The chamber door opens.
I whorl my threaded self, casting my awareness to that portal where a tall, shadow-wrapped figure stands. A jolt of recognition electrifies every miniscule unit of my being.Him.Him. Him.Terror drives me back into scattered parts, back out of this layer of reality. I don’t remember who he is or why I fear him so. But a name is there, echoing through my dread:the Shadow King.
My parts scatter, back into long strings of un-ness, melting through the stone walls, through layers of time and space, out into the Unformed Lands, where I drift in shuddering oblivion. But I cannot quite lose those ideas, which spark through me in complex patterns, keeping me from full disintegration.
Sister.
Sorrow.
Loss.
Fear.
These are not the properties of stardust, which is what I wish to once more be. I try to shake them out, but they cling. Little anchors of selfhood, like hooks drawing my individual parts back into a whole. I try to shake it away in flurries of twisting threads, but each shake only seems to make me gather more densely. I can almost feel what it used to be—to have limbs. To have bones, muscles, veins. To have weight and existence within a single linear progression of time.
Ilsevel.
That word—that name—it is like a cage. A cage of perception and individualization and limitation. One I do not want to inhabit. Not anymore.
Ilsevel.
No! I fight against the reforming of my threaded self. But something in that name, echoing through the vast emptiness around me, acts like a summoning. Pulls all my detached particles back together, thicker and denser, until I begin to perceive once-familiar oddities of being. Limbs. Heartbeat. Breath. Ugh! I shiver, shudder, seeking to scatter once more.
Ilsevel.
I turn. A sense of choice moves through my thickened existence. I could refuse to answer that call, could shake myself apart once more and drift away. But now that I am gathered this far, I find I possess the capacity for curiosity. Who is calling out that name?Who is moving and motivating my being into this form? Why should I not follow it and discover what I may?
I am awkward, ungraceful, moving these strange, elongated limbs. Like some multi-tentacled creature drifting through deep water, I float. My awareness narrows down and down into a space of sight. How strange it is to perceive the world through two eyes! Why would anyone submit to such smallness? And yet it is oddly comforting, even deep down here in this dark, watery, airless place.
Ilsevel.
I look up. Through ripples of dark water, I see a small circle of light. The edge of a porcelain bowl, a window from one reality into deeper realms of being. Curiosity moves in me once more. I propel my floating essence up and up toward that circle, rising from deeps unimaginable.
Ilsevel?
A face appears, floating above that window-circle and the reality of space-time it reveals to me. Once more I am struck with a sense of recognition. I know that particular assortment of particles strung together with simmering life-force energy. I know those pinched brows, that lip curled with such determination. Those blue eyes like Aurae, that fair hair like Faraine, that subtle arrangement of features that no one could mistake as belonging to anyone other than the offspring of Larongar Cyhorn.
Ideas burn through my being:Enemy.No, that isn’t right.Betrayer.No, not that either.Sister . . .yes. Yes,sisteris right, butI hate that word when applied to that face. It feels wrong, sinful. And yet it fits better than the others.
Those sky-like eyes of hers narrow as she peers with more intensity down through her window into the formless beyond. She shouldn’t gaze with those eyes into such a place, not for long at least. It will drive her mad, as it has driven others mad before her. I rise up more swiftly, a half-formed intention of warning her propelling my spirit.
Her lips move. This time I hear her voice—not her soul, but spoken words, muffled through water.“Ilsevel?”Her breath stirs the surface of the liquid in her scrying bowl.“Ilsevel is that you?”
Simmering energy moves in the space around me.Magic. . . that’s the word my mortality-thickened brain had for it. But it seems too small a word here in this existence through which I move. My limited vision perceives runes wrought in green fire, falling like rain all around me, sinking deeper into the void even as their pulsing propels me upward.Witchcraft.Another word I apparently know, and one that makes my being recoil. But everyone knows this young woman is a witch, don’t they? Isn’t that a commonly-held secret in my father’s house, like the not-so-secret of her true parentage?
I feel the crushing confines of my mortal perspective closing in.Lyria. My half-sister. The bastard.
I am far more solid than I was mere moments ago, more aware of my selfhood in this dark space of almost-emptiness. The pressure of water all around me becomes more present, more pressing, andI find myself striving toward that surface overhead, toward that world where I know air exists, just waiting to be breathed into dust-formed lungs. I move my limbs—arms, legs—pull myself through the water, through the shining fall of runes.
The face above me screams. Lyria falls back away from her scrying bowl, disappearing from my view. Then she crawls forward, hands gripping the edge of porcelain as she stares down, directly at me. “Ilsevel!” she cries.
I reach for her.
My hand breaks the surface of the water, and I feel droplets on skin, feel air prickling fine hairs. I feel mortality, and it doesn’t frighten me so much as fill me with a painful longing for return, for renewal, for—
“Ilsevel!” Lyria screams again, her face suffused with mingled terror and wonder. She lunges, clasps my hand, and that sensation of flesh-on-flesh shoots like a bolt of lightning through me, solidifying all my strange parts, collapsing all my broadened perspective back into its small containments of flesh and time.
“Lyria!” I cry, my voice bubbling up through scrying water. “Lyria, pull me up! Pull me out!”
