Zodiac Academy 8: Sorrow and Starlight

My legs burned from running through the trees, my heart thrashing wildly as I raced away from that girl and that hut, the fading version of myself who I’d both feared and hated in the deepest recesses of my mind for so long. I’d faced the worst of myself and emerged from the despair it had tried to drown me with, and I felt lighter for it. Like looking into the face of the truth I’d feared for so long had set me free from some of it.

I could see the lies mixed in with those fears, the ones I’d convinced myself of for so long that it had been hard to see through them. But observing them from the outside made it easier to do so somehow. And though I certainly wouldn’t have said I was cured of my insecurities and the reasons I had for being the way I was, I could forgive myself for some of it. I could see how certain parts of what I’d blamed myself for had never really been my fault in the first place.

I’d felt distant from the mortals who surrounded us for my entire childhood, always secretly hoping for a love that might surpass my difficulties and see beyond them. But we never would have fit in that place, even if I’d worked harder to play nice, had smiled more or tried to make friends with people who didn’t understand me. Because our home was here, in Solaria. And that was where I’d found my place at last, with Darcy right there beside me.

I needed to find my pack, needed to finish the work on creating that bridge, then hope to hell that I could figure out where the Waters of Depth and Purity were.

The darkness pressed close beneath the trees, but the eerie, bone white colour of their trunks made it possible for me to see a path between them.

I didn’t want to risk a light. Not with that thing still out there, the knowledge that it was hunting me rooted in my soul.

A glint of red in the dark caught my eye and a choked sob escaped me as I hurled myself towards it, snatching the ruby pendant from the ground and feeling the heat of it radiating into my skin.

I hurried to fasten it around my throat once more, the weight of it a relief which hit me soul deep.

The wind stirred around me, fingers ghosting along my arm, and I closed my eyes as I tried to lean into that fictitious feeling of him.

But the touch didn’t seem like those I’d imagined before, it was more of a tug than a caress, an urgency filling me as the sense of him increased and I could have sworn I heard his voice hissing, “Run.”

My eyes snapped open, and I spun around, whipping my sword from my sheath once more. The young version of me stood between two of the towering trunks, a new scar ringing her throat where my blade had sliced into it, blood trickling down to stain her white nightgown.

“You killed him,” she snarled, her words like a bullet to my gut. “You were the reason he fought in that battle. You were the reason he was so desperate to defeat his father. He’d been planning to challenge him long before you came and uprooted his entire life. He’d been waiting until he was ready to win. You made him strike too soon. You. Killed. Him.”

Her words seared the skin from my bones and made me bleed out at her feet, those cutting, ruinous accusations which I’d never let myself look at in the light of day. But the whispers of them had chased each other in circles during the night, keeping me up hour after hour, reminding me of all the pain I’d caused him when I’d refused to love him beneath the stars, hissing at me that I should have seen what Lionel had been doing to him long before I had. I should have seen and been the lifeline he’d so desperately needed. But instead, I’d become the weight which hung from his shoulders and dragged him beneath the surface. I’d added to his pain and his burdens, and I’d given him even more to hurt over in the short time he’d been gifted in this life.

Despair reared its ugly head as she took a step closer to me, and I didn’t know if it was her power or my truth which was working to destroy me, but it didn’t matter.

Despair may have been a tempting escape, an easy cop out to my situation, but I had never been the kind to linger in my sorrow.

“I didn’t kill him,” I said in a low voice, raising my sword as I steeled myself to face her. “But I will keep my promise to avenge him.”

No, sorrow and despair weren’t the path I’d been born to tread. But vengeance? Wrath? Anger? Violence? I could marry myself to those emotions just fine.

The girl’s eyes widened as I charged her down, her arms widening as if she might be readying to hurl some terrible power at me, but she didn’t. She did nothing at all to stop me, my blade piercing her heart of fear and nightmares, and a crack resounding throughout the entire forest as her body split and sundered.

I jerked my blade back, watching as those scars on her skin began to glow with an inner light, the corners of her lips lifting as her familiar green eyes met my own.

I threw a hand up to shield my face as she exploded into that light, golden flames arcing from her before splitting apart and dispersing, fading into nothing in the face of my fury and leaving me alone in the silence of the forest once more.

I was panting, trembling, aching all over and I knew I was nowhere near done with this place. Yet as I cast a Faelight above my head and turned back to hunt for my pack, I found the strength to keep going in the promise carved into my palm.

My feet seemed to know their own route and within moments I spotted my pack, sheathing my sword once more as I hefted it onto my back and turned my attention to the huge trunk I’d begun to cast the bridge magic on.

I expelled a heavy breath, the anger that girl had awoke in me rising as I closed my fist around the scar which bound me to my promise.

“I’m coming,” I told him, knowing he was close, haunting my steps as I strode to the trunk and allowed my fire to ignite on my fingertip once more.

I didn’t have to concentrate anywhere near as hard as I had when I’d started this, the movements coming easily as I burned the Elemental symbol for water into the bark of the tree, its screams doing nothing to slow me. Next, I scrawled the truth of my heart into the wood. The flame and the Dragon. All I needed in this world and any other.

A rumble started up in the ground beneath my feet as I slit the scar on my palm open with my dagger, blood trickling between my fingers while I sank into that well of old magic hidden within the world.

I could feel it stirring in the air around me, humming in the centre of the damned trees themselves and purring as it brushed against the potency of my rage.

The power of ether crested like a wave around me as I summoned it to do my bidding, offering up the blood of my vow to it until I felt it lifting me from my feet, the swell of that wave ready to break over the earth all around me.

I slammed my bloody palm against the bone white trunk of the still screaming tree and the power which erupted from me sent a shockwave tumbling out into the forest as the tree was ripped from the ground.

Roots tore their way out of the dirt beneath me, soil cascading all around as the enormous tree screamed louder, its fate already sealed, and a groan loud enough to be heard for miles filled the air before the echoing boom of it crashing to the forest floor consumed all else.

The tree’s screams cut off sharply and I threw my arms up to shield my face as I felt the curse which had been bound to it shattering, the ether vibrating with the power of its end. And I wondered if somewhere out in the world beyond this place of doom and damnation, the ancestors of the Fae who that curse had been intended for might suddenly find their luck changing.

The power I’d summoned fell away and I dropped from the air, almost slipping on the smooth bark of the fallen tree trunk as I landed on it, my Bridge to the Beyond stretching out ahead of me.

Magic crackled in the air surrounding it, the forest blurring either side of it, like it no longer led between those trees, but had carved a passage through the fabric of the world itself. This had been the ancient form of travelling by magic before stardust had been cultivated to fulfil this purpose. It was unstable and short-lived, but so long as I could cross before the magic faltered, it would deliver me to the destination I desired.

I started walking without hesitation, a little magic healing the cut on my palm and a flame igniting at my side to recharge the power I’d burned through.

I kept my gaze fixed ahead as voices tried to lure me from either side of the bridge, remembering the warnings in the Book of Earth as I refused to look their way. If I was tempted left or right, then I would fall prey to the things that lurked between realms, and no part of me would remain to be found ever again.

One foot in front of the other, I continued, the hazy white light either side of me flickering in my peripheral vision, but I didn’t look at it. Not once.

There was a presence at my back, footsteps hounding my own. But I didn’t turn. Because I knew who was stalking me into the dark, and I had always enjoyed his brand of violence best.