Page 161 of Magical Mission
I reached for him, but the scene twisted again.
And then—
I was back.
Or maybe I never left.
The door was gone.
The clearing was gone.
The shimmer had closed in again.
And I was on my knees, shaking.
It wasn’t just the images.
It was thefeelinginvading every part of me as if something inside me had cracked open under a weight I couldn’t carry. I was being shown a hundred truths I couldn’t shoulder all at once.
I pressed my hands to the cold shimmer beneath me, but it didn’t feel like ground anymore.
It felt likegrief.
Deep, ancient grief that wasn’t entirely mine but familiar.
“Why am I here?” I whispered.
The question didn’t echo like before.
It was swallowed.
The shimmer around me pulsed once, like it had heard but hadn’t decided how, or if, to answer.
And then something shifted, not in the air, but in me.
A sudden, achingyearningwashed over me, and it rooted in my chest, before blooming through my limbs like a memory I couldn’t name.
I wanted something. No, I needed something?
But I didn’t know what, only that it was missing. It felt as if a piece had been misplaced before I was ever born, and now this place was asking me to feel the absence without context, without an answer.
I closed my eyes, but in the dark behind my eyelids, the magic lived on.
Swirling.
Reaching.
And for the first time, I wasn’t sure if I had stepped onto the path…
…or if the path had stepped intome.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The shimmer thickened again until it was hard to tell if I was walking or simply drifting forward, carried by a current I couldn’t see. It wasn’t air I moved through anymore. It was magic, dense and whispering. It curled along my shoulders and spine like a new memory pressing in, like the breath of the past warming my neck.
Then, suddenly, the path opened.
No fanfare. No dramatic reveal. Just space.
