Page 35 of Fractured
“Why,though? Why is this where I have to be? You don’t even know me. What the hell—you’re talking inmyvoice—care to explain that little part to me? Or do you conveniently not know that, either?Whoare you?!”
Not my proudest moment to be screaming at a creature who might very well not be real at all, I’ll admit, but I wasthisclose to losing it and exploding in hysterics, so I cut myself some slack.
“I am Vair.”
A name.It had a name.
“I talk in your voice because that’s the only voice I have.”Fuck me.“The parts of you I don’t know are the parts of me I don’t know, and one of them is the reason why.”
My mouth opened and closed several times before I could give voice to my one hilariously absurd question: “Meaning?”
“Meaning I’ll know the reason why whenyouknow the reason why.”
I shook my head over and over again.
“Whatare you?” BecauseVairdidn’t seem like the proper answer.
“I am a snow lynx.” Except he looked different from the lynxes back home, didn’t he? Though when I thought about it now, a lynx was definitely the closest animal that resembled him.
“A lynx.”
“I used to be a gift.” Again, he lowered his head.
“Are you…are you a girl or a boy?” What a weird fucking question to ask but I was stuck thinking of it ashimeven though he spoke with my voice.
“I am neither, but the name given to me is male.”
“By whom?”
Another second of loaded silence. “I don’t remember.”
How awfully convenient.
I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply, called for order in my head the way a judge would in a courtroom. Unfortunately, my thoughts didn’t give a shit how hard I slammed that hammer against the metaphorical table in the middle of my mind.
“Nothing ever makes sense in this place—nothing.” Yet I was still here, still expected to figure it all out anyway. And I was still without Rune.
“Sense is found only when one opens their minds,” the lynx said, and I almost laughed.
“Oh, you know that answer tothatone. Really, very convenient,” I muttered.
“You have lost energy. You have used frostfire. I suggest?—”
“Wait, wait, hold on a minute,” I said, raising my hands. “I didn’tusefrostfire.” I wouldn’t know what the hell frostfire was if it smacked me in the face.
“You did. It is how I heard you. How I found you.”
There I went again, playing a fish out of water while my vocal cords rearranged themselves from the beginning.
“That was…it was…that’s justcold,” I ended up saying. “That was…it was magic. It was just cold.”
“Frostfire is not cold. It’s merely sharp,” the lynx said.
“No, no—I know what I felt. It was cold and then it burst out of me because I thought we were going to die. I thought it would killmefirst when it exploded—it’s justcold.”
Just cold, just cold, just cold,I said for another hundred times as I paced around in a circle in front of those locked doors, and the lynx let me. He only watched me until I stopped moving.
Then, he said, “Frostfire doesn’t kill. It purifies.” I looked at him. “The whisper of a memory says so.”
