Orin held out his hand to me. “Whenever you’re ready.”
For a long moment, I studied his fingers.
“You won’t be able to see it,” I said as I let my power grow. The life strands wrapping his body uncurled in response, reaching toward the light. “But if I succeed, you’ll know.”
He nodded, and the all-consuming hunger in his stare sharpened. I understood why it was there—especially after our private moment together—but something about it unnerved me. I wanted it gone. I wanted his soft smiles and warm looks. His easy laughter, unbridled by this fear of death. I wanted him to be free.
I beckoned to Orin’s threads with a slight curl of my fingers, and they flew to me with ease. In a matter of seconds, they’d wrapped around my arms, my legs, my stomach. Like before, I took a single thread and began stitching the blight into my body, but the pain was excruciating. I’d been able to tolerate the prick of needles with Zota, but this felt like white-hot blades carving away at my skin. The blight that seeped into my muscles brought with it a horrific sickness that immediately took me to my knees. Pain arced through my limbs, and my body began to tremble. Dots bloomed across my vision. Every breath was a battle, each inhale full of glass and each exhale riddled with salt. I couldn’t stop the burn, couldn’t douse the flames cooking me from the inside out. I bit my lip to hold back a scream and tasted the brackish, coppery tinge of blood.
With what little energy I had left, I focused on one of Orin’s threads. His blight wasn’t just a sickness; it was a starving beast willing to eat anything and everything in its path. The black tar bubbled and frothed as it oozed from his threads to my skin. I could’ve been delirious from the pain or perhaps it was magic, but I swore each bubble was a tiny maw with jagged teeth. As it crawled over my limbs, it tore at my skin. Drank in my blood. Settled in my bones. My light battered relentlessly against it, but I was drowning in a sea of tar and yellow loam, and nothing was strong enough to pierce it.
I didn’t know where I was anymore, if I’d already died or if I was somewhere in between. The blight was cooking my mind and my blood, and my vision swam out of focus. There was nothing but the heavy aroma of sour mulch and rotting flesh.
A quiet memory of Alec teased the edge of my thoughts. He’d started to hallucinate when the blight took over, too. Vaguely, I wondered what I looked like to Rorik and Orin. If I was writhing on the floor, suffering through an invisible pain they couldn’t abate. Or maybe I’d slipped into a slumber and was completely unreachable.
It was surreal to be lost in blight. At some point, the pain had faded and all I was left with was this unbearable sense of knowing that I was about to meet my end.
A flicker of awareness bloomed from somewhere in the depths of my mind. An itch I couldn’t quite reach. I didn’t know what it was, but it gave me pause. I shifted and watched as, for the first time, one of my own moonlit life threads appeared before my eyes. I froze as it drifted like a ribbon in the air, dancing about my body without the weight of blight. I’d never been able to see my threads before. Was it all a hallucination? An invisible breeze carried it close to my face, and a frayed end threatened to pull away from the core. With a sudden twist, it splintered off, no larger than a strand of hair but somehow still bright and resplendent and full of power.
You’re dying.The realization hit me hard as I watched the strand float away. How many of those tiny threads had I shed throughout the years? How many did I have left? I tried in vain to crane my head and once again glimpse the life threads twirling around me. But each time I caught sight of their moonlit ends, they’d shift and jerk away out of sight.
The itch in my mind was growing more and more insistent by the second. It wasn’t just an errant thought, but a voice. Someone calling my name. Someone bringing me back. The fabric of the hallucination trembled as it tried to keep me buried. Blight surged and frothed around me, pinning my limbs and tipping my head back. I could feel it creeping around the orifices of my face. My ears. My eyes. My nose.
Breathe.Was that my thought or someone’s shout? They coalesced into one single command that shook the blight’s hold on my mind. Suddenly the pain returned. Horrific, unending agony as sharp as knives cutting away at my organs. And with that, the rest of my senses came flying back. First there was sound. An earsplitting scream that threatened to shatter glass. My scream. And then there was the taste of blood—a mouthful of it—and Igagged as I managed to tilt my head just enough to feel its tacky warmth flood over my cheek. Finally, my vision. Orin’s strand was still stitched into my arm, and I was still siphoning sickness from his body. My gut churned at the sight of only one clear aquamarine thread. I’d hardly taken anything. Rorik and Orin were screaming, though I couldn’t tell what, as they waited on either side of my body. Orin was looking away, yelling at something or someone out of sight. But Rorik looked only at me.
“Edira, stop this,” he said when he noticed my eyes had cracked open. Or maybe they’d never closed. I couldn’t tell. Someone had dumped sand into them, and every blink was a rough scrape. Still, Rorik realized I was back. Somehow, he knew. His hand was pressed between my shoulder blades, and I wondered if his command to breathe had returned me to my senses. He’d ingrained that word into my body with every training session to the point it’d become an intrinsic response. An undeniable order to catch myself, to assess. I coughed, and another rush of blood flowed from my mouth to coat my blouse. With what little control I’d salvaged, I shut off my power and watched with relief as Orin’s thread was forcibly thrust from my body.
Rorik’s other hand was on my shoulder, and his grip tightened. “It’s all right. You’re all right.”
I tried to smile and failed. “Liar.”
“Edira!” At the sound of my hoarse voice, Orin rounded on us and quickly pulled me into his lap. “Thank the gods.”
Rorik stared at the space where I used to be in his arms. I’d gotten blood on his hands, but he didn’t bother to wipe it away. He’d become a statue, and the only movement that came from him was the ragged, uneven rise and fall of his chest.
“Why didn’t you stop sooner?” Orin pressed me close, and my body screamed in pain. I bit my lip and winced.
“I couldn’t.” My head throbbed as the world began to spin. “I couldn’t.” I forced a swallow and then vomited at the overwhelmingpresence of blood. The sudden retching sent another torturous wave of pain through to my toes. “Vora.”
“She’s already preparing the remedy.” Orin smoothed my hair with a shaky hand. He was covered in remnants of my blood and vomit, but he didn’t complain. He caged me in his arms and stood without faltering before heading out the door. With my cheek pressed against his shoulder, I caught one last glimpse of Rorik before we left. He still hadn’t moved.
Orin swept me into my quarters and headed for the bathroom, commanding the bath to fill with his silent magic the moment we entered. With gentle fingers, he freed me of my clothes and eased me into the copper basin. The once-clear liquid instantly shifted to something pink and murky.
The world tilted from left to right as I fought against sleep. Even with heavy-lidded eyes, I could still see the more prominent effects of my failed threadmending attempt. My skin was ashen and peeling in places, and my nails had turned a brittle yellow. Bruises blossomed across my legs and arms. Somehow, my muscles had lost all definition, and I was nothing but loose skin draped over bones. It was horrifying, and yet I couldn’t feel any fear. The only sensation that riddled my being was exhaustion. And gods, did I want to succumb to it. It would be so peaceful...
“Medicine first, then you can sleep.” Orin’s voice shook me, and I startled in the tub. Vora had entered the bathroom at some point, though she’d froze at the entrance. Her face was parchment pale, her lips parted and eyes wide. She blinked several times before handing it to Orin, and he pressed a mug of something thick and warm against my lips.
I drank it all.
“Make sure you’ve got her. She’s about to go under.”
With Vora’s words came a beautiful nothingness, and I slipped away to the feel of Orin’s hands sliding beneath my arms.
Twenty-Three
This time when I woke, I didn’t rush to get out of bed. My body felt better than it did before I’d taken Vora’s remedy, and while the fullness had returned to my muscles and the bruises had vanished from my skin, my mind was still too far gone. I’d been fighting and training for so damn long just to fail in the end. What was the point of it all? Why be gifted with a magic meant to heal, only to be faced with an incurable sickness? The pain of that truth was far greater than any physical ailment I’d experienced, and I curled in on myself beneath the sheets and hid from the world. From my brothers. From their deaths.
Vora and Orin checked on me frequently, but I didn’t have the strength to speak. It felt like admitting failure would permanently cement my brothers’ fates into existence. My mind was constantly flickering through all my encounters with blight. I went back to the start of it all, exhuming the memory of my parents’ death. It was a fog, a mirage on the horizon, but I wanted to relive every instance and glean as much information as possible.
