Page 8 of Heir Of Sun And Moon
This must be why I never remember my dreams—this one is extremelyodd. I try once again to tilt my head around but still can’t find who is speaking to me.
“When the stars try to lead you away from the false king, follow them. Look to the east for the answers you seek.”
“What?” The word comes out as a squeak, my heart beating fast and loud in my ears.
“Trust the stars over the ancient trees.” Her voice starts to fade away as my eyelids flutter closed. “Look to the east.”
A growing heaviness invades my bones, like each layer of my body is being stitched back together. It feels like I’m falling through the night sky and back into Olymazi, the wind whipping through my hair and lashing against my cheek harshly. Each second that passes is another weight that presses down on me.
I keep falling, the stars swirling around me faster and faster and faster until—
My eyes fly open as I suck in a long breath. Feeling returns to my fingers and toes—a tingling sensation that slowly moves up my legs and arms to my head. I swear I can feel each separate hair follicle on my scalp. I expect to wake on the balcony, outside in the elements and under the night sky. That this was all some half dream where I straddled the line between being awake and not. Instead, I’m staring up at the rafters of my tower from the floor on the lower level—right where I remember falling before the darkness swallowed me. Bella is by my side, her golden eyes burning with emotion.
Slowly, I move to sit, leaning on the tea table for support. My hand cradles my forehead, my body tense like I truly did just come back into it from the Afterlife. While I’m happy that it wasn’t a nightmare, the odd dream leaves me feeling off-kilter. Still, I remember every word that the ethereal woman said. Perhaps it is a sign that I am losing my sanity, but I find that my gut instinct is to listen to her. The words rattle around in my head as I stay seated on the floor and try to decipher their meaning.
Trust the stars over the ancient trees to guide me away from the false king.
And look to the east for the answers I seek.
Chapter Five: Bahira
Abreezeblowsinthrough the open doorway, the humidity of the spring day likely making my thick curly brown hair a frizzy mess. Standing behind the old wooden table that holds memories of all my experiments—both successful and failed—I place two small glass bottles containing the dead leaves of the pirang tree in front of me. Squatting down until I’m at eye level, I reach blindly to the left for the container of water that Hadrik, a mage that sits on my father’s council, infused with his raw magic. Of course, I nearly knock it over and have to hold my breath as I watch it wobble from side to side, liquid sloshing, before settling back down.Shit, that was close.
Councilman Hadrik is my father’s oldest friend and one of the biggest supporters of my research outside of my family. While everyone in the kingdom agrees that magic is declining, no one else seems to be actively working towards finding out why. It’s like there is a sense of complacency because it has been happening for so long.
I’ve always had a curious mind, constantly putting my nose in a book or looking down the eyepiece of a magnifier—the magnified instrument used for my experiments—trying to find the answers to questions that plagued me. My curiosity has led to a better understanding of nearly everything in the world around me, with the exception of one—what is happening to our magic and how to stop it.
Grabbing my tray of hourglasses, I flip them over to begin a countdown while I lift the infused water and pour it into one of the bottles of dead leaves. The hourglass tray is something I custom made for myself to keep track of elapsed time during my experiments. Between two planks of wood are ten hourglasses, each one a different measurement of time starting with one minute and continuing up to ten.
A soft, light green glow emanates from the bottle of decayed foliage, briefly blinding me before winking out. The oval-shaped leaves in the bottle turn vibrant green, growing in size while roots and new buds sprout. Hadriks’ more powerful magic works to help bring life and new growth back into the remnants of the plant within a minute. As I expected.
In our kingdom, mages come into their magic at around eight years of age and participate in a Flame Ceremony to demonstrate how strong their prospective magic is. During the ceremony, a drop of their blood is given to the Cauldron of Vires, and a flame rises in response, the size of it indicating how powerful the child’s magic has the potential to be. In centuries past, it wasn’t uncommon to see a flame more than six feet tall, but magic seems to have been in more abundance then. Over the past many decades, the magic manifesting in both young and old mages has been weakening, and recently—for the first time in our history—a mage was born without magic. A fact that I am, unfortunately, very intimate with.
Sighing, I reach for the container on my right filled with the water infused by one of the younger mages. The wielder is a twelve year old girl named Alba who has just mastered infusing her magic into an element like water. This task is something that used to be learned within weeks of turning eight and starting your training. Now, along with the magic being less powerful, it takes much longer for children to learn to wield their magic in what were previously simple ways.
When the one minute hourglass finishes, I pour the infused water into the second bottle of pirang leaves. I expect at least a small amount of magic light to emit from the bottle, but nothing more than a minuscule spark of blue—the color of Alba’s magic—twinkles before my eyes. I watch as the leaves slowly rehydrate and expand, turning from a dull, dead brown to a light green, but do not sprout roots or grow buds.
Then after five minutes have passed, the leaves at the top of the bottle holding Alba’s magic begin to shrivel back down to brown. I stand up tall as I stretch out my back before untying my apron. I turn to the faucet in the basin built into a black stone countertop, wetting my hands before sliding them down my face. A ragged breath leaves me as frustration at our kingdom’s predicament, atmyownpredicament, weighs heavily on my mind.
When it was revealed that I had no magic, I made them do the test again.Fivetimes. Five drops of blood. Each with the same result: no flame growing over the cauldron—not even a tiny spark of light. I allowed myself to wallow in sadness for a long time—not even wanting to be around anyone casting magic. Which proved quite difficult considering I am the only one who doesn’t have any, a fact I wish I had an explanation for. Eventually, I decided that maybe this perceived weakness was actually a test.
I am inquisitive by nature, always trying to dig deeper and see things from every perspective. Who better to try and figure out why our magic was draining, why mages were weakening, than the person with no magic to speak of? With each year that passed, I spent more and more time reading, researching, and experimenting on everything and anything that might give me a clue as to why it was happening.Somethingis making it so mage magic is growing weaker overall, and I intend to be the one to find out why it’s happening and fix it.I have to.Because figuring that out is the only way to find my own magic.
Footsteps outside the threshold of my workshop draw my attention. My gaze lifts, a small smile curving my lips when Daje—one of my oldest friends—walks in. He smiles back at me, his blue eyes piercing in the sunlight streaming through the windows.
“Working hard, Bahira?” he asks, his voice teasing. I smile faintly in response, though my shoulders tense imperceptibly. Lately, Daje has made passing remarks about how I need to “relax about the magic stuff.” What he doesn’t understand, what a lot of the people around me don’t understand, is that I can’t just stop. If I forgo my research, I will be a princess of the Mage Kingdom—a realm known for its skill in wielding raw magic—who is magicless. That is something I just can’t accept.
“Clearly,” I joke, my hand motioning to the two glass jars. A knot forms in my throat when I see the jar that contained Alba’s magic has already reverted the rest of the leaves back to a shriveled brown, the magic within the bottle depleted quickly. Meanwhile, the jar containing the leaves of Councilman Hadrik has stopped blooming new roots but remains alive and vibrant in color. I know the difference is significant, I just haven’t figured out how yet.
Daje takes a step forward until his hip is leaning against the edge of the table. He reaches out and tucks a wayward strand of curly hair behind my ear, his gaze lingering on it before bouncing to mine. The movement is intimate—too much so—forcing me to avert my gaze and clear my throat.
“To what do I owe this visit? Are youfinallyhere to help me for once?”
Daje smirks, taking my slight rejection with ease, as he straightens back up and clasps his hands behind him. The movement makes his broad chest strain against his light blue tunic, and I really can see why women obsess over him. His dark brown hair is cut close to his head, his clean-shaven jawline sharp despite the more oval shape of his face. It’s his eyes that make him such a popular commodity though—the light blue of them stark against his tanned skin. He’s also one of the only men that I have to physically look up to; as a taller woman, most of the men my age are at eye level or below.
“I’m afraid not. I was sent to retrieve you by your father,” he says casually, walking over to the small desk that I share with our friend Haylee. My body turns as I follow him with my eyes and process what he’s said, my hands flattening out on the wooden table in front of me.
“Is something wrong? Is it Nox?” The words come out of me so quickly that they are almost incomprehensible.
