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“It’s the pathways our magic will follow when we meld. They are predestined by the Goddess. Only ryders and their flyers are connected this way. They should reach for each other, and once they connect, we meld. The more tendrils that connect, the better the meld will be. A perfect meld would connect all facets of our magic.”
I ran my touch over one, feeling the pull in my chest.
He recoiled physically. “Careful now.”
“Did it hurt?”
“It’s just raw.” He was studying the tendrils coming from the light. We moved around it, looking from every angle. “That’s your power, Sol. It’s so strong and bright.”
“Can you see what’s wrong?”
He shook his head. “I don’t understand. I should be able to feel it.” He studied the tendrils, picking strands apart, following the flow and how they moved. They behaved like his, but they didn’t connect.
He finally took his eyes off the light of my magic, turned to face me, and stopped dead.
His eyes narrowed, and his mouth fell open.
“What is it?”
“Your pendant,” he whispered.
I looked down and gasped. Black wisps seeped from my pendant. Like smoke, it spread from me, and wherever it met a tendril of his power, its darkness extinguished the light. None got past.
“What is that thing?” he demanded.
“It’s a symbol of dedication to the Goddess,” I told him, automatically defensive. “We are given them when we take our first offering to the temple, and we never take them off. It’s a vial of sand blessed by the priests of the Temple of Avalon to symbolize the shores we are welcomed to when we finally go to the Goddess. We all wear them…”
As soon as the words left my lips, I saw how that was the answer to this whole mystery. If they took me, hid me, kept me prisoner in a remote place, and poisoned me to prevent my magic from reaching out for Nyx, of course they ensured I always wore something to prevent our magic from connecting. We all did! It made me wonder how many others in my village had some kind of power. I knew I was the only one being poisoned, but these pendants were around every neck in the compound.
Our eyes met and confirmed this without words. Nyx let go of my hand, breaking the soul connection, and in an instant, I was back on the fallen tree with Nyx kneeling before me.
“This whole time, I’ve been wearing the thing blocking me?”
“It think so.” He reached for it, and as soon as he touched it, he hissed, recoiling.
“What’s wrong?”
“It burned. It doesn’t hurt you?”
“It gets warm sometimes, but it doesn’t hurt.” I gasped. “No, wait! When you brought me here from my village, it hurt. It burned me. I thought it was protecting me against you…”
“Maybe it was. Well, protecting you from connecting with my magic, at least. Ultimately stopping us from melding.”
I touched it and found it warm, but not too hot to touch.
I scrambled for the clasp, trying to get it off, but there wasn’t one there. I tried to remember how they put it on me. It was part of the ceremony. I was young, so I didn’t remember all the details. All the children made their first offering to the Goddess at our small temple. We placed the offering at the altar and knelt, they placed the pendant around our necks as we recited the prayer, and then… I gasped again. They used a tool to attach it. I remembered that it got hot for a moment. But I was so proud to be allowed to wear it, I hardly remembered the detail. Had they fused it to me?
I grabbed the pendant and tried to work it over my head. It was too tight to remove that way, though, so I yanked at it, and as I struggled, it suddenly burned my palm, as if it now saw me as a threat, too. I didn’t release it, pushing through the pain, trying to snap it, but the chain held. Eventually, the searing forced me to release it with a hiss.
“I can’t get it off.”
Nyx took my hand, inspecting my palm. “Whatever it’s doing, it’s resistant to being removed.”
“Like it knows?”
“Maybe. But it doesn’t want our magic together—that’s it’s purpose.”
“How can we get it off? It won’t break; it’s too strong.”
