A small bird descended, its wings slowing as though the sky itself had gentled its fall. It landed softly in her waiting hands.
Brenton stiffened beside me. “What are you?—”
The magic rose, and the bird shuddered once. Its breathing grew shallow and uneven, its tiny body surrendering to Zaicha’s power.
It didn’t bleed or cry out. But life no longer clung to it.
My heart lurched.
The air that vibrated around it didn’t feel foreign.
My gaze snapped to hers.
“My magic is similar to yours,” she said.
Brenton’s step forward was curt and sharp. “You’re hurting it.”
Zaicha’s attention shifted to him, calm and unoffended. “I am changing its state. Not ending it.”
The bird trembled weakly in her hand. Brenton took another step.
“How else should she learn?” she asked. “Magic cannot be understood in theory. Only in practice and choice.”
My chest tightened as I watched the fragile rise and fall of its chest, and the deeper, impossible awareness beneath it.
Zaicha looked back at me. “It will not die.” She held the bird toward me. “Come, live beside it.”
My feet carried me forward. The bird’s life hovered somewhere I could almost perceive but not quite touch.
“Yesterday, you reached for life without understanding quite how you found it,” she said. “Do that again.”
My pulse stumbled, my mind skimming at the way Willow had reached for my magic. Trying to remember how I’d summoned it on its own.
“I don’t know how.”
“You do,” she said. “You simply did not notice what you were touching.”
She lifted her free hand, and the air shifted. And suddenly, I felt it.
Threads as fine as spiderwebs stretched the space around the bird. Some glowed strong and warm, others dimmed and quickly faded to nothing.
They didn’t fight each other. They existed side by side, separated by the smallest, most impossible distance.
Life.
My breath caught. “I . . . feel it.”
Brenton drew closer so that his shoulders settled beside mine. He stayed within reach.
Zaicha smiled. “All death magic is the space between. You do not create death. You touch the moment where one becomes the other. And then you choose.”
The bird trembled, its breath stuttering.
Panic flared in my chest. My hand hovered uselessly above it. “It’s slipping.”
“Then bring it back.”
I waited for her magic to move with mine, to steady what I might fail to grasp, but her magic stayed quiet around us.
