Page 23 of Ash and Feather

The extra bodies were dangerous, but the walls were worse—they felt like they were shifting away from me, dragging at my hair and clothing as they went, like a beast trying to inhale me, swallow me whole, never let me leave the belly of despair ever again.

Somehow, I put one foot after the other and marched on.

Somehow, I slipped out the same door I’d come in, through a city turning sleepy and quiet, and then beyond that, into a forest of thick pine filled with the beating of owl wings and the competing songs of chirping insects.

Andsomehow, finally, I stood before the restless river that would bear me back to the divine realm.

Head pounding and heart hammering, I knelt and pressed my palm against the surface, just as I’d done in the divine realm on the other side.

The water should have turned thicker, closer to the consistency of molten metal, as it was in that other realm. But the river didn’t shift, not in the slightest, as though it didn’t recognize my authority at all.

I suspected—hoped—it had less to do with my wayward magic and more to do with a lack of concentration. I was too far removed from my divine existence in that moment; I couldn’t travel to the middle-heavens while so many images of my mortal life remained dominant. I couldn’t belong to both worlds.

I tried harder to push the images of my family and my old home away.

Ihadto push them away.

But no matter how I tried, I couldn’t form even the faintest image of the divine realm in my mind—and so the river would not take me back to that realm.

My fingers dug into the cold mud on either side of me.

Magic stirred in my bones, tempting me to use it instead of the river.

The pools of water around me dried with the heat I gave off, rising as steam into the night air. Little fires began blooming in the grass and mud. They crackled and hissed against the damp ground, the sounds seeming to whisper words that were at once taunting and encouraging.

You don’t have to surrender to the mud. You’re a god. You don’t need a river to carry you anywhere. Your magic can take you away from this place.

I realized then how little I’d come to trust that magic of mine…so little that I wouldn’t even risk a simple transporting spell. Mai had been right; I was a mess.

The fires were becoming brighter, more numerous. I didn’t feel out of control of them—they were still harmlessly small—but they were popping up breathtakingly quickly. This was fast becoming a nightmare.

Nightmare.

The word stirred something inside of me. My hands lifted of their own accord, shaking away mud and putting out several fires with the same motion. And as quickly as that, I could picture the divine realm again—or a small part of it, anyway: my bed, with Karys resting in the center of it.

What if the potion Rieta had given her hadn’t worked? What if another terror had awakened her by this point and she was wondering where I’d gone?

My fingers reached out, hovered over the cold water. Instead of trying to picture the heavens themselves, I only tried to picture Karys’s face. It was surprisingly easy to do, even with the fires still building around me and the blood-stained memories still clawing at my back.

I could—Iwould—make my way back to her, even if I had to crawl to her through fire and mud and memory, and whatever else tried to come between us.

With an effort that sent a painful spasm up my arm and drew a deep groan from my chest, I forced all the fires around me to extinguish.

Darkness engulfed me. Fire started to rise within me, but I resisted the urge to let it overtake me again.

Instead, I leaned forward and dipped my hand closer to the river’s surface, still not quite touching it. I kept perfectly still as the water moved toward me. It rose almost tentatively to my fingertips, like a lover slowly moving in for a kiss, until finally, itswept over my hand, up my arm, and pulled me fully down into its embrace.

It was not a smooth journey. The waters seemed to have grown darker and even more restless in the short time I’d spent in my old kingdom. I was tossed and battered about, striking rocks, getting caught in violent currents, washing onto what seemed to be shorelines, only to be yanked back—almost as if Eligas could not decide what to do with me.

Once I finally reached a familiar shoreline, I stayed sprawled out by the water’s edge for several minutes, unable to bring myself to move. I was sore. Exhausted. And afraid to open my eyes completely, convinced that even after all that painful tumbling around, I was still in the mortal realm. The water hadn’t felt right. The air here didn’t feel right.Nothingfelt right, except…

When I focused, I could feel a second, fluttering force of magic alongside the heartbeat of my own.

Karys.

Closer. She was closer, and certainly in the same realm as me. So I was back in the heavens I’d been aiming for. But I still had at least a mile to go to reach her. Picturing her face once more, I shoved myself upright and carried on.

I made it back to the palace, all the way through the front door, and nearly to my tower before I had to kneel and catch my breath.

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