Page 18 of Lore of the Tides

A second later, she was back in her own familiar body. She didn’t open her eyes, but she flexed her fingers against the wood of the bowl, feeling the scented oil used to polish it smooth, the few drops of water that had spilled over the lip when she’d pulled it onto her lap, which still coated her fingertips. She concentrated on the sounds in the room with her, focused on her breathing to ground herself to the here, the now.

The physical plane.

Finndryl was here. Finndryl was safe.

Now she could get to work.

She thought of Duskmere. Aunty Eshe, Uncle Salim. Milo, Katu... She focused on the love of her people, the strength it gave her, and used it to help her focus on the bowl clenched between her palms. Her eyes were still closed. She couldn’t see when the scrying took hold, when the water morphed into a mirror, then a window, but shefeltit, as the magic poured from within her toward the scrying bowl.

Where are you? You’re the last piece to this puzzle. With you I can break the chains holding us back. I can forge a new path for us. Let me find you, please.

She left her body behind once more.

Please,Auroradel.Show me where you are. I will bind myself to you as I have your sister book.Lore threw her plea out into the expansive world. Spreading her magic wide. She could feel it breach the hull of the ship, dispersing out across the water, her magic a web of coiling, shimmering threads, spreading, hunting.

Lore cast herself farther out—widening her web until it was more akin to a fishing net.

She lost sight of herself completely, floating above the ship, which looked so small, surrounded by the stretch of moonlit ocean. With reckless abandon, she pushed farther than she ever had before, feeling her breath grow thin. She tasted copper in her mouth, felt the swell of blood in her nose. She urged the threads of her magic to stretch and lengthen. She was pushing herself too far, but she couldn’t care about that now.

A trickle of blood slid down past her lips and her chin, dripping into the bowl of water.

I haven’t much to give you, but I will give it all, she promised.Where are you?she called out.

She sank into the silvery, watery existence of this plane, this other place, until the world around her lost all color.

That same black swath that had consumed the scrying bowl now surrounded her; the pressure of something she did not understand enclosed her mind, pressing into her. Alarmed, she looked around.

There was nothing—just unfathomable darkness.

Lore’s spectral form startled, cringing back at the infiltration within her mind. Something was speaking, though, and it was not in a language she knew. She focused on it, fighting the urge to shove it away, out of her head, and claw herself free of this intrusion. But then, the voice changed. She still could not understand what it said, but the cadence changed.

She knew this voice.

It was Mama telling stories of the gods, humming little snippets of a song she’d created as she shucked peas for dinner... No, wait. Had she been wrong? Now this cadence... this rhythm... it was Finndryl reading from an alchemical text, his words a soft purr. Or was it Grey when he told a story, laughing through his fingers, barely able to push the words past his mirth? Now, Uncle Salim was teaching Lore her numbers in that soft-yet-firm voice of his as heslipped hand-carved beads from one side of an abacus to the other. It sounded like Aunty Eshe singing a lullaby to the littles as they burrowed into their blankets, their eyes heavy with sleep.

She relaxed the knot in her shoulders and breathed. She let the words drift through her mind, not straining to understand, just making space for them.

They changed, once more, into her language.

The human language. The one the Alytherians did not like them to speak, and yet it had been the language Lore had heard in the womb. The first tongue she’d understood, the first she’d learned to form in her own mouth.

Where griffin cries pierce the sky, and shadows strike the mountain’s heart, here I lie, an earthen hold, in slumber deep, a hidden spark awaits one who dares to seek.

Was this the grimoire or something else, something wicked, answering her call? If she could feel her body, she imagined the hair would be standing up on her arms.

The voice continued.

Where griffin cries pierce the sky, and shadows strike the mountain’s heart, here I lie, an earthen hold, in slumber deep, a hidden spark awaits one who dares to seek.

Please do not give me riddles. I am just a person who has not explored much of this world. Can’t youshowme where you are?

A picture formed inside her mind. Or the absence of one, for she was cloaked in utter darkness. She’d seen glimpses of this while scrying when the water in the wooden bowl would turn black as pitch. Blacker than pitch.

But this was different. The vision was pressing into her mind.

Lore flinched backward—or tried to, as she did not have a body to make it happen.

She stirred sluggishly here, too slowly. She was cloaked in darkness, a shock wave of realization as it dawned on her that she could not find her way out.

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