Page 48
A pale, colorless light bleeds through the haze, illuminating a room I don’t recognize. Its flat glow is soft, unnatural, erasing the shadows with its blank expanse. Faces hover above me, their features smeared and distorted, like reflections in rippling water.
The walls dissolve, melting into velvet-black night. Stars flicker into existence, small and distant, piercing the darkness with pinpricks of cold light. I find myself barefoot on a snow-covered mountain, gazing out over a lake locked in ice. A current of air rushes past, visible as a faint serpentine light bending and curling in the dark.
It waits, coiled. But it won’t pull me. I have to jump.
Something soft brushes my palm, and I look down.
A feather, black as ink.
My heart cracks, some ancient yearning spilling through the seam.
“Do you want this?”
The voice is deep, resounding. Forged from eternity and power, woven from memory and dream until I can’t be sure where it’s coming from.
Only that I’ve heard it before.
The fog in my mind twists and flashes as my theïkós stirs. The magic trembles awake, threading through my chest in desperate spirals. It twists, reaching, searching for something to hold on to.
I clutch the feather close.
Do you want this?
The question fractures inside me, reshaping, growing sharp edges.
Yes.
“Then it’s time to wake up, Daughter.”
I jolt awake, choking on air, drenched in sweat, and pulse hammering in my ears.
The blurry edges of a room sharpen into focus as I peer past the sheer drapery of the four-poster bed I’m on, but I don’t get the chance to take in more than the white marble walls and a wide wooden door directly ahead of me.
“You’re awake,” a voice calls.
I snap my head to the left as two figures approach, half lit by the hearth at their backs.
A man and a woman.
Trapped between dream and waking, I stare at the two of them.
“Welcome back to the land of the living,” the man says. His grin widens, and pointed canines gleam ominously.
But it’s not the unfamiliarity or the words that stop my heart beating.
It’s the feathered wings flaring from their backs.
This isn’t real. It can’t be real. Please, gods, let this be a dream.
The sheets cling to me like restraints as I shove them aside and scramble out of the bed. My knees buckle, but I catch myself on the bedpost.
Then I run, my heart hammering a bruising rhythm against my ribs.
The woman shouts, but I don’t pause to listen.
I wrench the door open onto a corridor that curves off to either side of me. I race around the bend and snatch the handle of the first door I come across.
The instant I step inside, it’s like entering a tomb. The air is stale, and shelves rise like gravestones along the arching walls, their books slumped and silent. I scan the room again with creeping dread. No doors. There’s no escape.
