Vi stared at the ceiling, frozen in place, as if the whole day had perched itself on her chest. The visions… her magic… the noru. She squeezed her eyes closed to block them out, but the darkness there was no more forgiving.
No, if she could focus on all of that instead, it would be a blessing. What was really keeping her awake was the lingering feeling of betrayal. When had Sehra told her mother the truth? How long had they kept her here needlessly? Mother above—did Romulin know?
The questions swirled in her mind until Vi was forced to scare them away by lighting the candle at her bedside.
Vi looked to her letter box, slowly opening the top. The book Sehra had given her just barely fit within. She stared at it, competing feelings of contempt, anger, hurt, and… admittedly, curiosity.
“I should hate you,” she whispered. She should hate it for all it represented. It was what had kept her from her family, from her home.
Yet she reached out and took the book into her lap, opening it to the first page.
“‘Words of the Goddess…’” Vi softly read aloud. Her eyes devoured the forward at the beginning of the book. It spoke of the basic principles of words of power. That the goddess—Yargen—had bestowed magic on man through giving the words of divinity to mortals.
By invoking these words, by her holy light, a mortal hand can do her will.
Vi’s eyes lingered on the last line of the page. The whole thing read more like a religious text than a magical one. Sehra had said it was from Meru; perhaps there they had different opinions on magic. Vastly different… given magic in Solaris was feared by the average person.
She flipped the page and let out a soft gasp.
At the top was a glyph.
It was the same sensation Vi had felt when she had first witnessed the shining symbol above her watch during her first vision. Then, it had been a litany of noises she could hear but barely make sense of. This time, the chorus of sound sang in perfect harmony.
She heard the word, felt it in her bones. It was not a language Vi had ever seen—if it was a language at all. The symbol imbued her with a deep understanding that surpassed reading and made sense of the sounds it invoked within her.
“Durroe,” Vi whispered. The word tingled across her skin, as though she was sinking into a warm bath, or lying underneath a hot sun after spending an hour rummaging through the ice house.
She quickly flipped the pages. More symbols were scribed in the chapter fordurroeand more sounds filled her mind as she skimmed the glyphs. Her hands stopped at the next chapter.
The symbol here was carefully drawn in red ink. Circles within circles, lines connecting between them, carefully drawn symbols encased among them. The moment her eyes lingered, she was met with the same sensation and then, clarity.
Halleth, to heal.
The lines on the page almost seemed to move, to come to life. It was as if they were begging for her to recreate them—though Vi didn’t know how.
No… what wasn’t quite true. Her breath was loud as she remembered being in her study after her first vision. She’d meant to write down what she’d seen in the flames, but she had drawn one of these symbols instead.
“Which one was it?” The pages slipped through her fingers as she searched, almost frantically.
The symbol above her watch during the first vision was the same that had appeared after the second. It was the same symbol she had sketched on the paper in her study, perfectly from memory—the very same glyph she’d seen swirl around that man.
Her fingers stopped.
“Narro, acts of the mind.” She stared at the glyph for several long breaths. No, she’d been wrong. It wasn’t identical… there was another layer to it. Something wasn’t quite right. Vi flipped the page. “Haath, communication.”
Vi flipped back and forth several times. The two symbols blurred together, overlapping until something audiblyclickedin her mind.
“Narro haath,” Vi whispered aloud again.
The spark surged up her throat to form the words. Magic radiated out from her flesh—not as fire, but as thin, shimmering strands of light. They swirled before her, not quite taking shape.
Warmth rippled across her with the vibration of a voice that she felt as much as heard.
“You again?”
Chapter Thirteen
“What?”Vi looked around quickly, trying to locate the source of the voice. Aptly, the disembodied words were undoubtedly from the same man who had called himself “the voice.”
