Page 215 of Emylia

He already had every broken piece of me.

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ChapterForty-Six

Wind swept my hair, stealing it and tossing it haphazardly around my face. The cliff was always like this—wild, unpredictable, brutal. It tasted of salt and fury.

There was no safety. No footing. Just wind—furious and unrelenting—howling like the ghosts of the Gods.

I stood at the precipice, my cloak flaring around my legs, fingers trembling at my sides. Air roared around me, sharp and wild. It tasted like lightning… and something more.

Power.

“Don’t try to force it,” my mother said, her voice nearly carried off by the wind. “Air answers to no one. You don’t command it. You become it.”

I closed my eyes.

Behind me, Maalikai stood in silence—tense, unreadable. And Sebastian… still not returned from Ophelia. His absence hollowed something in me. They were my opposite winds in this storm. One warm and burning, the other cold and steady.

But right now, everything else blurred into background noise, lost beneath the gale screaming in my ears.

Movement caught my eye—Evie, stepping up beside my mother. Her presence was a jolt, like a piece of me long lost and suddenly found. A shadow of mine. Opposite, yet the same in impossible ways.

I inhaled. Air filled my lungs like ice. I reached—not with my hands, but with my pulse. And something shifted.

A hush.

The wind paused, as if the world itself was holding its breath with me. My eyes snapped open.

Clouds curled at my fingertips. The air responded—hesitant at first, then with growing urgency. My hair lifted off my shoulders. Dust spiraled around my feet in delicate, dancing patterns.

I moved—slow, deliberate. Like I was conducting something ancient. And the wind obeyed. It wrapped around my arms, my throat, my legs… lifting me. Like a lover’s hands.

Without thinking, I took a step forward, like the wind called to me.

I hovered.

For a breathless second, I was weightless. Untouchable.

Come to me.

And I obeyed. In a weird trance I took another step forward. And another. Only slightly conscious that I was precariously close to the cliffs edge.

“Emylia?” I recognised my mother’s voice but at the moment it was lost, drowned out by the voice that still called me.

Come to me.

One step forward, but now it wasn’t just forward, it was upwards, the wind capturing my weight and holding it. And still higher I climbed.

“Emylia, stop.” This time it was Maalikai, his voice commanding, but not strong enough to make me falter.

Power crackled through me, ebbed around me is whorls. Claiming me. Promising power that would command all others.

Another step, I was close enough to the precipice now that if I took one more step my fall would no longer be guarded by the ground, but hollowed by the cliff drop, into the raging water that smashed against the cliff face. Not even I would be able to survive that fall.

But I didn’t stop. I took another step.

The wind howled around me, feral and wild, threading through my hair like a lover’s touch, tugging me forward with invisible fingers.

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