Vi sat heavily on the bed, sinking her face into her hands, her elbows on her knees. An ache ran so deeply within her that she didn’t know where it stemmed from, or what hurt most. Physically, her body felt fine. No, great. Not even the scars from Ulvarth’s shackles marred her wrists. Yet her joints seemed to protest every movement, as if they carried an invisible weight.
Quiet had never been so loud.
“What is going on?” she whispered to no one. A hand dropped to the watch around her neck. Magic pulsed under her fingertips.
This watch—no, notthisone… but a watch nearly identical to it had connected her with Taavin. It had begun this whole relentless series of events that had chewed her up and now spit her out in a place she had no business being.
“Curse you,” she muttered, burying her face in her hands again. She didn’t know who she was cursing. The goddess, Taavin, fate itself? All of them,curse all of them, for all she cared. “You told me to summon you? Summon a dead man?” Vi laughed, a sound that was crazy to her own ears. “Fine, Taavin. I’ll honor your mad, last wish.Narro hath hoolo.”
The words sparked in her mind, bright and true. Meaning poured from them into glowing lines of yellow light that spun from her like ropes of fire. They connected to form familiar glyphs.
From those glyphs came the outline of a man—a man she thought she’d killed with her own hands. A man whose brilliant green eyes could not be dulled by the sands of time no matter how many times they were turned over.
“T-Taavin?”
Chapter Two
He staredat her for a long minute before looking around the room, much as he always had whenever she’d summoned him. As though this interaction was perfectly normal and planned.
As though she hadn’tkilled himhours before.
The facts compounded on the surreal nature of her current state, making it feel as though she watched him from outside of her body. Their roles were reversed. She was the specter, and he was the real person.
Because nothing about her world could possibly be real right now.
“I see you’ve found some quiet corner to hide in.” He breathed a sigh of relief. “Where are you this time? I don’t recognize this place.”
“I don’t recognize any of this.” Vi was on her feet, working to keep her voice quiet. The building was sturdy and seemed well-built. But Lucina and her grandmother would definitely hear if panic got the better of her and she began to shout. Vi took a staggering step closer to him. “Taavin… where are you? What’s going on? Are you all right?”
Her hands reached for him as she drew closer. Closer to the man she had killed. Closer to the man who had held and hurt her. Nearly close enough to touch, to reassure herself that this wasn’t a psychotic break.
Taavin’s fingers wrapped around hers. They weren’t as solid as she remembered. Was this identical to how she’d first spoken to him in Shaldan? He’d seemed so real then, as though he’d been standing in the room with her. Now, the ghost of magic wriggled around his body. It created a barrier she couldn’t seem to cross.
He uncurled one hand and pointed his index finger at the watch over her chest. “I’m here.”
“The watch?” Vi looked down at the faintly shimmering glyphs that hovered over the token. “Yes, I remember it connects me to you, but where areyou?”
Pain flashed through his familiar emerald eyes. Taavin opened his mouth, then closed it, as if unable to find the words. His finger had yet to move. “I’mhere.”
“In the watch?” Vi dared to ask. Taavin nodded. “But… how?”
“The watch was the key to it all.” She remembered him saying as much in Risen. “In it were my memories… all of them. In it, the Champion’s future is ensured and preserved. In it, my consciousness now lives, so I may guide you.”
“I don’t understand.” She wanted to. Vi repeated his words mentally, but she couldn’t siphon out the deeper meaning clearly hidden beneath them.
“One moment.” Taavin gave her hand a light squeeze and, without further warning, stepped away. He stretched out his arms before him and curled his open palms, as though holding an invisible book. His lips moved with low whispering tones; it must have been some kind of Lightspinning, but Vi couldn’t make out a single word. She suspected that even if she could, she wouldn’t have understood them.
This was a magic the goddess had given only to him.
The glyphs above her watch spun faster. Like a spigot, magic poured from the necklace into symbols that hovered between Taavin’s arms. He watched them carefully as they piled, one atop the next, shifting and changing. The green of his eyes faded to the same pale blue as his magic, glowing brightly in the dark room.
Finally, Taavin lowered his arms, the light between them vanishing into the still air.
“All right, I think I’ve cobbled together the swiftest explanation that will make it easiest for you to understand,” he began. “You met Yargen, correct?”
“Yes.”
“What did she tell you?”
