Page 119 of The Forsaken Heir
Something in the smoke was making my head swim as well.
“What’s in there? Weed?” I asked, blinking to clear my vision.
“Marijuanaisa verystrong magical herb,” Sahalie said, deep in concentration as she swirled the smoke around me.
“Ay, yo,” Rasp said with a chuckle. “Could I…uh…getsanctifiednext?”
Delphine swatted him again.
“Will youstophitting me?”
Before anyone else could say anything, Sahalie cast the smudge stick aside and took my hands. The other fae began to chant, a high and low throat-singing that send weird, reverberating vibrations through the surrounding area. Leaves jittered, and my own chest hummed with the vibration. It made my dizziness even stronger.
Sahalie cleared her throat and began to speak, squeezing my hands for emphasis. I had no clue what she was saying. The language was heavy with trilling consonants and tongue-rolled vowels. A strange sense of foreboding as well as hope settled over me. I couldn’t help but think it was a kind of warning, as well as a prayer of protection or perhaps a wish for good luck.
Sahalie released my hands. “The wellspring is ready for you, and you are ready for it. Proceed. I do hope we will see you at the end, Sister Brielle Laurent.”
Licking my lips, I turned to look at my friends. They looked really worried. Hell,Iwas really worried. But we’d come too far to turn back now. With a last smile at them, I followed the stone path to the edge of the wellspring until my foot touched the shimmering surface. The surface looked like glittering semi-transparent mercury, flowing and rippling around my toes.
“Fear nothing,” Kaskawan called out.
“Easy for you to say,” I muttered under my breath and took another step into the Wellspring.
The deeper I went, the colder it got. Though it was amorphous and barely seemed to have any mass to it, the liquid pushed my robe against my leg, and a distinct wet feeling traveled up my ankles to my shins. Strange. It wasn’t water, yet it acted similarly.
Weirder still, the floor was flat and level, yet with every step, the liquid rose higher. After ten steps, it was up to my chest. It was almost like I was taking some sort of invisible stairs down. Fuck. I never asked how long I could stay under. How was I going to breathe? Did I even need to breathe? Would it be like swimming, and I’d need to surface every few seconds?
All those questions vanished when, with my next step, the bottom gave out, sucking me down. I yelped in surprise as the magic engulfed my face and head.
It felt like I was being embraced, swallowed, and lifted all at the same time. An immense and almost overwhelmingancientfeeling filled me, like I was in the presence of some eldritch thing I couldn’t even describe.
Paddling my feet, I found that there was no bottom. I couldn’t move my arms to swim upward. I hung suspended as if I was floating in outer space. The most bizarre thing was that I could still breathe. A white, metallic shimmer filled my vision. It was liquid, gas, and solid all at once.
This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever done.
A voice spoke out of the shimmering light, coming from all around me, like some kind of organic surround sound.
“Welcome…daughter of…wolf.”
It spoke in a halting cadence, and I couldn’t quite figure out whether it was male or female.
“Uh…hello,” I said dumbly, surprised my mouth didn’t fill with liquid or smoke or whatever the hell this was.
“Why…do you…venture forth…into our recesses?”
I cleared my throat. God, this was weird. “I came to speak with the Hikshil tribe. The, uhm, the people who live around you.”
“The children…of light. Yes.”
“Right, yeah, the children of light. Sure. There is a war coming. It’s going to be bad. Dragon shifters will more than likely be destroyed or defeated in such a way that their race will vanish in a few generations.”
A strange rumbling moved through the wellspring, like a wave in the ocean, as though something massive had swum by, and I had to steel myself against thinking about some sort of massive creature swimming around in the magic ocean with me.
“We have seen. We know. The veil grows narrow. You are right…daughter of wolf… War comes.”
Well, at least that’s out of the way, I thought.
“We… I mean, I and the dragons need the Hikshil to help us. We need their magic, their numbers, and their power. But they won’t agree until I’ve been, uh,chosenor something by you.”
