Page 119 of Damned and Broken Gods
Yoohoo, Weapon!
LEELA
The light swallowed me and spat me out on a wasteland of cracked earth. The sky was a swirling miasma of purple and blue, distant stars winking down at me, as if in acknowledgment.
I glanced back, expecting to see the glowing doorway I’d just walked through and find the others following, but there was nothing but more wasteland and no sign of my friends.
I was alone. What now?
There was nothing but flat lands as far as the eye could see.
How did I call a weapon?
I put my hands up to bracket my mouth. “Hello! Anyone here? Yoohoo, weapon!”
My voice sounded small in the vastness around me. Ifeltsmall. Insignificant. I set off at a brisk stride. Maybe I had to find the weapon.
Time slipped by. The landscape never changed. No mountains. No trees.
Emptiness echoed inside me like a warning of the vacuum to come once Araz was gone.
When had he become the thing that fulfilled me?
When had I become a vessel aching for his love? I drifted deeper into my thoughts, one foot in front of the other.
This journey couldn’t be about him. About us. It was bigger than that.
It was about the greater good. About freeing trapped souls. And yet it circled back to Araz. Again and again.
My gut told me he was important. Vital. But I wasn’t sure if that was the bond speaking. A bond that amplified.
I wouldn’t know the truth until I ascended. Until he was free.
I needed to rise.
I needed my weapon.
I stopped. Boots on grass. Toes at the edge of a moonlit pool.
How had I gotten here?
The water was as smooth as glass. I crouched to touch it and found it hard.
Not glass.
Not ice.
A mirror.
My face looked back at me. Eyes darker than I remembered. And as I studied my reflection, my face changed. Subtly at first—the cheeks fuller, eyes slightly slanted. Then more evident—a sharper nose, a thinner mouth. Until my face was no longer mine at all. It morphed into different faces. One after the other.
I wanted to pull away, to remove my hand from the mirror, but an invisible force held me firmly. The spot between my eyebrows began to throb, faster and faster, and purple light tinged my vision. The faces blurred and finally melted, only to coalesce into a female visage that I didn’t know yet recognized in a visceral way that made my eyes burn with the threat of tears.
Dark eyes, a full mouth that I knew would smile or bare its teeth, and angular cheekbones, regal in their slant. She glared at me, as if challenging me to do something. To say something, and that challenge unlocked something deep inside me.
Sound vibrated up my throat, unbidden and unformed until it reached my lips. “I see you…” The words fell in a whisper.
My breath misted the mirror, and hairline cracks formed at its touch, radiating outward across the lake. The reflection smiled, and a voice filled my head.
