“What’s it searching for?”Shade asked, his voice soft as they continued to stare at the form that still wore Myanin’s face.
“Don’t know,” Myanin admitted.“But apparently, it’s done with me and you’re the next target.So, have fun with that.”
Suddenly the form shifted and it was no longer Myanin.Now it was a male djinn warrior that she didn’t recognize.
“Shit,” Shade said, sounding as if the air had been punched out of him.
Apparently, he did recognize said warrior.The eyes did not close.They waited, with the patience of something that had centuries to spare, for what came next.
“Let’s get this over with,” Shade told the entity.
“I feel like you’re going to need some cotton candy after this whole mind trip,” Myanin told him as she folded her arms in front of her and took a deep breath.“And if I liked you, I’d be a pal and get you some.But, I don’t.Like you, that is.So.No cotton candy for you.”
“Damn.And here I thought I could trust you.”His words were dry and flat.
“Oh, you can trust me,” she smirked.“Trust me to throw your selfish ass under the bus.I’m going to be quiet now so that it will focus on you and maybe forget I exist.”
CHAPTER4
“The vows we survive are rarely the ones we keep.It’s the ones we fail that follow us.”~Shade
Shade had foughtcreatures built from shadow and concentrated rage.He had stood on battlefields slick with blood and spent magic, listening to dying men pray to gods who never once turned their heads.He had seen things that defied the language available to describe them, and he had carried most of those things quietly, in the locked and lightless rooms of himself that he did not open for anyone.None of it had prepared him for being studied.For being weighed in the dark by something patient enough to have developed a preference about what it found, wearing the face of someone who should not have a face anymore.
Beside him, Myanin had folded her arms across her chest, a posture he had come to recognize as her particular brand of braced attention.“Well,” she muttered, “this feels invasive.”
Shade almost smiled.Almost.
Then the parchment ground beneath their feet whispered.
One page turned.Then another.Then a cascade of them, thousands of sheets shifting in sequence, building in layers until the sound became its own weather—a storm assembled entirely from paper and the memory soaked into it.The gray world around them came apart at its seams, ribbons of script lifting off invisible surfaces, ink separating from parchment and spiraling upward into a dense silver fog that moved with the deliberate, unhurried purpose of something that knew exactly where it was going.No fire this time.No heat pressing against the skin.Only cold, and mist, and the quiet sense of the floor becoming less certain beneath his boots.
“Myanin.”He said her name before he had a conscious reason to.The word came out low, almost involuntary, the way a hand reached for a wall in the dark—not because it was necessary, but because the alternative was standing in the open with nothing to orient by.
She heard it for what it was.Her chin dipped once, sharp and brief.“Hold your ground, warrior.”
The entity’s voice moved through the fog like something dragged across stone.“Second oath waits.”
The mist surged.The world folded in on itself.
And Shade was seventeen years old.
Wind tore across a stone ridge under twin moons, cold and relentless and carrying the particular edge of high altitude that scraped the lungs clean of warmth.War banners snapped overhead, canvas worn through at the corners from weeks of use.Armor rang as someone jostled past.The smell hit him first–smoke, sweat, sharpening oil, the specific metallic bite of nervous young men trying not to let it show–and with it came something that Shade had not encountered in a very long time.
Laughter.
A cookfire was dying twenty paces ahead.A loose circle of young warriors had gathered around it anyway, more for the company than the warmth, sharpening blades they would use tomorrow with the focused, almost performative energy of people engaged in something familiar precisely because everything unfamiliar was waiting on the other side of morning.They were loud in the way that only the very young and the very unprepared ever managed, too loud, with the volume turned up against something they refused to name.
Shade’s feet stopped moving on their own.
The younger version of himself stood at the edge of the circle, leaning against a supply crate with his arms loosely crossed and his dark hair tied back with something that kept threatening to come undone.The armor fit wrong, too new, the surface of it barely marked, gleaming in ways that actual use would eventually correct.The grin on his face was the kind that lived before consequence had taught it any humility, wide and certain and entirely too comfortable with its own invincibility.
He remembered being that boy.He had not missed him.
Beside him, Myanin had gone quiet.He could feel her looking, not at the scene, but at him, watching his face rather than the memory unfolding in front of them.Then she shifted her gaze back to the younger version of him, and the silence stretched for exactly two beats before she said, with the careful tone of someone choosing their words while simultaneously throwing them directly at their target, “You were pretty.”
Shade turned his head slowly and looked at her.
“That,” he began, “is your takeaway?
