Page 56 of The Shadowed Oracle
They would attack soon. If there was such a thing as fate, Ingrid thought, then this outcome would just be another failure fitting right in with all the others from her past. Like Sisyphus, trudging through the unseen forces pinning her down, finally catching the glimmer of hope on the other side, only to fall back down and do it all over again.
“Let them go,” she announced, surprising even herself with the declaration. “And I’ll come willingly.”
“Don’t,” Dean whispered. “We’re almost there.”
Ingrid squeezed his hand in response, as if to say, “And what if we aren’t?” What if this was the only way to save them? If her fate had always been to be hunted, to be pursued, then why take down the few who’d shown her kindness? The few who’d gone out of their way to help, to make sense of the darkness shadowing her?
She couldn’t sit back and watch. She wouldn’t.
Standing tall, she said, “It’s okay,” and hoped that Dean would understand. “It’s okay,” she said again. “Thank you. Thank you all for?—”
She turned to him, to Tyla, to Raidinn…
But they were gone.
She raised her empty palm, gawking at where Dean’s hand had just been half a second before.
“Please,” Sylan said, amused. “Do continue. What were you saying?”
Ingrid rounded her head back to center, staring out at the room now entirely populated by her enemies.
Was it a trick? Had one of the Wranes invaded her mind again? It didn’t feel that way. No, this felt nauseatingly real. She was alone. She knew the feeling well. The ignorant orphan who just days ago knew nothing of her roots, nothing of this new world, she now stood alone in front of the merciless general of Ealis’ largest army. Everything else seemed to fade, even his fanged wild animals, and the Wranes, and the persistent mechanical signal, and the trembling quake of the engine, leaving her utterly stranded with the most ungodly being she’d ever laid eyes on.
“It seems your little toy failed.” Sylan looked to the control panel. “It left you behind. How curious.”
Ingrid gulped, a war of two choices again raging on inside her.
She could run. Hope her power was valuable enough that Sylan would give her enough time to get outside the blast radius. Or, she could stay. The emergency measures would surely start counting down now that the others had gone through, and when they did, maybe the explosion would leave these monsters injured enough to slow them.
She couldn’t decide.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” Sylan continued, snapping Ingrid from her plotting thread. “Maybe this was your… fate.”
Ingrid was too concerned with the decision ahead of her to notice the coincidence. How one might think he was mocking her for her attempt at self-sacrifice, her thoughts about fate.
“Maybe it was necessary,” Sylan continued. “To feel this emptiness.” He smirked devilishly, enthralled by his own dramatic pause. “To know what it would feel like if those newfriends weren’t so friendly at all. Had you considered that? Have you doubted your saviors yet, Ingrid?”
Her stomach lurched. “How… how do you know my name?”
Sylan only kept that small smile plastered on, so calm and so still that Ingrid could’ve sworn the contours of his body suddenly faded. She blinked, and with each passing second, everything became cloudier.
Sylan seemed to fizzle, contorting into a twisted shadow before her eyes, like her vision had tunneled and everything before her caved in on itself.
He was only a mess of shadows now.
The red and yellow lights had turned pure white.
And then, all at once, she was somewhere else.
Somewhere in between, falling endlessly through a colorless, formless void.
Chapter Nineteen
Raidinn hadn’t liedwhen he said it would hurt to go through the portal.
Every molecule pinched and pressurized, aching and pulling and poking and stabbing and scraping all at once. Her extremities coiled, her organs shuffled, her teeth felt like they would crumble from her mouth. And just when it felt like a reprieve was imminent, then came the throbbing, pulsing pain like her body was rushing to heal and bruise, putting every cell back into place.
Her nervous system screamed out in unbearable pain as she descended deeper, deeper, deeper.
