I stilled. I hadn’t heard her voice inside for a long time, not even when I was in Pica’s prison. I hoped she was okay and that by returning here I hadn’t hurt her somehow.
“Do you know if it’s possible for me to release her soul back to her?”
It was one of those deep desires, the sort I was afraid to even admit out loud. Jakan grinned suddenly, and even as a washed-out grey dude, I could see why my mother fell for him. There was a warmth about him that his brother definitely didn’t have. An easy way of being.
“I don’t think there’s anything you can’t do, Willa Knight,” he said to me. “Don’t underestimate yourself.”
I was guilty of that, and also of not even trying because I thought I might fail. I had to stop with that sort of attitude. I’d seen miraculous things happen recently. I’d done miraculous things. I had to believe that I could do anything if I worked hard enough at it. Which meant one sun-cycle I would return my mother’s soul to her. I would restore her life, the life that had been robbed from her by a petty whim of Staviti. And if possible, I would even try to return the portion of her soul that had been ripped from her before I had ever even had the chance to know her: when she lost her true love.
I mentally added it to my list of things to do before I died, along with learning how to knit, baking just one thing without burning it or myself, inventing a new type of dance, and freeing the worlds from Staviti’s reign of terror.Easy done.
“It’s just over there,” Jakan said, distracting me from my thoughts. I realised that there was actually a spot of colour where he was pointing. Nothing bright, but it still stood out against the dull landscape.
“That’s the glass?” I wondered out loud.
“Yes,” he said quickly, “you’re seeing the reflection of its surface. There is just enough light here for a subtle glow.”
A subtle blue glow to be exact.
“Brace yourself for the next part,” he told me, and I was about to yell at him, because you shouldn’t tell someone to brace themselves and not tell them what they were bracing for, when I saw the god-children.
They were everywhere. The lands had been pretty empty up until that point; a few wide, blank eyes poking out from behind the vegetation, but nothing too obvious. Here though, there were dozens of them just hovering around the mortal glass, staring at it.
“What are they doing?” I asked, my voice catching.
“They stand here to be closer to their bodies,” he said, tinges of sadness creeping into his words. “To be closer to the world that holds their parents.”
My feet ground to a halt and I was once again clumsy-cursed-Willa as I almost fell on my face. Jakan latched on to my arm, keeping me steady. “They told me last time that they were somewhere dark,” I whispered, tears creeping up my throat and burning behind my eyes again. “They’re in the cave near the panteras? I was there, I never saw them …” I trailed off, thinking of how dark it was in there, of how much more cave there could have been to explore beyond the glass. The panteras never mentioned them to me, but that was no doubt because of their ‘no interference’ rule.
“There is a network of caves behind the mortal glass,” Jakan replied. “Every child that Staviti has killed was hidden there, where only he has access. Not even the panteras will venture into those caves. The energy is too dark for them; they are naturally repelled.”
It was both devastating and a tiny bit unsettling to know that there were a bunch of murdered god-children in the same cave network as me, but it also gave me a sense of hope. I knew where they were. Maybe there was a chance that I could return their souls to their bodies. There had to be a way, even if I was forced to return over and over again with the magical items that could pull them to their bodies.
I had to at least try.
