Page 21 of Only Cold Depths
Zane wasn’t even my brother, not really, not in any way that trulymattered, but I was still afraid he was going to hurt me just as badly as Nerezza had.
I was such a paranoid, broken fool.
I shook off my troubled thoughts and moved over to a door on the opposite side of the room. This door also featured a familiar symbol: an arrow streaking upward through a cluster of stars.
I traced my fingers over the House Caldaren sigil. The sapphsidian arrow was shaped like a spade from an old-fashioned tarot or playing card, and it was as cold as ice, but the sensation wasn’t an unpleasant one. I liked Kyrion having a door in my mindscape, liked this connection to him, even if I still didn’t understand much about our abilities.
Kyrion said that everything about the bond felt easier now. That he could sense my thoughts, feelings, and magic much more readily and deeply than before and that my seer ability even showed him things from time to time.
In some ways, I felt that same connection. Kyrion’s thoughts and feelings were much easier to sense now. Most of the time, we had no problems communicating telepathically, but I still couldn’t use his other psion powers, especially his telekinesis, with any regularity. I also couldn’t form a psionic blade, a weapon made of pure mental energy, on a consistent basis like Kyrion could. And neither one of us had been able to replicate the incredible lightning storm of psionic power we’d unleashed when we’d first accepted the truebond and decimated the Crownpoint throne room.
Oh, yes, a few things had gotten easier, but all the big, important things—the abilities that would actually help and protect us—had gotten much more difficult, and I had no idea why.
Frustration spiked through my body, and I stalked away from Kyrion’s door and moved over to the final door in the very back of the room. The Door, as I always thought of it. My door, the one that led into the true, hidden heart of my seer magic.
Beautiful carvings of crescent moons and stars swirled across the stone, but the centerpiece was a large upside-down sapphsidian eye that sparkled just a bit more brightly than all the other jewels. I waved my hand, and the sapphsidian eye turned right side up. A lock clicked, and the door opened. Unlike the other doors with their endless loops of memories, wisps of blackness spilled out of this opening, curling up like fingers beckoning me closer, and I strode forward.
Over the last few months, I had thoroughly embraced my own inner darkness, along with all the cold, cruel, calculating things I’d done to survive. Like exposing Rowena Kent’s scheme to crash Imperium ships on command for the Techwave. Fighting and killing Julieta Delano, the traitorous Arrow who’d been working with Rowena. Tricking and then killing some soldiers so I could escape from the Techwave facility where Harkin Ocnus was torturing me. Then, later on, shoving my stormsword into Harkin’s chest. Battling the Imperium soldiers and Bronze Hand guards who’d tried to keep me away from Kyrion during the midnight ball.
Sometimes I couldn’t believe how drastically my life had changed. I’d gone from being a lowly lab rat toiling away in obscurity, to a Regal lady and the head of a corporation, to an infamous fugitive. I didn’t know what the future held, but maybe I could get a glimpse of it here in my own inner darkness.
I plunged deeper and deeper into my mindscape. The blackness was so thick and absolute that I couldn’t see anything, not even my hand in front of my face, and the only sound was the soft scrape of my boots on the stone. Slowly, in the distance, the darkness receded, and rays of light bloomed like a flower unfurling its petals one by one.
More time passed. It might have been a few seconds, it might have been a few minutes. But from one moment to the next, I stepped from the absolute blackness into a pool of silver light, as though I had been transported into the middle of a Frozon moon.
The light illuminated a slab of stone that resembled an altar, and the entire thing was shaped like an oversize eye, just like the jewels out in the main part of my mindscape. The top of the altar was made of sapphsidian, but instead of being static, the stone rippled like a deep, dark blue lake. Lunarium eyes were also embedded in the stone, staring up at me like silver stars.
Down below, the altar’s curving sapphsidian legs were mounted on sturdy pieces of lunarium shaped like arrows, and lunarium arrows also glimmered in the sapphsidian lake like sparkling treasure just waiting to be brought to the surface. Despite the disparate parts, the pieces of stones flowed seamlessly into each other, as though each bit was intricately connected to the next, and they were all an integral, inextricable part of one another, and the whole.
The eye-shaped altar was a psionic nexus, a visual representation of a psion’s power, the place deep inside them where their magic, abilities, and instincts resided. I’d first stumbled across my nexus a few weeks ago, when I’d been trapped at Crownpoint Palace and was recovering from Holloway draining off my magic. Kyrion had also found me here when I was more dead than alive from sucking all the air out of the cargo bay on theDream Worldin order to kill Adria Byrne.
According to Kyrion, I had been lying on the altar like a mermaid floating on an ocean wave, although I didn’t remember that or him picking me up, returning to the main part of my mindscape, and carrying me through his door and back out into the real world. One moment, I had been drifting along in a peaceful black void. The next, I’d heard Kyrion calling my name, demanding I come back to him. I’d drawn in a breath to tell him I was trying, and I’d woken up on the medtable, with Kyrion cradling me in his arms.
I smoothed my hand over the nexus. The sapphsidian rippled a little more vigorously, causing the lunarium eyes and arrows to bob up and down like shimmering water lilies. The nexus was cool to the touch, although I could have sworn a bit of heat was lurking in the dark depths.
My fingers sank a little deeper into the stone, and I held my breath, wondering if I might finally unlock the nexus’s secrets . . . but nothing happened.
No flares of magic, no sparks of power, nothing.
I’d come to my psionic nexus several times, trying to figure out how it worked, but the slab of stone neverdidanything. It just stood here, in the darkness of my heart, like a glowing beacon I couldn’t quite understand or access.
I swallowed an angry snarl and kept trying, but nothing happened, and my frustration built and built with every soft slide of my hand across the stone. Nothing was going right today, especially when it came to my magic.
My frustration boiled up, and my fingers itched with the urge to throw something. I didn’t even really think about what I was doing. I just reached down, plucked one of the lunarium eyes out of the sapphsidian surface, and hurled it away as hard as I could.
As soon as the eye left my fingertips, I clasped my hands over my mouth in horror. I grimaced, waiting for the telltaletinkof the eye hitting the stone somewhere in the darkness, but everything remained quiet. Weird. Then again, everything was a bit weird in here. What did that say about me and my magic?
A bright flare of silver appeared in the distance, streaking toward me like a shooting star. I ducked, and the lunarium eye whistled past my head before arcing back around like a boomerang. I ducked again—
The lunarium eye stopped in midair and dropped back down into the nexus like a stone plummeting into a lake.
Plop.
Eyes wide, I peered at the altar. Had I just broken my own mindscape? An annoyed huff tumbled from my lips. Well, wouldn’t that just be the cherry on this shitshow sundae of a day.
Ripples spread across the surface of the stone, and the lunarium eye bobbed back up to the surface of the sapphsidian. After a few seconds, it settled back down into place, floating alongside the other eyes and arrows.
I exhaled, but my relief boiled away in the simmering stew of my frustration. I could look at a faulty brewmaker, a misfiring blaster, or a malfunctioning spaceship and know how to fix it in minutes, sometimes even seconds. So why couldn’t I figure out my own magic? What waswrongwith me?
