1
Sylvia
Come. I await you.
Visible puffs of breath pulsed before my lips. The endless, snow-coated woods felt infinite as I listened beyond them.
Find me. Tether me. Use me.
Trembling with the insatiable urge to comply, I clenched my fists. This voice wasn’t the intrusive, tormenting whisper of the Ancients locked in my mind. I had to strain to hear this beckon, this promise that I was worthy.
My perch was high off the ground, the sturdiest branch I could find near the top of a pine tree. A late afternoon breeze whistled through the needles, and I shivered despite my winter wear—a thick cobalt blouse and freshly-patched leggings.Shit. The brief distraction made me lose my grasp on the tempting murmur, and I desperately scrambled to reclaim it.
Channeling the gemstone in Veloria had been a brief, violent indulgence, but it had altered me, sharpened my senses to findmore. This gem seemed to hover on the fringes of my range, agonizing.
Had Father felt like this all the time?
My usual bitterness toward his gemstone obsession gave way to sympathy. Memories that had once been hazy came into sharper focus. He would absorb magic in small doses, treating it like a delicate art. Such power longed for an outlet. Between his experiments and training an ice affinity daughter, the charged magic was put to good use—and gave him an excuse to reach for more.
I shut my thoughts from him, only to squirm at the idea of how I’d tell Mother about my own quest for gemstones when the time came.IfI did find her.
Would she be proud to know I had frozen a hunter solid with the power of the amethyst sliver she’d saved for me? Or would she immediately search my face for signs of my father’s mania taking root?
That didn’t matter. My desire to find her and Hazel far outweighed any fear of judgment.
Sinking to a seat on the branch, I pictured them somewhere in these mountains, braving the weather. Mother would be fussing over Hazel’s little wings, going stiff from the cold. My sister would be watching the robins flit from tree to tree and wistfully picture herself mounting one to ride, yearning for Elysia’s hummingbird stables.
Peeking up through the dense pine needles, I envisioned the hidden constellations. I whispered a prayer to one in particular—the Wanderer’s Flame—that my family had traveled safely and that they had managed to escape from Elysia in the first place.May they be warm and protected in Aelthorin, I thought desperately to the stars.
A drop of unnatural fear interrupted my prayer, and my heart skipped a beat.
Danger.
Despite every instinct roaring at me to get far away, I turned toward the warning sensation. Starkly different from the beckon of a gemstone, the prickle of amonsterhad become familiar over the past months.
I was alone, and something was out here. With each passing second, the unnatural warning crept closer, and my isolation sank in. I hadn’t meant to venture this far from the cabin we'd been staying in. Cliff was out on a supply run. Jon had still been dead to the world, deep in sleep, when I'd sensed the gemstone and squeezed my way out of our shelter.
It was a decision I was rapidly coming to regret.
Biting back a curse, I stood slowly and searched the snowy ground below for a sign of a monster—tracks, a rustle in the sparse bushes,anything.
A terrible voice-like screech pierced my ears, and I looked up in time to see jagged yellow talons bearing down on me. Crying out, I fell backward and scrambled to gain purchase on a lower branch. Dark brown feathers flew every which way as the creature beat its wings madly.
Fuck,this thing was far too fast for something so massive.
Branches snapped behind me as the monster made another attempt to snatch me. With everycrack, I pictured my bones making precisely the same noise if I were caught in those claws. Brimming with adrenaline, I burst out of my hiding place. The creature was struggling to spread its wings in the thick pine.
A distorted, person-like face became visible between the twigs, and I realized that aharpywas trying to make a meal out of me. It was worse than any sketch Cliff had etched in his journal—the skin leathery and waxy, its eyes pure, irisless golden orbs like liquid metal.
But therecouldn’tbe a harpy here. It was too cold. This should be impossible.
The freezing air burned my lungs as I glanced all around—nothing but fir trees for miles across a landscape blanketed in inches of fresh snowfall. I couldn’t hope to outfly this monster, and finding a place to huddle would only get me cornered and clawed to death.
The harpy gave another furious screech and finally oriented itself on the edge of a branch, tensing its wings for flight while the bough bent dangerously under its weight. As those golden eyes refocused on me, I shot upward and croaked an incantation. Before the monster could come near me, I threw a volley of icicles downward and speared its wings.
Its flight was brutally thrown off, but it still wheeled around to reorient itself. Harpy feathers were freakishly strong, according to Jon, even sewn into clothing by some hunters as armor.
With a mighty beat of wings, the harpy launched itself at me again. I aimed for its face this time.
