mother, after all. In that moment, however, I could not feel as she felt. I could feel nothing beyond the struggle for each successive breath.

But Mahra felt it all. The torture ofvelrhoar.

She threw back her head, crying out in a loud voice which rang through that empty air. The cry became a scream, and her song, which she had sung for so long despite her pain, fractured at last.

I tried to reach for her. My lips moved, attempting to form her name. It didn’t matter. Pivoting on her hindquarters, my mother’s licorneir turned away from us and raced back the way we had come. Back across wild country I did not know, vanishing into the horizon, leaving only the echo of her song behind her.

Thus Tassa and I survived the devastation of Licorna only to find ourselves alone on the edge of the world.

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