“You are holding yourself back.” Aziel chided from the tree line. “Stop thinking so much and justlet go.”
“I’mtrying.” She snapped, scrunching her eyes to resist the urge to open them and glare at him. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”
She heard the soft crunching of leaves and twigs over his feet as he approached her. The sigh he released was not one of contentment, but deep frustration.
That makes two of us,she thought.
“Do you remember what you did in order to use your power in Yaar?” He asked.
Her eyes snapped open, filled with a fear that was unmistakable to him. He’d known for quite some time that the only thing preventing her from using her Grace was that fear. He was hesitant to mention it in the last few days, but he believed that coddling her from the truth would do nothing, but hinder her. The longer they waited to move things along, the more unbalanced the world would become.
“I… I don’t want to think about that.” She confessed quietly.
“You need to,” he urged. “Ignoring what happened will only make your guilt eat away at you. Letgo. It may be more of a relief to your soul if you do.” He moved in behind her, his hands coming up to her shoulders and giving them a comforting squeeze. “Try.”
Nymiria drew a breath in through her mouth and then expelled it through her nose. She did exactly as he’d commanded every day and let her muscles relax. The tension fell away, the worried line between her brow now smoothing out. She reached for her Grace again, letting out a harsh growl as she drove her senses towards it. The light grew larger by just a fraction, expanding and retracting, dancing in and out of vision until…
Nothing.
She wanted it back. She wanted to control it again. She wanted to feel the same magnitude of power she felt the moment Phyona removed those runes from her back. She wanted her flowers to bloom. She wanted her vines to stretch through the earth, to weave themselves through the dirt and make a home there. She could feel the calling of the earth under her skin—dirt and stardust and whatever else was woven into the molecular makeup of things thatlived.
“She was a disappointment the moment she was born.”Her mother’s voice echoed through her mind, nearly ripping the air from her lungs. It was so close, the power was just within her reach, so close that she could almost taste it.
Nymiria let out a cry of frustration—releasing every ounce of energy she had pent up into a single yell. Ten years without the ability to make something bloom, ten years without the strength to hold a wilted flower in her hands and breathe life back into it—she’d tried. Every day for ten years, she tried. And all that came of it was the fucking garden that Lilith and Owen were buried in. And even that had been a failure.
Every flower she planted died. Every weed she pulled sprang back the next day. She scraped and prodded and primped the dirt, sewing seeds, watching them grow and then wilt all over again. The only thing she ever successfully produced in that garden was tears.
Tears.
She was crying.
Aziel stepped forward then, watching as she wiped the tears off of her face, smearing them along her reddened cheeks. She couldn’t understand why he was smiling or why he took a step back when her brow furrowed.
His face fell, the finger he’d pointed at her while yelling his commands was now extended in her direction again. “Look.”
Nymiria was prepared to hurl insults at him, but the moment she looked down at her hands and saw that the intricate designs of moonflowers he’d marked her with were now blooming real blooms, every single word in her vocabulary vanished entirely.
“Now do it again.”
As quickly as her words seemingly disappeared, they all came hurling back to her at full force when Aziel spoke. Nymiria’s eyes narrowed in on his. “Fuck you!”
“You’ve made it abundantly clear that you don’t want that from me. Now,” He cleared the distance between them, his hands cupping her face. Nymiria wanted to pull away. It was her first reaction—to want to shove him off of her and spit in his face. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. Even the flowers sprouting from her skin seemed to gravitate in his direction. “Do it again for me, Moonflower.”
“I’m not doing anything for you.” She grumbled, her voice lacking the venom necessary for her words to make impact.
Aziel nodded, his hands falling away from her face. His smirk told her that it was what he wanted to hear all along. “Then do it for yourself.”
Do it for myself.
Nymiria tried to shove away the tingling sensation his presence left on her skin—how those markings covering her body felt alive just from one simple touch. She couldn’t think like that. Not about him.
She continued to breathe, each breath grounding her more and more. Every thought and feeling was cast away to the wind—dust riding a warm breeze. She placed her hands upon her stomach, doing her best to find the place inside of her that she’d believed she sealed shut.
She had to feel it.
Her heart. Her core and whatever else lived inside of those things—she needed to feel them. Her mind wove through the moments of her life from one unfortunate event to the next. Her mother, standing over her with a hateful sneer, her face red with anger. Her mother, looking at her with the sort of contempt one would only save for their enemy.
Men.
