Page 10 of Swords of Soul and Shadow
Maybe it wasn’t too late; maybe she could find her way back to Myrrai. Find her way back to Kase.
She inspected her two parchment cuts. If her power stopped responding, she wouldn’t be able to make it to the Yalven city, but shecouldmake it to Kyvena. There’d not be any danger of succumbing to the power she didn’t understand or control.
But would that mean she’d failed?
She’d convinced Kase, her father, and Niels she could do it. The Lord Elder had given her the vision of the passage for a reason, surely…yet he’d gone silent in the days since.
Perhaps she’d proven herself incompetent or unworthy somehow. Or perhaps she was simply tired and should trade fruitless daydreams for actual sleep.
She looked down at the spiky, inconsistent Yalven characters below.
Maybe failure wouldn’t be so bad.
No one was forcing her to do this. If her power had disappeared, that was fine; it meant she wouldn’t have to worry about the world or Jagamot or anything at all. She could just…be.
But there was that voice at the back of her head, the one that always waited until her lowest moments to sow that seed of doubt in her naysaying. A voice that very much sounded like reason.
If she wanted Kase to live a long and full life, she needed to solve this. He deserved better than her hesitation and doubt.
He deserved the world. And she wouldn’t stop until she gave it to him.
Without stopping to consider the consequences, she turned off the lantern and smashed it onto the stone below. The laughter outside cut off sharply, but Hallie didn’t care. She grabbed the largest glass shard from the casing and sliced it across her palm. She gritted her teeth against the burning ache. Blood bubbled from the jagged wound, slithering to her wrist.
She pressed it onto the parchment. She was mad. Absolutely mad. It hurt like burning suns.
Blood soaked the page. The journal was ruined, and Hallie only had a second to feel bad about that fact.
Heat leapt from her core, blazing a fiery trail up her chest and to her fingers and toes, a detonation that knocked her to her knees. She stuffed a hand in her mouth to keep herself from screaming. Sweat ran down her face, joining the blood on the page below her.
The cavern disappeared. Darkness crushed her chest. Her knees pressed into the stone floor she could no longer see.
Too much, too much—it might kill her. The weight might grind her to dust. She couldn’t move.
She screamed, but something stole the sound away as soon as it met her lips. The fire inside her burned so violently, yet it shed no light.
The Lord Elder had said his power would burn through her. She’d expected that burning to devour her slowly, a spark chewing through a log; she hadn’t expected it to consume her like chaff, a flash of light with nothing left behind.
Panic choked Hallie, but no sound came out. It was as if she’d found herself in the vastness of space, only able to focus on the fact she couldn’t breathe. She curled into a ball and willed it to end.
“He’s too young. Father could heal him.”
The voice came from the darkness. Hallie blinked, but she remained blind. Where was the woman? She sounded…familiar.Her words came soft but clear, iced with slightly elongated vowels. It reminded her of her own voice.
“Ara, you’ll kill yourself tryin’. He don’t want that.” The second voice was deeper, male. The gravely edge to his tone suggested he’d done time in the mines, though that gave no hints as to his age; it was always hard to tell whether miners had been working there forty years or ten. The grit took early and overstayed its welcome.
Some force shoved her forward. More shouting, more screaming—hers? Someone else’s? The force yanked her back. She still couldn’t breathe.
Hallie’s skin tingled, shuddered—then caught fire.
She collapsed, her body caught up in the inferno. The void beyond swallowed her screams.
Her stomach lurched up into her throat, but she couldn’t retch. There was no air.
Then, as suddenly as the phantasmal fire had come upon her, it extinguished.
Air flooded her lungs; she coughed, sucking down oxygen in great gasping breaths as she forced herself to blink. Tears stung her eyes as they alighted on the canvas ceiling of her father’s tent.
What in the blasted suns and stars had just happened?
