"The final chess piece has made their move," my mother declares, her voice taking on that prophetic weight again.
My gaze snaps back to her face, searching for explanation I know won't come in clear form.
"Be kind to him, Gwenievere."
Him.
"He's the oddest of them all," she continues, sympathy softening features that already seemed incapable of hardness. "But he yearns to love as much as you yearn to be loved."
"Wha—"
The word doesn't finish.
Somethinggrabsme.
Not hands—force itself, invisible and overwhelming, seizing my barely-there form with violence that contradicts the gentle field of flowers. I'm yanked backward with speed that should be impossible, the warm field blurring into streaks of impossible color as I'm torn away from the woman who might be my mother, from the peace I'd only just found.
One.
I crash through something—not a wall but a barrier, a membrane separating realities that parts around me with the sensation of breaking through ice on a frozen lake.
Two.
Another barrier. This one burns as I pass through, fire without heat, power without pain.
Three.
Cold this time. Frost that clings to my translucent form before shattering away as I continue my violent trajectory.
Four.
Shadow. Darkness so complete it has texture, wrapping around me like familiar arms before releasing me to the next barrier.
Five.
Blood. The taste of copper floods my awareness, crimson light surrounding me for an instant that feels like eternity.
Six.
Starlight and void intertwined, the sensation of existing in multiple places simultaneously before being forced to choose just one.
Seven.
This one is different.
This one feelsnew.
Power I don't recognize wraps around me as I pass through—something ancient and arrogant and so completely foreign that my fragmented self can't process it. It tastes of stone and silence, of patience stretched across millennia, of wanting so fierce it has become its own form of existence.
Then I'm through.
All seven barriers behind me.
Reality crashes back with the subtlety of a collapsing star.
I gasp.
Air floods lungs that remember they're supposed to breathe, the sensation so overwhelming after the void that I nearly choke on simple oxygen. My eyes fly open—when did they close?—and I shoot upright with the desperate energy of the recently resurrected.
