He bends toward me. “Next you and Cobalt travel to the Twelfth Court and petition the All of All.”
I furrow my brow. “The All of All? Is that some god? Some deity?”
“The All of All is a culmination of all that is and all that is not.”
“But what exactly is it? And how do I get to the Twelfth Court? I take it I won’t find a door here on the balcony.”
Foxglove shakes his head. “The Twelfth Court exists on its own axis, separate from the other courts, yet within them all at once. You can reach it from anywhere.”
“How?”
“Enough chatter,” Cobalt says. “Let’s go.”
“But I don’t know—”
“If you can’t figure it out, then you don’t deserve to petition the All of All.” With that, he faces forward and closes his eyes.
My pulse races, mind spinning as sweat beads at my brow. I can’t do this. I was wrong when I made Aspen choose me as his champion. I don’t know how to access an invisible court, how to petition some magical deity. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t know how to get out of this. I messed up. Big time.
I feel a squeeze on my shoulder, Lorelei’s fingers. I remember her words.How do you breathe every day? How do you sleep when you’re tired? How do you perform surgery with your hands?
With a deep breath, I close my eyes, trying to shut out my fears, my worries, my regrets. I focus on the feel of my breath rushing through my nostrils, the sound of my blood pounding through my ears, the feel of my heart hammering in my chest. I summon my surgeon’s calm, of hands that remain steady in crisis. I summon my fiery passion, the part of me that chose to open my heart to Aspen, to explore unknown parts of myself. I summon the mysteries I’ve yet to unfold, the instinct I felt when performing Aspen’s surgery, the magic of a little girl putting her hands on the sick. I summon my mother’s strength, her care, and my sister’s reckless love.
My eyes flutter open, a calm warmth spreading over me. I’m not surprised by what I see, even though the vision before me looks unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. The balcony remains intact, but its shape is more liquid than solid, like particles of light weaving together to create a floor, bright glowing orbs of multi-hued radiance to represent the bodies in the audience. I turn my eyes to the sky, finding dark shades of violet and indigo swirling with other colors I can’t put a name to.
Time isn’t quite frozen, but it isn’t what it was before. It’s slow and fast, gentle and violent. This world is everywhere and nowhere at once. Oddly, the thought doesn’t worry me. It makes perfect sense and no sense at all. I accept it.
A warm yellow light beckons me forward, and I leave my throne to follow it. I’m subtly aware that my body feels weightless, like I’m nothing more than one of the glowing orbs the council fae have become. I follow the light as it flutters away from me, down what used to be stairs, into a tunnel of swirling particles. The particles give way to darkness, with nothing to see but the light that leads me on and on.
The light stops just ahead and disappears, pitching me into a black void. My mind begins to sharpen, growing clearer. A violet speck of light begins to pulse in front of me, growing larger and larger, providing subtle illumination. I glance at my hands, aware that my body has returned to its familiar shape and density.
The speck of light becomes a violet sun. It rises overhead, beaming rays of warmth onto me. As it sets, a crescent moon takes its place and stars shoot across the sky. Violet clouds cover the moon and the sun returns, but my attention snags on something near my feet. Narrow stalks shoot from the ground and open into dazzling violet buds. The petals unfurl into flowers, then tower higher and higher. I walk through the enormous flowers, mesmerized, watching them sway in a warm breeze. The sun shines high overhead, warming my face.
When the sun sets, the flowers shiver and shake, petals dropping at my feet, each one as large as I am. I run forward, dodging the falling petals, spinning to avoid being pinned beneath them. Once the petals cease falling, the stalks begin to wrinkle and sag, then shrivel back down toward the ground. In the blink of an eye, there’s nothing. Everything is smothered in a blanket of violet. Silence. Death.
A flash of panic rises inside me, and all I can think is to run. Escape the nothingness. Then suddenly, something sprouts from the nothingness. Then another. New blooms, born from death. Calm returns to me as I continue on, watching the cycle repeat around me, again and again. After a while, it no longer terrifies me when the nothingness returns.
As the petals unfurl yet again, I’m starting to wonder if this is all I’ll see, if the Twelfth Court is nothing more than this endless cycle where seasons change and the sky shifts high above. Then a violent breeze sweeps by, blowing away the petals, the stalks, the ground beneath my feet, until only darkness remains. The wind swirls around me, pushing me on all sides, making me lose my balance. As I right myself, a figure stands before me. Like everything else here, she’s composed of violet particles of light. Her long hair flows behind her, like the blue fae on the council. This fae, however, has the wings of a pixie.
“We get along well,” she says with a mischievous grin.
“What do you mean?” My voice sounds strange in this place, like a version of me I’ve never heard before.
She taps the side of her head. “Thought. Intellect. You live your life in your head much of the time, yes?”
“I do, but…what does that mean?”
“It means the air in you is the air in me.” With that, she disappears.
I’m left in darkness again. I take a few steps forward and see something up ahead. It’s small, round. A rock? As I reach it, the rock seems to come to life. It rises on gnarled legs, then turns to face me.
A goblin.I leap back.
“I know you,” he says with a snarl.
My breath hitches. Can it be? This goblin may be violet, but he looks uncannily like the one that chased Amelie and me. “You!”
“Ah, you remember,” he says. “Vile beasty, you are. Why are you here? Did my claws teach you nothing?”
