“Is she dead?”
“Tar Vazrenni,”Maharaja Belwar casts, and his voice enlarges.“Listen!”
Everyone stills and looks up at us.
“My daughter and her ceremony have nothing to do with what we are facing. Listen to me.” He yells instruction after instruction about where wizards need to go. But I already have my duties. I look to Mount Gandhak. The gray cloud erupting from its top grows, pluming into layer after layer of mushroom-shaped spouts. The magnitude of what we are about to face, it’s indescribable. And we don’t have much time.
Only when Maharaja Belwar pauses at the end do I truly listen. “I’m asking you all to save our country. I cannot force you to stay, but we must work together. Trust in your rajas as the gods have trusted in us and our home will still be standing at the end of this day. We will not fail.” He bows; his voice dims, and the last of us on the roof hear his final plea. “We cannot.”
Danger
Love
Passion
Blood
Death
Red, all around me, saturating, dripping, covering every particle I can see. I hold up my hands. Only the dark-brown hue of my skin has been left its natural color.
I’m in a nine-sided parlor much like a prayer room, a demented prayer room. Wait. It’s more visceral and real, but this…this is the room, the land of my nightmares.
“Adraa?”
I turn to find a woman glowing in red. Red skin, red sari, and even redder hair, lashing out like fire around her shoulders. The only color not permeated with blood is her eyes, her black-as-coal eyes. And they’re staring at me. Before I can utter the words, my brain tells me this is Erif, Goddess of fire. I tumble backward and fall hard on my butt.What the blood?
“I can’t believe I did it,” she says with a gleaming smile.
Panic builds up in my chest. I can’t breathe. There’s no air in this room. I’m going to faint. The bloodlike walls blur. They seem to be melting, gushing, oozing.
“Oh!” the woman yells. A burst of red smoke smashes into my face. I gulp back life. After a few moments of silence, calmness wraps around me like a cool blanket.
“Sorry about that. I forgot, your body thinks you are still dying.”
Still dying? Still dying!“Am I…am I dead?”
“No, not yet. But I had to take you out of there. Dloc was going to kill you.”
The ceremony swims back to memory. Yes, I was trying to contain the blizzard, but it was too much for me. Frostbiting cold. There was so much pain, and then, then nothing but the color red. “I’m not dead, then?”
“What did I just say? You’re not dead. You seemed smarter down in Wickery.”
Well, this is great.I really hope this is a dream, because I don’t want to spend the rest of eternity being ridiculed by a woman whose hair is literally smoking.
“This is a dream, right?”
“You’re not physically here, just your soul.”
“And youbroughtme here?” I scan the room. A giant fireplace sits center stage in the bleeding parlor. A set of wrought iron fireplace tools line the stone hearth. A few chairs and a table covered in satin look unused. “The nightma—I mean the dreams I’ve been having, they were you?”
“I can only open up this portal at certain times. And several possible paths led you to never performing the ceremony. So yes, I called out to you in your dreams. But even after all my preparation, I didn’t think I could do it with Dloc attacking you. He’s so melodramatic.” Erif turns from me and tends to the fireplace, poking at the embers and the little tuft of flame.
I can’t even fathom what she is saying. Dloc melodramatic?Melodramatic?“Are we just tools to all of you? Is my entire destiny based on your argument with Dloc?”
At my tone, her coal-black eyes snap to me. “Look, you don’t have a destiny because I chose you to bless. I don’t have that kind of control.”
“You don’t have that kind of control? But you did choose me. You decided to bless me. Didn’t you fight for that?” I pull up my sleeve, showcasing my bare arm. “That’s why I’m deformed like this?”
