“It’s not meant to be.” Esumi managed a grim smile. “But it’s all we have.”
The palace bells rang the hour, and servants began appearing in the courtyards. Our stolen morning was over, returned to the world of protocol and duty and questions no one could answer.
“Same time tomorrow?” Kaneko asked, looking at Esumi.
“If we can manage it. No promises.” Esumi started gathering the training weapons. “You two should get cleaned up before someone important sees you and decides you’re loitering.”
We headed back toward our chambers, and I found myself still clutching Haru’sbokkenlike a talisman. The wood was smoothunder my fingers, worn from use, and along the handle someone had carved tiny characters too small to read in passing.
Later, sitting alone in my chamber, I would examine them and discover they said: “Speed without wisdom is falling with style.”
Typical Haru, making a joke even in his weapons, even as magic failed and the world crumbled around us.
Chapter 22
Haru
Iam falling again.
The dream always started the same way—the sky above me, endless and blue, my body weightless and tumbling through air that offered no resistance. Below, the ground rushed up to meet me, close enough now that I could see individual trees, their branches reaching like skeletal fingers.
My rational brain knew I should have been afraid. In the real world, falling meant death, meant impact and pain and the wet crunch of bones breaking against unyielding earth.
But in the dream, I just fell.
My gift wants to activate, wants to blur me sideways through space, to catch me mid-plummet and laugh at gravity’s impotent rage.
But dream-logic held me suspended between motion and stillness, falling forever without landing, moving at impossible speeds without going anywhere at all.
Was this the price of the gift? That’s what Father had once told me.
The speed-blessed dream of falling recurred because our minds couldn’t reconcile how we moved when awake. We slipped between moments, and our sleeping brains tried to make sense of it by showing us what it felt like from the outside.
Falling, falling, always falling—
The ground vanishes.
Not gradually. The world simply ceases to exist, replaced by darkness so complete it has weight and texture, a presence that presses against my skin like cold water.
I stop falling.
Or perhaps I’d never been falling at all. Perhaps I’d been sinking, drowning in an ocean of absolute void, and only now realized I couldn’t breathe.
“Haru.”
The voice rolls through the darkness like thunder through storm clouds—deep and resonant, older than mountains. It doesn’t speak so much as vibrate the space around me, making my bones hum with frequencies that shouldn’t exist.
I know that voice.
I’d never heard it before, but I know it with certainty, the way one knows his own heartbeat, the way one knows the sound of his mother’s breathing.
“Who—” My voice comes out small and childlike. I hate how afraid I sound.
Gold blazes in the darkness.
Two points of light, burning with the intensity of captured suns, fix on me with the weight of divine attention. As my eyes adjust—or perhaps as the darkness chooses to reveal itself—I see the shape that holds those eyes.
Then I see the scales.
