Page 18 of Ash and Feather

“Fine,” she grumbled.

“Thank you.”

She chewed on her bottom lip, contemplating for another moment, before removing one of her many rings and offering it to me.

It was golden in color, the band made to look like the curled body of a serpentine dragon—her favored form to shift into when she wasn’t masquerading as a human. The dragon’s head was slender, its eyes made up of two shining, scarlet-colored stones.

“Take this, at least,” she said, placing the ring into my palm. “It won’t make up for the…troubles you’re having with your own powers, but it will help hide you, at least for a time. Not indefinitely, mind you. And if its power wears off and your reckless ass is still in the middle of someplace you shouldn’t be, I am not coming to save you. Just so we’re clear.”

“You’d come for me.”

She rolled her eyes.

I smiled.

She bared her teeth at me, only to relent with a snort. “Eventually. Maybe. After you had time to suffer and think about what a godsdamn idiot you’d been.”

“That’s fair.”

“Hurry up and go,” she said.

I went. Over hills of cracked and smoking ground, through a small forest of white trees, and finally into a small clearing where a silvery pool awaited.

This pool was called Galim. Five rivers twisted away from it, and dozens more branched out from those five farther downstream. The waters of the rivers were thick, rolling like molten silver, and each one corresponded to a certain area of the mortal realm below this one. They would bear you smoothly through the spaces in between the realms, typically spitting you out on the other side within moments.

These waterways were mainly utilized by lesser divine creatures or spirits. Only occasionally did gods such as myself use them—and only when traveling to places we weren’t personally connected to. If not for my magic’s currently unpredictable behavior, I would not have needed any river to carry me into my old kingdom.

I might not have needed it now, either, but I didn’t want to risk it; traversing the realms by way of the waterways was less taxing than using one’s own power.

I needed to conserve all the power I could for the night that lay ahead of me.

So I knelt, placing my palm flat against the water, and I ignored the warning building in my gut as I pictured the place I had once called home.

Chapter 5

Dravyn

I surfacedin the mortal realm just as the sun was slipping behind the hilltops, splashing swirls of pinks and orange over the sky as it sank.

The river that had carried me here roared restlessly at my back. All the paths and waterways that snaked through Eligas—the name we gave to the space between the mortal and divine realms—felt restless as of late, ever since Karys had gone to battle in that in-between space.

During that battle, she’d managed to sweep a powerful elvish weapon away from the middle-heavens and into Eligas, preventing said weapon from doing catastrophic damage to the Tower of Ascension.

But the weapon had still ignited.

We didn’t know how far the destruction had spread; Eligas was a strange place, difficult to map, its many shifting layers nearly impossible to truly inspect for damage.

All I could say for certain was that it felt different traveling through it now.

Everythingfelt different about this trip compared to the dozens of times I had made it in the past. And the restless, warped energy rising from the river, combined with my own strangely off-kilter powers meant I was already more tired than I should have been, even before I’d taken a single step onto mortal grass.

I soldiered on, all the same, my gaze fixed on a halo of light in the distance—the glow above the royal city of Altis.

I could only just make out my family’s palace on the far side of the city, and only because the setting sun’s light was reflecting off a wall of its windows with a dazzling shine that was difficult to miss.

I knew what room that was—the one with all those windows—even from here. It was an expansion of the study that lay behind it, a sunroom my mother had requested as an anniversary gift. My father had immediately dismissed the idea of a room with so many windows, and in such a precarious spot…only to summon the kingdom’s greatest architect to the palace the very next day to make it happen.

A funny feeling spread through my chest as I thought about my parents—like an itch below the surface of my skin, just out of reach.

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