And somehow, from somewhere, she felt the presence of her own parents.
Almost like a whisper, their pride—their love—brushed her skin, and she knew…
They remembered her. They knew her. They were proud of her. And even though they might not be around her—not like Merrick’s mother and father, who smiled at her as if they sensed what she did—they were inside her. They were part of her. Like Merrick, they would always be part of her. It didn’t matter that she’d changed, broken and healed and everything in between… Their love would always run through her veins.
While Merrick’s smile had dropped, there was awe in his dark eyes as they went from the people behind them toher, and they both remained quiet—Lessia barely dared to breathe—as the people placed their hands over their hearts in the way Fae did to show their love during burials.
She wasn’t sure if it was a welcome or a goodbye—or if she really wanted to know—but Lessia didn’t have time to linger on it when something flickered behind them, and Merrick’s eyes and hers widened when the souls disappeared.
Fire and lightning lit up the lake instead, the rumbles of a storm roaring in the air, but when they whipped their heads up, the sky above them was as clear as it had been all night. Still, the booming sounds seemed to wrap all around them, and Lessia could almost smell the smoke from the fire raging across the reflection.
She held on to Merrick as she turned back to the lake, a current running over her skin as a strange mixture of energy and tiredness swept through her. Merrick must have felt the same thing because he tugged her to him as the image once again shifted.
Lessia caught a glimpse of a ship and a lone male, with hard green eyes and wild hair so dark brown it was almost black as it blew around his face, in its bow. The image vanished before she could blink, and it shifted to reveal the five girls from her earlier dream, causing both her and Merrick to gasp. The girls reached for each other, their fingers nearly touching?—
Their reflections were gone before Lessia could close her mouth, but she couldn’t stop her hand from grasping for the vision, as if she could hold on to it and make it real. Only Merrick’s reflection and her own looked back at them now, but Lessia staggered when they reminded her of the ones they’d seen in the Lakes of Mirrors.
They were wrong. Twisted.
Her face was filled with rage, a defiance she’d never seen or felt. Her amber eyes became green, then brown, then a mixture of both, while Merrick’s dark ones reflected with green so deep it reminded her of vast forests.
A cold rippled through her, and she wasn’t certain if it was good or bad.
Was this the gods playing with their minds? Like they’d tried to do those weeks back?
Her worry must have echoed in Merrick because his lip drew back in a snarl as he glared around them, his shoulders stiff and muscles coiled with readiness.
More images painted the surface, moving faster now.
A burning world, the crackling of fire blasting her ears and heating her skin.
A tall mountain peppered with snow that seemed to be moving down, chasing something.
A bright realm, exploding into light, forcing her eyelids shut for a moment.
Then a darkness so suffocating it made her reach for her throat.
Elessia.
The voice sounded familiar somehow, and she was reminded of the wyverns—of the bond that allowed Auphore to speak into her mind. But she was also reminded of the gods… of everything they caused and everything they continued to be the reason for.
Her and Merrick’s death sentence.
The fear. The worry. The sorrow they’d caused. The defiance she’d felt—the foreign one that first seemed to be another’s but that she now welcomed—rushed over her skin, making her limbs tingle and muscles tremble.
No. She was not going back to being scared of the gods.
They’d already killed her once. What more could they do?
Lessia saw the resolve in Merrick’s eyes at the same time as she ordered, “Enough!”
The world silenced, the cracks and rumbles fading, but those images of worlds she didn’t know but that called for her all the same kept flickering on the lake, and she did the only thing she could think of.
Dropping, Lessia picked up a large stone and threw it across the surface like she’d done when she was little. It bounced five times, almost in a circle instead of a line, before it vanished into the lake without a sound, erasing whatever was left of the strange imagery.
“Fuck,” Merrick cursed, his wild eyes flying over her, behind her, and out across the lake. “That was?—”
“Let’s not.” Lessia took a step toward him, relishing the sense of unruliness that had taken root in her—the one that erased the last of the fear and the worry for the future and only left her with a sense of direction, a sense of fate that she would not escape, but that washers, and hers only.
