I shook my head, staring him down with a look that was half confused, half pissed.
He rubbed a hand over his chin again and started over. With Griff’s occasional help, Finn explained how the seven channels included the three internal channels—mind, body, and soul—and the four elemental—earth, air, fire, and water. Not everyone had access to every channel, or the same amount of access, and with different combinations of channels, people could perform different magic.
“For example,” Finn was saying, “Griff is a teleporter, which takes body and mind?—”
Griff looked like he was going to say something, but Finn wavedhis hand. “I’m generalizing. It’s more complicated than that. I have my mind channel, and that’s what allows me to speak mind to mind and move things with my thoughts.”
He directed several sticks to pile themselves onto the fire, as if that was normal. Although, I was quickly realizing, here, apparently it was. As his attention was on feeding the fire, I shifted against the tree, my shoulder knocking against Griff’s. A sense of comfort flowed through me, just one more thing I didn’t understand.
I looked up at him, this rugged stranger who, in the course of a day, had turned my orderly life upside down. This man who persisted in calling me a princess, and spoke of magic and kingdoms like one would speak of the weather.
I finally voiced a thought that had been spinning in my mind since I had seen him earlier that day. “Why do I feel I can trust you?”
He leaned his head back against the tree, entirely comfortable in this space. “Insight is one of the things your soul channel gives you.” He said it like he thought it explained everything.
“Oh sure, that clears that right up. My soul channel. How silly of me to not immediately realize that.”
I caught a smirk before he added, “What do you feel?”
“Like I’ve known you—both of you”—I glanced over at Finn, tending the fire with whatever magical abilities he’d yet to show me—“for my whole life.”
Griff’s eyes were unreadable.
My mind was whirling with all the information I had learned. I knew I had more questions, but I couldn’t quite get my thoughts to settle long enough to put them into words. I wasn’t made for sitting still, though, so I stood, Griff immediately standing alongside me.
I wandered over to the fire and settled next to it, the heat sinking into my bones and warming me despite the chilly air. I’d always enjoyed watching flames dance with a life of their own. The twins joined me, Finn sprawling out on one side of me, Griff sinking down easily on the other side, both content to stay here as long as I wanted.
“What is the Veil?” I asked, the next in my long list of questions.
“Think of it as a barrier,” Griff told me. “We exist underneath it. It shields us from those who would take more than their due.”
Sure, that wasananswer.
Finn appeared to agree with me, because after shooting his brother a look, he explained, “We don’t quite know how it was created or why, or even really when. Stories passed down over the centuries tell us that there was a foe so great that those in power forged a barrier to draw a Veil over his eyes and block us from his gaze. It persisted until a little over fifty years ago, when it began to shred and the forces of darkness got through. We don’t know who was the cause. Maybe the original foe. Maybe a new one. But he blacked out the sun, and his army of hufen descended on us. They were defeated, but at great cost.”
“Hufen?”
“In the old language, it basically translated to demons, but in reality, they’re humans that he’s corrupted. Infected. It takes only a touch. When his tentacles of darkness reach out and grab a heart, they corrupt it. Who you are, your personality, your likes, dislikes, the people you love, slowly start to fade from your mind until all you are is an embodiment of darkness. Our understanding is that over time, it basically suffocates the soul. Erasing it.”
Demons erasing the soul? What had I gotten myself into?
Griff took over. “But the protection of the Veil has been failing again. We are unable to fix it. All we’re able to do is try to deal with the damage while it heals itself, but eventually, even that won’t be enough.”
I looked at them in confusion. “Why is the Veil failing? What in Erde’s name am I supposed to do about it?”
The twins shared a look. Finn let out a heavy sigh while Griff’s face was unreadable behind that mask he seemed to favor.
“Spit it out. I have a feeling I’m going to need to know what you two don’t want to say.”
“There’s a prophecy that says there is one person who can stopthe darkness,” Finn began gently. “I’m paraphrasing here, but that person is the lost princess with access to power wielded from all seven channels.”
“Oh.” There was that princess shit again.
We sat in silence as I digested that. I should have felt overwhelmed, but I’d passed overwhelmed several hours ago and was just in shocked numbness. It was as if the words I was hearing were going in through my ears, bouncing around my brain like a swarm of angry hornets, and then just sitting in my chest like Cormac’s anvil.
“Let me get this straight. First, I’m a princess, then I’m a powerful wielder of magic, and now I’m the prophesied savior of my apparent homeland? Fantastic.”
My anger, simmering under the surface all day, flared to life again. Nana could have prepared me better for this. Even just a simple,Hey Lexa, you’re destined to save the world I ran away from, would have been helpful in the past twenty-two years.
