Page 131 of Witchlight
Blessed are the pure,Sky thought—and this time, the voice in her head sounded like Priest Corlant’s.
She pulled out the book, fingers numb. Teeth chattering. If thiswaswhere the Well had been, then there was supposed to be a tunnel on the other side. An old hypocaust that had heated baths centuries ago…
Yep, Sky found it. Straight ahead. She just had to circle left around the gaping hole she didn’t want to study too closely. She returned the book to her pocket and shifted, ready to leave.
But the weasel had other plans—and now it wasn’t even pretending to be a normal animal doing normal animal things. It raced right for Sky, white as the snow, and it chittered and purred, curling its tiny form around Sky’s boots.
Then an image formed in Sky’s brain. Althoughimagewas overstatingthe clarity of what appeared there. It was more like afeelinglaced by vague shapes, and thatfeelingindicated the snowy mound ahead.
“You… want me to walk over to that mound? Where all the ice lines are going? No way.” Sky snorted. “I ain’t doing that. I’m going over to that old hypocaust, and I’m getting the hell-pits out of here.”
The weasel didn’t like this answer, and after zipping up Sky’s body, it bit her on the face. Justbither, right on the nose with wicked fangs and claws to stab into Sky’s neck.
Sky punted the weasel off her, squawking with surprise and pain. The weasel hit the snow ten paces away, but she was down no more than a heartbeat before she got to her little feet and hurled forward again.
Sky ran; part of her was ashamed to be fleeing arodent,but most of her was wondering what this cursed creature was and why she, Sky, had gotten trapped in this completely unhinged reality of ice craters and weasels.
Her feet pounded into ice veins on the ruined earth, and each time they hit, a ringing walloped through her. It didn’t hurt so much as stagger Sky with the intensity of its response—and it reminded Sky of this one spot on her elbow that always knocked her silly whenever she bonked it. This ice wasn’t just weird, it was alive. It waspartof some greater being.
Nope, Sky didn’t like this and she didn’t like that weasel and she didn’t like that she was close enough now to the mound beneath the snow that she could see blood trailing outward from it. Six trails moving on the wheel spokes… until they froze, forming the very veins Sky couldn’t seem to avoid.
The weasel chittered anew, and fresh feelings and images filled Sky.The sword,it seemed to say.Drop the sword.
Sky obeyed. She flung the sword at the mound. To her horror, though, the sword didn’t just rotate a few times through the air, then land on its side like itshouldhave done. Instead, it found a path all its own and stabbed right into the mound. Fully vertical, exactly as it had when it had landed on the cobblestones before.
The ice veins all rang at once. The mound groaned.
And Sky gave one moreNopebefore running with all her heart away from that mound, that ice, that sword, and that weasel.
Heat roars. Wood cracks and embers fly.
“Run.” Blood drips from his mother’s mouth as she speaks. It splatters his face.
With arms stained to red, she pushes herself up. She wants him to crawl out from beneath her. She wants him to escape. “Run, my child, run.”
But he does not move, just as he did not move when the raiders first ambushed the tribe. Just as he did not move when his father drew his sword and ran from their tent. Or when the raiders reached their doorway, loosed their arrows, and then his mother fell atop him. She had hidden him with her body until the raiders had moved on.
“Run,” she whispers one last time, pleading desperation in her silver eyes. Then the last of her strength flees. She collapses onto him.
The six arrows that pierced her body slam into Aeduan. Pain and punctured breath and blood, blood, blood. Always the blood.
He is pinned by cedar and corpse. His mother is dead.
And now there will be no running. Now there is only flame.
He begins to cry.
Aeduan watched himself. He stood where the raider had stood when he’d loosed the six bolts into Dysi’s back. He stood at the mouth of their tent—except there was no tent now. No walls or battle raging in the tribe. All that surrounded Aeduan was fire and shadow.
Death follows wherever you go, yet by the grace of the Wells, you always outrun your own.
All he had wanted that day as a child was to join his mother and escape the flames. But death had refused to claim him. His mother’s body had kept away the full brunt of the fire’s force; his magic had healed his wounds.
Demon. Monster. You’re bound to the Void, a cursed beast with ’Matsi poison running in your veins.
Eventually, Dysi’s body had burned away. Eventually the arrows in Aeduan’s chest had too, leaving only white-hot heads trapped inside his chest. And eventually, Evrane’s gentle face and gentle hands had found Aeduan among the debris.
For so many years, Aeduan had relived that nightmare. Only once before though had he hovered outside like this, watching as his mother died and his wounds oozed blood upon the floor.
