Tears roll down my cheeks. When they fall to the ground, they’re like acid, creating craters in the earth. I’m scared to know what they’re doing to my face.
“I didn’t!” Ezryn cries out, a mournful howl. “I didn’t mean to.”
I suck in a breath and throw myself through the spiderweb. Icky fingers cling to my hair and skin. But he’s there, leaning against the trunk, hands digging at his helm.
“Ezryn, I’m here,” I say, placing my palms over his.
My heart feels like it’s imploding in on itself, a black hole bending all gravity. The rest of the world lurches away.
The grove again. Daytime. It looks different: more flowers, brighter. Ezryn’s here, still right in front of me.
“No, no, no,” he mumbles. “Get out. Get out!”
But it’s too late. I can feel it now—my consciousness has been left behind, and I’m here with him.
In his nightmare.
Or rather, I realize as I stumble out from beneath the cover of the willow tree, his memory.
There’s another Ezryn in pure white armor. I know it’s him, because though I can’t see his face, I can feelit, the way one feels the sun on their skin or the breeze through their hair.
There’s a woman: tall and broad of shoulder and hip. A long jade skirt pleats out from under an armored breastplate. And she wears the most stunning helmet I’ve ever seen: starlight silver with a narrowed visor angled like cat eyes.
She’s trying to grab his shoulders, but he’s staggering away from her. “You must control it, son!”
This Ezryn ripples, flashes of magic sparking off his fingers like fireworks. “I-I can’t!”
He pushes Princess Isidora, and my Ezryn does the same to me. The words are a haunting echo from them both: “Get out of here!”
But I can’t move. I can only watch in horror.
This nightmare was once real. I feel it in the threads binding me to Ezryn in this moment. I feel it pulsing through the air: the Blessing of Spring passed from mother to son.
A Blessing too powerful for the son to control.
“I can’t!” the past Ezryn cries and then he doubles over.
And erupts.
A guttural roar, a shockwave of power, and a pain in my heart so pure I fall to my knees. The grass in the grove shrivels, the trees wither, the leaves turn to ash in the breeze, and fish float to the surface of the pond.
And Princess Isidora cries out once, holding her throat, as she falls before Ezryn’s feet.
“No,” I whisper, my voice lost to the cry of the young fae man before me, clutching feverishly at the mother he killed.
And my Ezryn sinks to his knees beside me, silent.
“Murderer!” A new voice, a new figure among the dead trees. Kairyn. He turns and runs away.
Then more voices join the fray, coming from all around us: “Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!”
Some of them I recognize: Kairyn’s, Eldy’s, Kel’s.
My own.
The world is shifting again, the voices turning to cackles, the trees growing eyes. The lake is now a bubbling pool of lava. No, no, we can’t keep doing this. We have to get out. It needs to stop.
Ineed to stop it.
