Page 30 of Ash and Feather

“There doesn’t seem to be much magic in the air here, compared to where we were practicing before. Maybe that will actually be more helpful to me?” I reasoned aloud. “The greatercontrast between where I’m standing and the palace might make it easier to focus on the magic at said palace.”

Zell snorted and swung his head to fix his inky eyes on me. I couldn’t say if it was an encouraging look or not, but I wanted to think it was.

I slid from his back and readied myself for one more try. My theory made sense, I’d decided; I was confident I’d be able to pick out that great concentration of magic around Dravyn’s palace. Then I only had to surrender to its pull.

Surrender. Surrender. Surrender.

I repeated the word as I stared at my reflection in the glass-like surface of the pond.

I watched the familiar-by-now flames flicker to life and start to wind around me.

I watched my mirrored self take a deep breath, then another, silently urging her to stay calm.

Zell took a few steps back, eying me carefully. He went completely still as the fire swallowed me up to my shoulders. Not the spooked stillness of a frightened animal, but the intelligent, stoic stance of a partner trying not to break my concentration.

I looked down at my boots. Imagined them gone. Blinked.

Still there.

But then a deep breath, another blink, and it was finally happening: I was disappearing, feathered flames whisking away from me and leaving nothing but air where they’d just been burning.

It had likely only been seconds, but time seemed to move in slow motion as I watched the process spreading up my legs, my waist, my chest.

Surrender. Surrender. Surrender.

“Don’t panic,” I ordered myself in a whisper.

My body—what was left of it—no longer felt like my own. Then it didn’tfeelat all. I was untethered, terrifyingly light andaimless. Panic rose, but with no body left to hold it in I found it easier to let go of it. I could imagine it scattering into the wind, frail and harmless and no longer my problem.

But I cannot scatter with it,I reminded myself—one of the lessons Mairu had been repeating all morning.I have to stay on the path I decided on.

There may have been no map to help visualize that path, but this time I tried to imagine one—even going so far as to lift my hands before me and pretend I was trailing my fingers between points on a piece of parchment.

I was so close now. I would not fail.

Iwould not.

As soon as I declared this to myself, I felt my body being pulled forward. All around me was darkness, but warmth kissed my face. Distant, teasing warmth—like the tiniest ray of sunlight penetrating a dark forest I’d been wandering in for ages. I imagined myself embracing it. Reaching up, parting the canopy of leaves, letting more light in.

I knew where this light was coming from. This warmth. I closed my eyes and pictured moving toward it—the palace.

When that didn’t make me budge, I pictured something more specific: Dravyn descending upon that palace. Wings of fire flared wide, burning so brightly they blurred away all but the faintest outlines of everything around me.

The warmth became more intense, pulling me along, farther and faster.

Faster, faster, almost there,surely, I was almost there—

Something caught me, jerking me violently to a stop as if the pocket of my tunic had caught on a door handle.

I was no longer light and floating, yet I still felt suspended and fragile…less like a feather and more like a rock upon thin ice. Cracking, breaking, and then I was sinking through cold, such awful cold, faster and faster, until finally I hit the groundhard.

I knew instantly that I’d managed to bring my physical self with me this time—because pain blossomed from a half-dozen different parts of my body. I tasted blood on my lips, and I heard myself cry out, the sound echoing in air that was much more frigid than what I’d left behind.

I opened my eyes.

Darkness surrounded me.

Why was it so dark?

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