As I stare up at her, openmouthed, suddenly it’s over—she falls to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, sprawled motionless on the floor of the clearing.
I scramble toward her, but the cat is already out in front of me, and he lands flat in the middle of her back. By the time I reach the pair of them, she’s stirring.
She moves just like the cat, slow and deliberate, stretching and arching her back as she pushes herself up, shaking her loose hair away from her face and turning to meet my gaze.
But this isn’t Nimh. This is some wild-eyed version of the girl I’ve come to know, the dawn showing me a curve to her lips, a certainty in the tilt of her head that I’ve never seen before. She seems almost to glow, golden and shining against the rising sun behind her, with newfound purpose gleaming in her features.
If I didn’t know her as well as I do, I might think she was serene. But I can glimpse the whites of her eyes, the energy bursting from inside her in the way sparks fly off a live wire, ready to connect with something and send a deadly shock straight through it.
She lifts one hand, and the mist around us whirls into action once more, seeming to contract and intensify around her, and then suddenly fly out toward the edges of the clearing, as if some invisible blast had thrown it away from us. There it stays, roiling slowly as it circles us.
Nimh tilts her hand and it picks up speed, its circuit of the clearing’s edge suddenly urgent.
She tilts her hand back the other way and it slows once more.
She’s controlling it.
“Nimh?” I sound like I’m afraid of her. In this moment, I am.
“This should not be possible,” she breathes, watching the mist with those heated eyes. “To control the mist is to control magic itself.”
I fight the desire to step back, the memories of what the mist did to Quenti and those villagers all too fresh in my mind.
Nimh condenses the mist into a little tendril that weaves about her hand. “One might collect the rain to water a garden … but one does not command the rain to fall.”
Her eyes lift from her hand to meet my gaze. She must read something in my face, for hers softens. “You have nothing to fear,” she whispers. “See?” The current of mist stretches out toward me, beckoning like a finger. When I recoil, scrambling to my feet, a flicker of hurt crosses the not-quite-serene expression on her face. “North?”
I swallow hard. “You spoke, when you were—right before you woke up. You sounded like you were reading from a new prophecy.”
Her brow furrows, the mist receding back to settle around her like a halo, catching the rising sun. “Yes … I remember.” She blinks, urgency cutting through her daze. “Itwasa new prophecy. You are the Last Star—by your light, I knew myself … the Lightbringer. You were always going to be here at this moment, and I was never going to manifest until you arrived.”
“A prophecy a thousand years in the making predictedme?” I protest.
Her weight shifts as though she wants to step toward me, but she stops herself. She can’t hide the intensity in her gaze, though, and that’s enough to make me want to flee. “Jezara was wrong, North. I do not know what magic Inshara has used to convince others that she is communing with the Lightbringer’s spirit. But I have never been more certain in my life.Iam the Lightbringer. And youarethe Star—you unlocked the scroll for me to read. Don’t you see?”
“And what does that mean, exactly?” Though the mist around her is quiet now, I can still see it, like a faint iridescence in the air. Somehow, its near invisibility is worse than when it was reaching toward me—now it’s waiting, lurking, like a predator in the shadows. “You’ve been promising since the temple to tell me what the Lightbringer is meant to do. Because all the other names for that god—Destroyer, Wrathmaker, Eater of Worlds—they all sound incredibly … murdery.”
Her eyes are clear, and though she doesn’t hesitate, her voice does quiet. “The Lightbringer is the one who ends the world.”
“Ends?” My throat is tight, my body cold. “That can’t mean what it sounds like.”
“Do those words have another meaning in your land?” she asks. “The Lightbringer brings about the end of the world. The sky will fall, the forest-sea will burn, and the slate of creation will be wiped clean. We will see an end to the cycle of suffering and poverty and disease. A return to the nothingness from whence all this was born.”
A cold feeling settles in my gut at her words. “Nimh … you can’t be serious—you want everyone and everything in this world destroyed?”
She leans forward, her gaze intent, pleading with me to understand. “Here, we are taught as children about the cycle of creation and destruction—we all learn that the end will come, and that we will be reborn in a world without suffering. But for that to happen, all this”—a sweep of her arm takes in our surroundings: the dawn, the golden light filtering through the trees, the tumble of the river below—“must die. And so must we.”
And so must we… .
“The sky,” I manage, trying not to let my dread infect my voice. “When you say the sky will fall …”
“The cloudlands,” Nimh says, her voice softening a little. “Yes. The gods must return to us in this new cycle.”
“The blood of the gods will rain down,” I whisper, echoing that line of her new prophecy.
Her dark eyes fix on mine. “Your people and mine were never meant to exist apart. If there is anything I know with absolute certainty, it’s that our two peoples were bound together long ago. Our worlds must be reborn together.”
She’s talking about bringing my people crashing down to Below in what could only be a firestorm of death and destruction. An impact of that magnitude would certainly destroy this land—her people and mine would be all but vaporized. The forest-seawouldburn. The ash and debris from that fire would block out the sun for generations. It could mean the death of everything.
