Page 178

I thought that lie was pretty good. Regardless, these mood swings from him were beginning to give her whiplash. Lily warped her annoyance into a playful gasp and hopped up to sit on the edge of the table. “Are we back to playing games?”

Jarek’s mouth went slack.

She bit her lip, eyes shifting between him, Sterling, and the book. “Don’t be shy, you know how much I love them.”

“Games?” Sterling inquired, the amusement clear in his voice. “Oh, do tell.”

“I couldn’t possibly.” Lily crossed her legs, leaning forward a hair to pick up the glass in front of Jarek. Keeping her movements slow and precise, she swirled the liquid. “I will say, I think I met my match. He’s very good at them.”

“Is that right?” Sterling tossed the cork at Jarek’s head.

“I’ve met better players,” Jarek groused, throwing the book onto the table.

“You flatter me, Master Atwood,” she crooned, delicately scooping up the book and placing the glass back in front of him. She slid down from her perch and made her way into the house, clutching her prize close to her chest.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Lily angled the book in her lap so the pages caught the light from the closest sconce in Ava’s study.

What is clear is the symbiosis between the environment and its inhabitants, much in the same vein as the latter and Erebria’s Pantheon. Like the Flare’s contribution to each vitality reincarnated, so is their influence to the health of Eizreth. Energy feeds off energy. If it fills the people, it fills the land, and if it fills the land, the people thrive, and if the people thrive, so does reincarnation.

Lily blew a strand of hair from her face and stretched her numb legs along the length of the window bench. She’d been tucked in the little nook, reading for a few hours at this point.

She peered out of the window, not able to see beyond her reflection in the flickering glare, but she could feel the presence of the creature—the ethae—somewhere in the dark. She closed her current read, keeping a finger pinched between the pages.

Lily followed through on her word after Ivy’s bath, picking the girl’s brain and the tangles from her hair while she dripped the last of Lily’s earnings from Gridian into her pillowcase. Lily eventually tired and left to change out of her dusty clothing into a flowing black skirt under a soft maroon tunic that laced at the chest. Far more comfortable, but after lying in a bed that was too big and too soft, she found herself here, hoping to find more information on the spirits, but only getting an education she’d already received.

She dredged up what little she knew about ethaes from the pit of her memory. Their purpose was to spread a Flare’s influence throughout the three continents, keeping the land nourished of the gods’ magic for the benefit of the Aithre domain. Lily had seen old, forgotten statuettes and sculptures dedicated to the spirits on the peninsula, but knew nothing more. Not even Amalia thought to bring them up.

She could assume that there were two different kinds—the little “hoppers” Ivy had seen and the larger one following Lily. One for the Guardian and one for the Wraith. If there were any others connected to the other Flares, she didn’t know.

Ivy mentioned she only started seeing them earlier this year. About as long as Lily had been seeing hers. The creature being an ethae explained its behavior of taking the auras left behind by the dead trees she was practicing on in Markoth. It was spreading her influence to nourish the soil for the Aithre Domain, but where was it taking them?

She cracked the book open again, inattentively trailing down the page until a date caught her eye.

There is no more obvious consequence, the passage began, than the blizzard befalling Eocera’s mountains. While little is known about the inner workings of the Reatian Empire, what is known is the reincarnation cycle has slowly come to a halt since the events of the Reapers’ War in 1438, resulting in its people living past their body’s natural limits. This was exaggerated after the discovery of ghostsoil some eighty years later, the text continued on the next page. Further speculation is debated between Terin scholars as to the restoration capabilities—

The quiet shattered with the opening of a door. Lily jolted upright and slammed the book shut as Jarek stepped into the room and closed the door.

Lily slid down the wall, crossed her legs, and thumbed to a random page filled with words that were no longer interesting, or even decipherable, for that matter as he wandered up and down the shelves.

“Is there something I can help you with?” she asked, dropping the book to her lap.

“I didn’t know you were such a bookworm.”

“I’m not,” she muttered.

“Pity. I was going to add another commonality to your list.”

“You like to read?”

“You sound surprised.”

“More so that you had the time.”

“I was able to manage. Not so much, anymore. I have other responsibilities keeping my attention.”

Warm, gooey sensations rolled around in her chest until she remembered that she was mad at him for avoiding her for three days. “Now answer my question: What are you doing here?”