19
No repressed feelings whatsoever
Daeyari energy felt like splinters beneath Fi’s nails. Like a pick of lightning through her arteries, charring from the inside out.
She liked it more than she ought to, this touch of power that could destroy her.
At the start of the week, Antal joined her in the clearing by her cottage, a capsule of daeyari energy scorching her palm. Fi could Shape from her own capsules as easy as breathing. Daeyari magic came to her like inhaling ice water. A more powerful current, Antal explained—concentrated, when they became immortal, and their new bodies could withstand the fiercer energy. Fididlisten. She picked through every damn word.
Still nearly burned a hand off the first time she tried to grasp the capsule’s current.
The danger didn’t deter her. Nor the pain of immortal power searing her lesser flesh. To stand any chance against Verne—against Astrid—Fi needed this edge.
Antal left again, surveying Verne’s tightening grip on his territory. Still no news from Boden. To maintain sanity, Fi wrestled into her boots and coat, out into the cold to practice.
She gripped a crimson energy capsule, perched on bare fingertips to limit skin contact. The current hummed through hernails. Oddly, she couldn’t decide if the energy felt scalding or freezing, or some other sensation she had no word to describe.
A deep breath. Then Fi reached for the energy inside the capsule.
The current exploded into her, surging that otherworldly hot-and-cold down her arm. Fi clamped her teeth as the foreign energy tightened her chest. She held her stance as it carved her stomach, dredging that fight-or-flight panic of a hare, an instinct to hurl the capsule at the ground.
It was terrible and delicious, how the energy tried to consume her. In that moment, Fi wasn’t some tiny thing cowering in the forest. Ozone burned her tongue, a taste of eternity plaquing her teeth.
She raised her sword hilt. Energy surged into the conductive metal, writhing as she Shaped it, until a crimson blade formed, too rough on the edges, but keener every day, crackling the cold air. Fi envisioned Verne facing her across the clearing, those mocking eyes regarding her like a gnat. She envisioned Astrid leant against a tree in too-tight pants, lips coiled to a sneer.
Ten years. Fi abandoned Astrid forten years. Understandable, that Astrid would blame her, hate her, betray her. But to side with Verne? To hold a guillotine above Nyskya and Void knew how many other villages desperate to survive this shift in regime?
Energy fed off Fi’s ire, sparking crimson down the blade. Maybethiswas what turned Astrid to that cold creature Fi had seen. This siren’s song of power. This sip of eternity. The current burned and froze through the marrow of her bones.
One slip, and…
Pain speared Fi’s arm. The daeyari energy bucked her control, searing muscles and snapping red tendrils through the air. Hershout rang across the clearing. Her fingers spasmed, dropping the capsule to the snow as she fell onto her ass.
She shuddered as the energy fled her system, leaving her cold.
“Fuck,” Fi said. Then, “fuck,” more emphatically. Then a shout for good measure.
She flexed each finger, tendons prickling. In a few places, the sensation didn’t fade. There was her problem pinkie, nerves fuzzy since a past overdraw. The energy burns down her thumb and pointer finger were new: charred veins against pale flesh, heaviest at the fingertips, roots feathering her wrist. The biggest downside of human energy Shaping: destructible casting material. Not a problem for daeyari and their “Void-woven” flesh, as Antal described it.
Across the clearing, Aisinay paused from hunting needlemice under the porch, lifting her head for a snort.
“I don’t want to hear it from you,” Fi said.
Astridwielded daeyari energy just fine.Astridhad put Fi on the ground when they fought. Fi didn’t need a judgmental Void horse reminding her how much ground she had to make up.
But Aisinay’s finned ears didn’t perk toward her. The forest went quiet, squabbling jays and squirrels turned to silence, usually a sign of… Fi scanned the trees. Not the trunks, she was learning. Her chin tipped up to the dark canopy.
She spotted them faster each time, those red eyes staring down at her.
Antal perched upon the high bough of a shiverpine, still as a phantom, tail balanced against the branch. Not the first time she’d caught a daeyari watching from the woods this week. Her visitor had appeared once upon the shingles, another time within the drapery of a fir.
Fi disliked how her heart sped at the sight of him. She loathed the reason it did so, no longer purely out of fear.
She stood, tidying her coat with as much dignity as one could wipe snow off their ass.
“Listen, Antlers,” she called up. “I’llgive youpermission to teleport straight to my doorstep, if it will stop you being a dick and lurking in trees.”
He’d taken to ignoring the nickname, perhaps thinking this would dull her amusement, clearly not realizing the challenge would only stoke Fi’s determination. He descended the tree in several agile hops, a scrape of claws against bark then a muffled footfall on snow. Could have teleported down easier. Show-off.
