Page 3 of Ash and Feather

He didn’t try to close the distance between us this time. He watched me as I fought to steady myself, concern knitting his brows together.

Slowly, I felt my control resurfacing, the rage within me subsiding, the fires around me cooling. It took far more effort to put out the fires than it had to call them.

As the last wisps of fire shifted to smoke and drifted away, I looked, one final time, to the last place I’d seen the retreating elves.

There was nothing there but dusty ground and hills rolling toward a dark and foreboding horizon.

I exhaled a shuddering breath. A flood of emotions warred within me. Before I could untangle any of them, a sudden rush of power and the sound of wings—both leathery, booming flaps and softer, more delicately precise whispers of movement—stole my attention.

I turned and saw the Goddess of Control and the God of Winter landing side-by-side on the slope behind us.

Valas rolled his shoulders and folded his feathered, ice-glazed wings against his back.

Mairu did the same with her dragonesque appendages before turning and immediately finding me. Her eyes were as reptilian as the wings she’d tucked away—a bright, unsettling shade of yellow with black diamonds in their centers—but they becameincreasingly more human-like as she moved closer to inspect me.

One of her slender hands pressed uncertainly against my scarred face while the other gripped my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

My mouth felt unbearably dry, as if filled with the ashes of my extinguished fury, but somehow, I still managed a response. “Yes. For the moment.”

She looked as though she wanted to press me further, but more middle-gods and goddesses were suddenly arriving, sparing me from that conversation.

One by one they appeared—the same divine beings who had walked into battle with us just hours ago.

The God of Storms came first, his dark eyes still shining with anger over the whole ordeal, his body tense as a coiled spring, prepared to launch back into battle at the slightest provocation.

Then the Healing God, Armaros,appeared in a burst of white and shimmering gold magic. He waited with one arm stretched out behind him toward Edea, the Goddess of Sky, who arrived an instant later. The Healing God’s expression was grim with concern as he watched the goddess move with slow, shaky steps.

Despite Edea’s unsteady appearance, my anxious heart unclenched somewhat at the sight of her. The last time I’d seen this goddess, she’d been sprawled out on the ground in the shadows of the tower. Surely dying, I’d thought. So it was a relief to see her standing on her own two feet again—to know that whatever wicked weapons Andrel and the others had devised were apparently not strong enough to kill a goddess.

Not yet, anyway.

But as the goddess’s gaze swept over me, catching on my scars—which I could only assume were still glowing, however more faintly now—the tight feeling in my chest quickly returned.

She looked at me as thoughIwas the one who had returned from the dead. As though I was a ghost who didn’t belong in this realm, regardless of the divine magic now burning within me.

A stranger in this strange land all over again.

Stepping away from the crowd, I did my best to settle my new, burning magic further. It hurt to press it down; a tight and tingling pain along all my edges, like trying to shove a foot into a boot two sizes too small.

No one followed me as I moved away—though I could sense the curious, secretive glances they kept shooting my way, along with the building tension as the aftermath of our battle settled, leaving space for questions to rise.

What happened?

Why did it happen?

How do we keep it from getting worse?

The entire world is unsettled, our magic and power threatening to shift…

The larger problems looming over us were plentiful, but at the moment, I couldn’t think of much beyond my own pain and discomfort.

The harder I tried to push my magic down, the more excruciating keeping it in became. It felt like there were heated blisters popping up all over my skin, another one bubbling up with every repressed flare—though a quick inspection revealed that, at least on the outside, I looked perfectly intact.

Dravyn continued to watch me out of the corner of his eye, a worried frown on his face. With every wince I made, or too-sharp inhale I took, he addressed the crowd around him with increased urgency.

That crowd grumbled louder and louder as the minutes passed, until Dravyn lost his patience, or his concern with me reached new heights—or some combination of the two—and hesilenced the gods around him with a fiery display of furious magic.

“The battle is over, at present,” he said, sharply, into the freshly stunned silence. “Obviously, we have much to discuss and deal with in the coming days, but for now I think we need to return to our respective territories and regroup; none of us are thinking clearly as we stand now.”

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