Page 4 of Ash and Feather

A few grumblings followed—the Marr never missed an opportunity to argue, I’d learned—but a few minutes later, the last of the divine beings finally transported themselves away from the tower, leaving Dravyn and me alone once more.

I stopped fighting the wildness of my new magic and let it rush more freely through me. It sucked the breath from my lungs and made my legs feel like they were melting, dropping me to my knees despite my best efforts to steady myself.

“We should go back to the palace,” Dravyn said, reaching out his hand as he approached, “so you can rest in a place away from the tumultuous energies surrounding this tower.”

I couldn’t make myself reach back. My fists pressed hard against the cold ground on either side of me as I hung my head, fighting the urge to vomit—or worse, to give in to the intense urge to search the horizon once more for our retreating enemies. I was a strange combination of sick and angry. Exhausted, yet humming with power and a dark desire for vengeance.

Dravyn stood at my side while I attempted to collect myself once again. With little more than the snap of a finger or the occasional twist of a hand, he wordlessly extinguished every furious flame that escaped my body, his gaze calmly scanning our surroundings for threats as he did so.

“I wanted to make them all pay,” I said after a long silence. A confession. The quiet bloodlust in my tone frightened me; my voice didn’t seem like my own.

Dravyn didn’t so much as flinch at the sound of it. He only said, “I know.”

“And not just them,” I muttered, pressing a hand to my chest, fingertips mapping their way over the newest thick, gnarled scar stretching over my skin. The upper-gods had stopped my bleeding, healed my broken bones, and my stained tunic remained mostly in one piece…but through the bloodied fabric, I could still feel the damage that had been done.

I closed my eyes against the memory dropping into my head—the sight of Andrel’s knife glinting wickedly in the sun just before it slashed toward me.

Swallowing hard, I said, “He stabbed me. Andrel, I mean. We were beside some mortal river I didn’t recognize, after the chaos of traveling through Eligas, and I…” I winced as I pressed my fingers against my heart. Not because the wound there still hurt, but because the weight of what had happened settled fully against me with a violent suddenness, like a heavy iron ball I hadn’t been fully prepared to catch.

Dravyn knelt before me and took my hand, drawing it away from my body and lacing his fingers through mine. “You don’t need to speak of it anymore right now. I already know enough.”

I gave him a curious look.

“I’m the one who carried you away from that mortal shoreline,” he explained, pulling me back to my feet. “I saw what he did.”

I fought my way to my feet and stepped away from him, absently touching the wrist that had, until a short time ago, held a bracelet he’d given me. That bracelet’s magic had allowed me to leave this realm and take Andrel’s weapon with me. It was no longer there, but it had done its job—carrying me away from the battlefield, and apparently, leading Dravyn to my side…

“If there had been time, I would have gone after him, too,” Dravyn said, his tone mirroring the violence that had beenin mine moments ago. “But between the weakness traversing realms had caused you, and the amount of blood you were losing, I had no choice but to focus only on saving you.”

A cold sweat washed over me. “I thought I was going to die.”

A haunted softness overtook his voice as he said, “So did I.” I felt his gaze lifting to me as he added, “Which is why I carried you directly back to the Tower of Ascension—to its magic—and why I desperately called out for the Moraki to meet me there.”

“And they actually…did.” The thought made me dizzy.

He took a deep, steadying breath. “It’s not how I envisioned your ascension taking place—if you decided you wanted it to take place at all. But the alternative…”

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw the guilt building in his expression and clouding his eyes, so I quickly tried to reassure him. “I don’t regret anything I did. And what you did…I’m glad you did it. I’m grateful. If I’d been in my right mind, I would have made the choice myself.”

He nodded, though his gaze didn’t meet mine.

“I’m just a bit…dizzy. Confused.” I held up my hands, trying and failing to make my skin glow at will with the magic I’d seen in my reflection earlier.

“What am I?” I wondered aloud. “I heard the upper-god of the Shade say the amount of magic you gave to me was unprecedented. How much, though?”

Dravyn continued to avoid my gaze. “I gave what I needed to.”

Unsatisfied with this answer, I stepped directly in front of him and said, “You once told me that the Miratar spirits who ascend into the court of a particular Marr become like an extension of that Marr’s very being. So what does that mean where you and I are concerned?”

“You aren’t a mere spirit. You’ve been given the rank of a middle-goddess by the Moraki who reign above us.”

Goddess.

My dizziness grew worse, but I steadied myself through it and asked, “We can’t both be the Marr of Fire, though, can we?”

“It takes weeks—sometimes months—after ascension for the powers of any given Marr to fully establish themselves. Nothing is set in stone, as of yet. Fire will be the magic that comes most easily because of what I offered to you in order to aid in your ascension. But there’s more to you than what I gave you. The Moraki granted you power in addition to mine, and it’s impossible to say how much, or what you might shape that into.”

I considered all this information for several minutes. “And what becomes of the magic you’ve poured into me?” I asked. “How does that affect you?”

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