Page 75 of Flame and Sparrow

“It’s late,” Dravyn prompted.

I nodded and absently hooked my hand around his arm, letting him lead me mostly so I could focus on observing the things we passed.

He walked me all the way to my room, and he held the door open as he bade me goodnight; I hardly realized it all as it was happening, as lost in thought and observation as I was—but I recognized the absence of him as soon as he was gone.

My hand felt restless without his arm to hold on to, and a strange, uncomfortable weightlessness overcame me as I locked the door and turned to face my empty room.

I went slowly back to my bed and picked up the notes I’d tossed aside earlier. I used what little blank space I had left to draw miniature sketches of each of the glass figures I’d committed to memory, and then I tried—mostly in vain—to sort through them, to guess at what sort of memories they might have represented.

When I finally managed to fall asleep, I dreamt of the God of Fire. Of the two of us together in a dark room with glass walls, clothed in nothing but flames, our hands reaching, but not quite touching.

The closer we stepped to one another, the brighter the fires burned, until the heat became so intense that our glass surroundings shattered and fell over us like a sharp and deadly rain.

Chapter22

I woke,in near total darkness, to find myself in a room I’d never been in before.

My elven eyes adjusted quickly, but even my sensitive vision wasn’t enough to fully see through the inky blackness surrounding me. I managed, through a combination of patience and still-half-asleep squinting, to feel my way from the couch I’d been laying on, around several tables and chairs, and eventually through a doorway and into a much larger room.

On the far side of this second room I saw what appeared to be a balcony. The door to it was open, a honeysuckle-scented breeze sweeping in, turning the gauzy curtains around it into swaying ghosts.

Outside, it was clearly night, but it still appeared much brighter than inside, so I headed toward the balcony in hopes of being able to better understand where I was and how I’d gotten here.

The frigid night air bit at my skin. I still wore only the thin nightclothes I’d fallen asleep in, and pulling the loose shirt more tightly around myself did little to ward off the chill. I tried to distract myself from the cold by looking up.

I’d never seen so many stars.

I nearly lost my balance craning my neck, trying to take in the vastness of it all, and I had to catch myself against the balcony’s railing.

As soon as I touched that railing, the floor collapsed beneath me, swinging away as if on a hinge to allow me to fall through.

Except I didn’t fall—not at first.

I floated.

I was suspended in mid-air as a powerful energy swirled around me, invisible aside from a strange shimmer I occasionally caught out of the corner of my eye. That power soon settled heavily against my chest, crushing the breath from my lungs…

Then it released, and I plummeted downward.

I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out. I reached upward, swiping desperately for something to catch on to, something to slow my descent, but there was nothing but emptiness.

Then the stars above were falling too, as if diving toward my outstretched hand. One of them brushed my fingertips. Its light scattered on impact, raining down as a shower of silver and gold upon me. What seemed like a thousand more stars cascaded down on my left and right, occasionally bursting with a similar show of silver and gold, and I was so busy being astonished by it all that I forgot about screaming—or even panicking—for a minute.

Just as I felt the panic returning, my body bumped gently against cold, sandy ground.

The stars continued to fall all around me, sinking into the sand and making it glow for a moment before turning it to a deep shade of black. All around me the sand began to shift in this way; bright as the sun for a breath, dark as the depths of the earth in the next. The ground directly underneath my feet stayed the same, but everything else was changing, stretching into a wide expanse of black earth.

Once everything was dark for as far as I could see, pinpricks of light began to appear along the ground, popping up like speckles of shimmering paint splattered against a canvas.

Not ground, then, I realized.

No; it was becoming the night sky in its full, dazzling glory, and I stood breathless in the center of it all as it kept expanding, my heart coming a little closer to leaping from my chest with every new star that flashed into existence.

As I took in the sight of it all, I remembered what Valas had told me—that he suspected either the Star or Moon Goddess would be the one to test me.

This was not a dream.

It was a trial.

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