Page 40 of Daughter of No Worlds

“We can stop for the day,” Max said, rising to his feet. “Even experienced Wielders would struggle with this. You don’t have to get it tonight.”

But I didn’t look away from my translucent flower as I replied, “No.”

“What?”

“No. We do not stop.”

He paused mid-step, looking perplexed. “This isn’t typically the context in which I’d like to hear that. But my answer is the same nonetheless” He turned back around, slumping back to the ground, quirking one eyebrow at me in a skeptical challenge. “If you can do it, I can do it.”

Oh, I could do it.

So, we resumed — me creating flower after flower and Max telling me all the ways in which it was wrong. By this point, I knew before he opened his mouth exactly how it was lacking, and I was already letting it dissolve by the time the words left his lips. By then, all final dregs of sunlight had long ago disappeared beneath the horizon, leaving us in darkness. Max opened fire in his palms and placed it on the ground, where it hovered in an eerie, self-contained ball.

“Could I do that?” I asked, without looking away from five-trillionth flower.

“I don’t know. Can you?”

I flicked me eyes to the fire ball. Fire had always been difficult for me, like it was speaking a language I didn’t quite understand.Sparks, really,Max had called it. He wasn’t wrong.

But I said, casually, “I’m sure yes,” as if it were nothing.

He chuckled.

Flowers and flowers evaporated into the night. Max’s responses grew slower and less enthusiastic. Eventually, he stood up and stretched. “Alright. I’m done. Sleep.” He said it as if he couldn’t conjure the energy to create more complete sentences.

“You go. I will stay.”

A brief, surprised pause. “Are you sure?’

“Yes.”

“Ramming your head against the wall will probably get less effective over time.”

“I don’t know what that’s meaning.”

“It means, don’t kill yourself. But then again, I’m in no position to judge, I suppose.” I heard the door open, even as my eyes were unwaveringly focused on the petal I sculpted. “Good luck.”

A bitter smile twisted the edges of my mouth. “I do this so I don’t need luck.”

“I can’t decide if that response is charming or terrifying.”

And with that, he closed the door, leaving me in silence, singularly focused on my work.

It was comforting in a way to have something to fight for, to push myself beyond the shadow of talent and forge my success out of something stronger. There was a certain meditative quality about throwing myself against a stone wall again and again, chipping away at it. I could feel it cracking beneath my fingers, even as I felt it crackingme.At the end, one of us would be left standing. And I wasn’t about to let myself break.

I eventually began conjuring each petal individually, figuring out how to hold the others in my mind as I moved on to the next one and the next and the next. And then, after that, I forced myself a step further: figuring out how to turn it into glass without letting all of those separate petals slip through the grasp of my mind.

The sounds of the nighttime bugs and creatures faded. The sky turned purple. My vision blurred, my head grew leaden, throbbing behind my eyes, ears, temples.

Tisaanah.

It was Esmaris’s voice at first, accusing and pleading all at once.

“Tisaanah.” The murkiness dripped away, peeling back the memory of my former master’s face, his betrayal.

I opened my eyes to see a bright sky, tree branches and green leaves encroaching on the edges of my vision. And a pair of angular, bright blue eyes looking down at me from beneath perplexed brows.

I had fallen asleep.

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