When the world began spinning worse than it had done until now, I fought to keep hold of coherent thoughts, but it was becoming more difficult. It was easier to just gape at the spectacle above, where auroras painted patterns that looked like ancient scripts of prophecies written in light, and dragons made of shadow and starlight rather than flesh and scales danced between the lights.
My legs simply wouldn't carry me any further, and I collapsed where I stood. The stone beneath me felt warm, alive, almost thrumming with the same energy that now coursed through my veins.
As in a trance, I watched as the procession continued.
Codric passed by the shaman without incident, or at least, I thought he did. Everything was becoming harder to track. Time seemed to flow strangely, stretching and compressing like taffy. I saw Kailin receive her blessing and witnessed a brief conversation passing between her and the shaman. Shovia followed, then Morek, their forms becoming increasingly indistinct as the tea dissolved more of my mind.
The ceremony continued into the night, with braziers lit atop the pillars casting an otherworldly glow. The auroras above seemed to dance, creating a mesmerizing display of ghostly flames on each standing stone. The dragons overhead had become impossible to distinguish from the ones I saw dancing in the lights, reality and vision blending until I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.
But through it all, one clear thought kept resurfacing—the shaman knew. He knew who I was, what I was hiding, and why I was here. And instead of exposing me immediately, he'd winked and seemed pleased.
What game was he playing? What test was this really a part of?
The Elucians valued truth above all else. It was one of the first things we'd learned about their culture. Lying was considered the gravest offense. By their standards, I'd committed an unforgivable sin. There was no way the shaman would allow me into the Dragon Force now, no way I would accomplish what I'd come here to do.
I wanted to find Codric to plan our next move and figure out a way to salvage this disaster, but the tea was making itimpossible to think. The world had become a swirling mixture of reality and dream, each breath drawing me deeper into whatever vision the sacred drink was designed to invoke.
When the last pilgrim finally received her blessing, completing the circle, Shaman Saphir raised his staff, and the symbols carved into the standing stones began to glow with an inner light. Moki chattered something that sounded almost like words, and the air itself seemed to thicken with promise.
"Now," the shaman's voice somehow cut through my increasingly chaotic thoughts, "the true test begins."
I tried to focus on his words, but the tea was pulling me under, drawing me toward something I couldn't fight. The last thing I saw before the vision took me completely was Moki staring directly at me, those too-intelligent eyes filled with what might have been accusation or understanding.
Everything dissolved into light and shadow, and I began to fall into whatever truth the sacred tea had in store for me. My secret was out—or at least known to the one person who held my fate in his hands, and by extension, the fate of two nations.
There wasn't a single thing I could do about it except surrender and pray that when I emerged, there would still be some way to prevent the coming storm.
42
KAILIN
"Beyond Reason's Edge, Wisdom Awaits."
—Ancient Elucian Teaching
The tea was bitter, it smelled bad, and it burned going down. It was nothing like the soothing herbal blends my grandmother made, and none of the undertones were familiar. I wanted to analyze it, to break down its components like I would in the apothecary, but my thoughts scattered like leaves in the wind.
I found myself sitting down on the ground, far away from Saphir and the long procession of pilgrims still waiting to drink the tea and receive a blessing from our shaman. What had he told me?
My mind was so scattered that it took me a while to collect the words he'd said to me.
"Those who share our path might not always share our destiny," Saphir had said to me, his ancient eyes tunneling into my soul and making my skin prickle. "The shadows you see are glimpses of what must be." Moki had leaned forward on Saphir's shoulder, dark eyes fixing on mine with an unsettling intensity. "When the time comes, remember that destiny rarely travels in a straight line, and yours is much greater than what you allow yourself to imagine." Saphir's voice had dropped lower, nearly a whisper in the silent bubble he'd created around the two of us, ensuring that no one heard the words that had been meant for me alone. "Light is the flip side of darkness, but bravery is not the flip side of fear, and not everything that the darkness hides is bad. Sometimes things need to be hidden for their protection and then need to be explored and embraced." He'd finished with a wink, and the bubble of silence around us had burst.
I couldn't even dwell on that bubble of silence he'd created and how there was no explanation for it other than magic. I had more pressing matters to attend to at the moment. Like, was I really destined for greatness, or was that something that Saphir said to all pilgrims?
The future hadn't been written yet, so he couldn't be accused of uttering a pretty lie, and after getting an encouraging blessing like that, most would strive to prove it correct.
I wasn't special.
Well, that wasn't true. My brother was a rider, so I most likely had the genetic trait that would allow me to bond with a dragon.
That was special.
Suddenly, everything the shaman had told me made sense.
The friends I had shared the pilgrimage with had different destinies, my dreams of an obsidian dragon and the frequent hallucinations of dragons on the pilgrimage meant that I was tobecome a rider. That was the destiny I didn't allow myself to imagine. Was his advice to me to conquer my fear and be brave?
As if I hadn't been trying to do just that for years.
