Vaguely, the terrifying imagery registered to her through the words of crones and soothsayers. They had spoken of an apocalypse, of a reckoning where all souls would be summoned to the Father’s realms—a day where the sky itself would shatter and the world as they all knew it would come to an end. But Vi had never heard the tales spoken in this much horrifying detail.
The dragon roared and the world shuddered, vibrating with a sound that she couldn’t hear. Vi may have screamed, but there was still no sound in her ears. The monster turned its gaze toward her and she was filled with the same sensation she’d felt the moment the diseased noru and the lightning man in her vision had looked to her.
It saw her and it wanted her.
She raised her hands on instinct to shield herself, to make herself small. She wanted it to end, to be free of the horrific images she was being inundated with. No vision until now had been this horribly vivid and she would not be able to endure should it continue.
“Make it stop!” The sound of her own voice broke the trance.
Darkness, the blissful darkness of the backs of her eyelids, filled her sight, and when Vi opened her eyes again, the world was as she knew it. She staggered and sank, her trembling knees no longer able to bear her weight. Gasping through fingers holding in silent screams at the horror she’d witnessed, Vi continued to stare wide-eyed at where her fire had been. Surely, surely, there was some mistake.
That wasn’t their future. It couldn’t be.
Gasping, Vi relished in the sound of her voice and the familiar cool darkness of the North in winter. A pair of boots, illuminated by hazy glyphs, appeared in her field of vision. Vi followed them up to the intricately embroidered coat Taavin always wore, along the scar on his cheek, and to his eyes.
“What did you see?” he asked grimly.
“The end of the world.” The words didn’t sound like her own. They were detached, removed, split from her body. What she now could never unsee would forever change her.
“Tell me everything.”
Vi recounted the vision in as much detail as she could bear. For as difficult as it was, doing so gave her some clarity. It removed the initial shock and horror and turned the sights into something to be analyzed.
When Vi had finished, she asked, “This dark god you speak of—Raspian—and his followers… the White Death… they’re all linked, aren’t they?”
She didn’t want him to nod. This was the one time in her life where Vi desperately wanted to be wrong.
“They are.”
Vi let out a string of curses that would make her tutors blush. Taavin stayed silent, allowing her to reach the end of her list before speaking again. Curses were cathartic, but they weren’t going to help them get anywhere. Vi tried to remember everything he had told her following her last vision.
“The elfin’ra, you said they were sealed away on Salvidia?”
“They were.”
Past tense. “What changed? Why is all this happening now?”
“Raspian and his followers were sealed away by the goddess in their last, ancient struggle for power over this realm… but nineteen years ago, that seal was broken. Since then, his evil, his pure chaotic energy, has been seeping into the world—twisting it. And his followers, who were also set free with it, now seek a way to bring his full return.”
If everything he said was true, it meant there was no cure for the White Death. Her father had left for nothing. Her people sought a cure that could never be found.
No one on Solaris knew how desperate their situation was, but her.
“Taavin, these visions I see at the apexes… are they whatwillbe, or whatmaybe?”
“What will be, should the world progress without any changes in course.”
“So, then, the course can be changed?”
“Perhaps.”
Vi breathed a sigh of relief, even though a corner of her mind still refused to believe it. Normal future sight—by a Firebearer—was generally regarded as absolute truth. But Vi wasn’t exactly a Firebearer. So she’d have to take Taavin’s word for it.
“How do we make sure?”
“Just as there have been apexes of fate in the past, there will be apexes in the future. Places where—”
“—the world changed or places where it could still be changed,” she finished for him, remembering what he had said when she first asked. Vi finally pulled herself off the ground, feeling stronger. “So we need to find future apexes, and make sure we shift fate there.” Simple logic, but Vi expected it to be much more difficult in practice. “How do we find them?”
