The very same one I painted onto my tarot card.
Chapter 31
Absence of Fear
E
There’s a pull between my shoulders, faint at first. Not pain—pressure. A memory bubbling up from inside my skin. Wind in my hair. The clean, sharp rush of clouds past my face. The vast drop beneath me, riddled with broken stones, the kind that shatters bone.
The fear of falling. The thrill of flying.
Wings.
The word doesn’t feel foreign. It bleeds and aches. From the moment it leaves her mouth, I know she’s right.
I don’t argue with Nick’s claim that Max is probably too groggy. I don’t hear Max insisting that she’s not in her right mind. Their voices reach my ears, but they don’t take hold. I’m already heading for the edge.
The slope falls away into a steep descent of rock and churning water, the river far below smashing itself against stone in a constant, grinding roar. Mist rises in thin veils at the base of the rapids.
The fall is lethal, especially since I’m not sure I can swim.
I step closer and unbutton what’s left of my shirt, shrugging it off, the fabric already half-burnt from Max’s magic.
Muscles and sinew shift as the pull in my back deepens. A slow, insistent itch crawls along my spine, like blood returning to a numb limb after it’s been unused for too long. My fingers flex at my sides, the dauntless need to jump eclipsing everything else.
Max calls my name, and there’s a thread of fear in her voice. A plea.
But if I hesitate, if I let myself doubt for one second, I might lose the fragile, undeniable certainty humming just beneath my skin.
And so, without looking back, I step off the edge.
A violent wind surges up to meet me as the water rushes closer, the river’s roar rising to meet me. For a heartbeat, there is only the fall—the weight of it, the speed, the inevitability.
My back draws tight, that buried ache snapping into something stronger, wider, as if space is being carved out of me from the inside. The air shifts again, catching in my wings, lifting me up, up, up.
I rise high in the sky, above the rivers and cliffs, higher and higher.
The fear is still there, bright and clean as the rocks rush up to meet me—but there’s joy in it, too.
Yesterday, I couldn’t even touch Max, and now I can fly.
I circle back to find Max, and it’s easier. Not effortless, not yet, but the wings hold as they should, and bend when I ask them to.
Max and Nick are half-hidden in that shallow nook of roots and pine needles, way below, and for the first time. They look so different from above. So small and fragile.
Max tilts her head up. Even from here, I can feel her lock onto me—not my body, not something she can see clearly, butthe shape of me in the air. The outline of my wings carving through the light.
They’re not fully there. Not solid. But they catch enough of the world to be seen—translucent spans stretching wide on either side of me, bending the sunlight, scattering it in faint, shifting prisms. More visible than the rest of me.
Nick just stares as I soar closer. “Well… I’ll be damned.”
Max doesn’t speak right away. There’s something haunted in her gaze.
I lower carefully, the steep slope threatening to throw off my balance the second my feet touch down. The wings twitch behind me—too large for the space, brushing against branches that snap and bend in response.
Max’s eyes track the movement.
“By the Dark One—” Nick chokes.
