He was here. He was…
“Breathe, Aya love,” he murmured, taking a hesitant step toward her.
She couldn’t. Her vision blurred with tears, her hand finding her throat as if she could will her lungs to open.
Weeks of burying her feelings, of leaning into the brokenness Evie expected to see. Weeks of terror, and pain, and coming to terms with her own death.
Coming to terms with never seeing Will again.
Weeks of grief she swallowed until all they saw was emptiness.
Emptiness, and passivity, and meekness.
Weeks and weeks, all leading up to a single moment, a single deception that could have saved the realm and stopped the war and she’dfaltered.
She’dfailed.
“I could have ended it,” Aya gasped, her body shuddering with the force of her sob. “I was going to end it.”
Will’s brow furrowed, one hand still outstretched between them. Still reaching, still wanting.
“What are you talking about?” he asked softly.
“I was going to steal her power. I was going to fix the veil.” The confession snagged on her staccato breaths, tears blurring Will’s features until she could hardly make him out.
“I don’t…I don’t understand…”
Aya squeezed her eyes shut as another strangled cry climbed up her throat. She wrapped her arms around herself, desperately trying to gather her shattered pieces, but there were somany, there were too many, and she couldn’t hold them, she couldn’t hold them, she couldn’t…
It’s the inside wounds that hurt the most.
She hadn’t known when she’d uttered those words to Aidon just how far those inside wounds could go. She didn’tknowthe way someone could rip her power from her and it would feel like losing her very essence.
She didn’t know that in doing so, her power would fight to heal her time and time again, until it rendered a tonic—imbued or otherwise—completely useless.
She didn’t know, until shedid.
In their hubris, they’d assigned an Anima healer to her, never once considering an advanced Saj would more easily learn what they did not know: that Aya’s power was beginning to break through. But then Lorna had come, and she had stared at those shackles knowingly, almost as if she could sense Aya’s power roiling inside of her, despite the way she shielded it.
Just as she’d shielded herself from Will after the Athatis attack.
Aya had wondered if soon, her power would be too strong to hide beneath the tonic and her own shield.
If soon, Evie would know, too.
So she’d made a plan. It was, after all, Lorna who had inspired it. Not just with her knowledge that Aya and Evie alone could summon the veil, but with all she had told her before:
No practitioner had reached the level of power to tear down the veil. NoVisya, except Evie. Aya was not powerful enough.
Yet.
We are who we choose to be.
Aya had chosen to be exactly who Evie wanted to see.
Another broken sound fell from Aya’s lips as she doubled over, her arms wrapping tighter and tighter. She couldn’t see through the tears blurring her eyes, but that didn’t stop her from hearing the plea woven in Will’s murmuredAya.
She didn’t know how to coax the words from the labyrinth of grief inside her.
