Page 28 of Oath-Maker

“Merek—”

He stepped behind me and grabbed both sides of my head. “Gaze upon it.”

“No!” I grabbed his hands, but I could not pry them from my head, no matter how hard I fought.

Merek yanked my head backward and forced my line of sight right at the sphere. Even with my eyes shut, the radiant energy and magic from it burned. The pure sunlight. “Look.”

“No! This is crazy!” It’d destroy my eyes. Maybe even my very soul. And at the very least, Merek should have known I couldn’t very well help him with his anti-demon plans if I couldn’t see how to use my magic, right?

What was the point of this?

“Look upon the Light, Ayla!” Merek shouted. “It has done nothing but support and power you. You owe it this much. This trust.”

Already, my eyes burned and they weren’t even open. They watered, spilling over and pouring down my cheeks. I was scared to look. Scared to lose my vision to this. My life, too.

But a voice began to worm its way into my head, soothing and smooth. Like chimes on the wind.

It is okay to look, Paladin.

I would not hurt someone I helped to make.

I gulped.The Light.

Merek hadn’t been lying. This was the entity that had created the Order. The entity that had been the glue to everything in my life since birth, and a small avatar of it, a piece of its presence in this world, was sitting right before me, asking me to trust it.

I exhaled and took the leap of faith. Merek’s grip on the sides of my head tightened as I opened my eyes, guaranteeing I wouldn’t be looking away anytime soon.

And it wasbright. And painful.

But the burning stopped after a few seconds. The white light cleared, revealing images and shapes slowly over long seconds that unfolded into a clarity I’d never known before.

A cityscape came into focus. Destroyed and ravaged, but a cityscape all the same. Tall skyscrapers, stained-glass domes, white brick and limestone. Above, a red, raging sky that churned like stars with shades of deep purple and burnt orange. A deep, mauve sun burned along the horizon, casting long shadows over ruins. In the distance rose tall, spire-like mountains, thin and twisty like spindles.

It was entirely alien. And entirely familiar.

The home world of the demons and celestials. Soltar.

The Light’s voice chimed again through my mind:Welcome Home.

CHAPTER12

Darkness followed the light. I swam through it, unseeing and unhearing for a long time. There was a shuffling as though the world had continued going on around me, but I wasn’t privy to it. The sight of the celestials’ and demons’ home world of Soltar had been burned into my mind, allowing my eyes to see nothing but an afterimage of the at once radiant and desolate world. The aftermath of their war.

What Serenia might look like if they succeed in bringing another round of war here.

If Merek were to get what he wanted.

Slowly, I became aware of a world outside of the afterimages searing my mind. A comforting, soft blanket enveloping me. Warmth cast on my face from sunlight. A plush mattress beneath my body.

Mattress.

My eyes snapped open and I jerked with a start, sitting upright in a four-post dark-wood bed complete with ruby drapery curtains. They weren’t let down, so the sunlight pouring in through a nearby window had bathed the whole bed in light. Shadows filtered over that same window intermittently as celestials in both humanoid and not-so-human forms flew through the skies.

I gulped and kept a splayed hand pressed to my chest. In some ways, I had been convinced I was still standing before the avatar of the Light on top of the Order’s tower. But I must have blacked out at some point…Or passed out entirely, I realized as I glanced down at myself. I was now dressed in a light, silk shirt and matching pants the same color as the Order’s gold emblem.

How had I gotten here? The obvious answer was Merek had brought me after I’d passed out. But how much time had passed since then, and what had transpired within it? For the life of me, my mind would not fully leave the fog of darkness.

Focus, I begged it, but this fatigue, this fog, was so hard to sift through. Reality was impossible to cling to as those images of that home world haunted me.

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