Page 147 of Lightlark
He leaned back against the wall, eyes shut tightly.
“Are you all right?”
Oro nodded just as his entire body seized again, as if he’d been struck by lightning. He slammed a hand against the ground, and long cracks erupted from the place he had hit, Starling energy making the cave smell of sparks.
She couldn’t imagine the pain. His connection to the island meant he felt its power ... but also its destruction.
Isla placed a careful hand on his shoulder, and he stiffened. She quickly withdrew it.
Oro yelled out again, his fingers digging deeper into the stone, fire forming then dying in his palms, ice freezing then melting, sparks coating them, then vanishing. “What—what can I do?” she asked, panicked. There had to be something she could offer.
His eyes were still shut. He swallowed, and she watched the movement, watched him wince once more. Found herself wondering if she would take his pain for herself if she could.
“Sing for me, Wildling,” he finally said.
Isla thought she must have misheard him. But he took a shaky breath in, and out. Quiet. Waiting.
She remembered that night on her balcony. Singing when she hadn’t known anyone had been listening.
He had clapped. And she had assumed he had done it to be mean.
Perhaps he had liked it.
She began to sing a Wildling song. Her favorite song. The one she sang when she wanted to hear her own voice echoed back to her. When she was alone in her chambers and hoped someone far away might hear her. When she wondered if there was someone realms away, listening.
She sang that song.
Her voice was thick as honey, high as bells, deep as rumbles of thunder. She could do wild things with it, and she did, sitting back on her heels, her knees grazing his legs. Her voice echoed through the cave, harmonies weaving together.
Oro’s eyes opened at some point. He watched her, taking steady breaths. Slowly, his fists began to uncurl. He rested his palms against the cool stone and listened.
She smiled at him when his shoulders settled. His expression did not change. She continued to sing, because he hadn’t told her to stop, and the sun hadn’t come up. She sang until her voice went hoarse and the sound changed. She liked when it got like this, smoky, different.
Part of her wondered if he had let her go on to be polite. But when she closed her mouth, Oro frowned.
“Why did you stop?” he asked.
Isla motioned toward the mouth of the cave, breathless. “Because of that,” she said.
The dark sky was brightening. The moon was fading.
Oro was on his feet in an instant. They both rushed to the entrance, watching. Waiting.
In the rising light, Isla noticed something. She squinted. Right below the nest, something was floating in the air, untethered to gravity.
“Is that an egg?” she asked.
Just as the words left her mouth, the egg fell. Slowly, too slowly, it plunged to the ground—
And cracked open.
From its shell emerged a shining, gold yolk. It rose from the ground in tandem with the sun rising from the horizon, just across the cliff.
“The full egg represented the moon,” she said, her voice hoarse from singing. “The yolk ... is the sun.” How many times had she thought the full moon looked like an egg? That the sun looked yolky?
She turned to Oro, eyes wide. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s the heart.”
The heart is hidden until it blooms and becomes a part of Lightlark. Oro had presumed it was a plant. But this time, the heart had returned as the very basis of life. An egg.
