I didn’t hesitate as the tunnel grew narrower. I didn’t have him to press against this time, but I wasn’t scared either. I hadn’t seen any evidence of the creatures who had come here. They had probably left again.
I really hoped they’d left again.
The chamber announced itself the same way it had before with the tunnel opening all at once, the space expanding beyond what the torchlight could reach, the ceiling rising into the dark.
And in the center, the column.
I stopped.
It was exactly as I remembered it and entirely different. The same stone, the same veins of color running through it, the same slow, rhythmic pulse of light moving across it. I took it in freely, my eyes running over it, seeing more than I had allowed the first time. Now I didn’t need to worry about hiding my reaction.
Now there was no one to manage anything for.
I stood in the dark at the edge of the chamber, looking at the column, feeling my magic move toward it with a gentleness that had nothing of the frantic, weeks-long pressure.
You've been so busy hiding it that you haven't looked at it clearly since you were a child.
I took a breath, slipped my moonstone into the pocket of my cloak, and walked forward.
I stopped three feet from the column.
Up close, the pulse was even more visible, as if the column itself were breathing. Which, I was beginning to understand, was exactly what it was doing. The magic of this place, pooled here longer than anyone had been alive to measure it, doing what magic did when left to itself. It was being.
I did what I hadn’t been allowed to do the first time. I pressed my palm flat against one of the stones.
And the world opened beneath my touch.
There was no flash of light, no sound, no physical sensation beyond the warmth of the stone beneath my palm. Instead, I felt it inside. Something inside me opened, properly this time. Slowly, it swung back on a hinge that had always been there, waiting for someone to push it.
Waiting formeto push it.
I felt the column's pulse sync with mine.
I felt my magic, which had been contained, suppressed, rationed, and hidden for so long that I had never known what it felt like to be uncontained. It rose within me. Not a surge, not a boil, not the desperate pressure of the past weeks. Just rising within me, ready to beknown.
I felt its size as it surfaced.
That was what stopped me.
It wasn’t fear. It was simply the staggering fact of understanding, for the first time since I was a girl touching a winter-bare tree and feeling the sap move somewhere deep inside it, what I actually carried within me.
It was not small. It had never been small.
I'd been treating it as something trivial, unimportant. And it had been patient with that, patient the way the column was patient, the way the land was patient. But it was not small, and it never had been.
I had been carrying something vast in a very tiny container for a very long time.
I stood with my hand against the column and breathed, and it breathed with me.
Images rushed through my mind. So many images. I saw glyphs I had never known. I saw life in the soil, plants and flowers bursting through it and growing. I saw the sun, not covered by gray clouds, but shining bright in blue skies that stretched further than I'd ever seen. I saw boats on water, water that wasn’t frozen. I saw buildings, large and imposing, small and humble, and spires, spires that rose above palaces and reached for the sky.
I stepped back, panting.
“Too much,” I told it. “Slower.”
I placed my hand back on the column. Again, image after image flooded my mind. Slower this time, but still so much.
I didn’t understand it, but I knew it.
