Excerpt: When It All Shatters... Can It Be Rebuilt?

Dorei

Yaedar stared at me quizzically and then shook his head, but he said nothing. In silence, we returned to the rooms Sangar had provided us and it was only in the solitude that Kess said, “Do you feel it?”

I hadn’t noticed anything beyond the glorious feeling of having been cleansed of blood and washed clean by tears.

“I haven’t felt anything like this since Dewline. We have to be careful, Doe!”

I closed my eyes and tried to just feel, but I couldn’t sense anything, not that thickening of the air that made it so hard to breathe in Stream’s Edge, nor that lingering feeling of blackness that even seemed to eat the scent of flyss there. Maybe it was Patrikia and its sterile blackness and slick silvers. Maybe it was the heaviness in even the indoor air that filters couldn’t cleanse. Or maybe it was the feeling of a land dying, the last gasps of its beleaguered surface crying out to be cleansed. I tried to reach for that stifling feeling of dread, to feel my soul crushed beneath its weight once more, but all I could feel was the agony that near slew me several hours after we met the Circle. Patrikia rang with this same despair, this same endless scream ringing out from the depths of hundreds of thousands of tortured souls who had to eat and drink of its foulness. I felt no Dark here, just the endless agony of a befouled country mirrored in the screaming of my own heart as I thought of our lost Bardan once more.

“Doe?”

“I can’t think of it… I can’t bear it!”

He grabbed my head in both hands and stared into my eyes. “We’ll have time for that later—something’s wrong. Very wrong!” He pressed his lips against my nose so softly that it felt like a brush of honeyfly wings.

I shoved every last bit of regret deep down in my soul and shoved wall after wall around it. Not the time, not the time, rang through my head as an echo. I forced myself to strap on both daggers and my blade after Kess shook his head when I reached for my breastplate. If what he suspected was true, likely armor would be nigh unto useless, I supposed.

I followed him down the stark hallway, dingy under the yellowing light as we made our way once more to Yaedar’s quarters. I wondered at his thoughts, for I would have fetched Alea and Harkos first.

Your intended must be avenged!

From deep within the haze of red that clouded my every thought, my every sight, my every part of me, something emerged, something I had once thought buried forever, deep within my memory. He stood there, young and proud and blessed with the light of the Mother’s creation shining upon him almost as bright streaks of lightning. He smiled, a rare smile from the likes of him, and it was lit with something different than the twisted spite I had come to know so well. His deep brown hair glowed almost golden in the light of the Mother’s blessing, and his sea-green eyes crinkled with pure delight.

“Rei, come look at this!” He gestured into a cloud that slowly formed itself into a small rock cove just on the edge of Sunset Beach. “Hurry! I don’t think they’ll be here long.”

“What?” I heard myself say in that high-pitched reedy tone that marked me as little more than a ratdog whelp for the five years after I was Chosen. “What is it, Dalain?”

Perhaps that might have been the only time I’d ever said his name without cringing, but I remembered none of the shuddering, none of the shivering when this memory took me over.

“Hurry, Rei! They won’t be here much longer!”

Huddled deep in the corner of the small rock crescent, they curled into a huge ball of fuzzy black fur. Tiny, all of the little balls of sleek fluff struck me as smaller and more vulnerable than even the mice of the Summersdawn grasslands. Somehow, we’d come upon them quietly enough that none had awakened under the assault of our eyes, though Dalain hadn’t been silent with his call. One puff of fur shifted in the big pile and let out the smallest of squeaks, so close to silent that if the Mother’s breath had puffed even a little, his little cry would have been forever lost to the Mother’s flesh. My heart dripped slowly as a liquid to my feet as his nose twitched almost unconsciously, and I reached for Dalain's hand. The babe's delicate movements, as near motionless as they seemed to be to my own clumsy eyes, awakened a few of his littermates, and the next we knew, the Mother’s breath filled with a chorus of twittering almost as the cheek-cheeks’ spring mating songs. Seasals.

“Rei, do you feel the Mother?” I’d never heard his voice, so soft and so full of the wonder of the Mother’s creation.

This didn’t happen this way, I tried to tell myself as the seduction of the memory pulled me ever under.

“I do. She has blessed us well, indeed. How many see such small miracles of her creation?”

“We are her blessed, Rei, and she shows us the wonders of her blessings through her visions.”

The seasals squeaked as they waited for their own mother to bring them the fruits of her hunt while I stood next to this blessed young heir of the Holy Family. You were meant to be together, the seductive voice told me. Who stole him from you?

Twisted, the world twisted tight about me, and the vision that had once brought me the greatest solace and the greatest warmth turned to little more than darkness and I saw those sky blue eyes darken with the Mother’s wrath. Clouded, they shot bolts of the Technologists’ electricity through me while the visions thickened and curled themselves about my chest so tight I could no longer breathe.

You have a weapon—avenge yourself!

But…

He took your intended from you.

I didn’t even feel myself reach for my blade. All I noticed when the visions loosened themselves about me, was the heft of my blade in one hand, and the smooth hilt of my dagger in the other. And I moved, moved as I once had in combat against the Shadow-clan, furious, and without any true thought.

“Doe, what are you doing?” He dodged, and blocked my blade with one of the twisted, tined blades that had taken the life of my intended. “Why?”

“Take her down, Kessian!”

“But…” I saw little more than the blur of my blades and the flash of his.

“She’ll kill us if she has the chance, and you’re the only one who has a prayer of stopping her!”

Who spoke? I whirled around to face my other attacker, but all I saw was another cursed Technologist. Would they stop at nothing to destroy the Mother and her creations? And why was I here, in this grim, dark, stark stone room? Where were the seasals? Lost… All lost…

Your enemies took this from you—attack!

What? A sudden flash of red hot searing behind my neck, and black was all I became.