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"What are you?" I said into the dark. My voice was calm.

Nothing answered. Just water dripping somewhere below.

Then a scrape.

I stopped.

Another. Above me.

Three Slykars dropped from the ceiling and landed without sound a few paces ahead. Green-grey, their hands slick, their fingers bending at angles that made no anatomical sense. They smelled me. Their heads tilted. They recoiled from the leather and then hunger won and they came anyway.

I couldn't help but roll my eyes.

The first one rushed me.

I stepped aside and drove my shoulder into its ribs. It hit the wall. Hissed.

The second grabbed for my forearm. Its fingers hit leather and it shrieked and jerked back.

The third went for my throat.

I caught its wrist.

The creature struggled. I threw it. It hit the wall hard and did not get up.

I stared at my own hand. I had never been that strong.

The first two came back. Together this time.

I lifted my hand. The light came before I asked for it. It came the way water came when you opened a tap. Easy. Fast.

I gasped.

The Slykars screamed, their voices carried an undertone I did not expect: fear.

They did not get thrown backward. They unraveled. Their bodies broke apart into ash and the ash drifted and then was gone.

Silence came back into the corridor all at once.

I stood with the light still around my fingers. It was not fighting me. It was waiting. Patient as anything. As though asking if I was done.

I lowered my hand. It went.

I looked at my palm. Flexed my fingers. Looked at the empty tunnel where two creatures had been.

I wondered what Aunt Petunis would say about this power. If she would tell me how to use it. Then I realized I did not care.

There was nothing she could teach me about this. This was not a skill. It was mine. Using it felt like remembering something I had never been allowed to know I had.

I continued toward the Darkway.

For the first time since waking in Morrath I found myself wondering what else had been taken from me when I was born.

Fiersa was in my chambers when I returned.

She looked up from the basin where she had been arranging something and stopped when she saw the blood and scrapes on me. She did not gasp. She did not step back.

"Sit," she said. "You look like you had a rough journey back from the tunnels.”