Chapter Thirty-Nine
The dream felt muddled and hazy. It felt wrong as it tugged at the edges of my mind.
I was sobbing in this dream. And I knew it was a dream. So I did everything that I wanted that I couldn’t do in my reality. I cried and screamed until my throat was raw. I saw the stiff face of Lokkaru, looking up at me from her bed, where she’d died, only this time her eyes were open and staring deeply into me.
It made horror coil in my chest. Lokkaru’s face morphed into my grandmother’s, with her light blue eyes and grey hair that she’d always kept trimmed short and out of the way. Only I saw red blood appear across her throat.
It was a dream so I changed it, wiping away the image of my dying grandmother, but I sat huddled, trapped in the confines of my mind and not knowing what was happening orwhy.
I kept my eyes squeezed shut but I could hear what sounded like a stream nearby, though my vision was blackened, though I couldn’tseeanything anymore.
Someone touched my shoulder.
I kept my eyes closed, feeling like a small child though I was grown.
“Cossa,” came a voice. A familiar one.My breath hitched, my eyes flying open, and there stood Lokkaru, wrapped in her golden cloth that she’d been buried in, a transparent veil over her features. “You see? I told you dreams are powerful.”
“L-Lokkaru?”
She looked alive. She looked well. But I knew this was a dream, that it wasn’t real.
Or was it?
I thought of Devina, of her plea to me. She’d showed me a memory, an important one to her, and I had believed that real, hadn’t I?
“You’re here?” I whispered, rising from my crouched position. When I looked down, I saw the black veins on my arms had disappeared. “How?”
“We are never gone,” she said. “Though only some possess the gift to see us.”
Like Davik.
“Did you go to him yet?” I asked. “In his dream?”
“He has not slept yet,cossa. You are riding back towards the horde and you sleep in his arms on hispyroki.”
I knew that. Even still, speaking with her felt like wading through water. Heavy and slow. It made me drowsy, though I already slept. It was strange. So strange.
“I appeared to him as he can see me,” she said. “But he rejects his gift from Kakkari.”
“He does not understand it,” I whispered, a flash of guilt piercing me. “I don’t even know if I understand it.This.”
“You are not meant to,” she said. “I never questioned it. It is simply a part of you, as it was a part of me.”
My vision swam. The tears that leaked down my cheeks felt like ice. I was surprised when they didn’t shatter, frozen, at my feet as they dropped.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m…I’m so sorry, Lokkaru.”
“For what,cossa?”
“For—for not checking on you earlier. You died…you died alone. I found you and you were so cold. I tried to enter your mind and all I felt was…n-nothing. I felt nothing at all.”
Her face never changed.
“I did not die alone, Vienne,” she told me. “My mother and father welcomed me and I went with them gladly. It was time. But this new life is strange. It works in different ways. I feel my hold on your world lessening and I want to say goodbye. Because I do not know what comes next.” She wore a secretive, mischievous smile, one very similar to when she’d gleefully imagined stealingkuverifor our candles. “But I am excited to see, to learn.”
Would she come back? In my dreams?
“The mind is powerful, Vienne,” Lokkaru murmured, looking at me intently. “Yours is as strong as I have ever seen. You fear your gift, as Davik fears his?”
