Page 28 of A Sea of Fate and Starfire

“The time of sirens is dying. Humans populate the world now, and the number of Naiads shrinks every year. Thaan’s is not only a method of conquest. It is a slow and effective vanquish, whether he means it to be or not.” She stepped forward. Stepped toward me. “After an aeon of watching sirens grow weaker, smaller, less, I am ready to start anew.”

The silver bloom shone in her hand. A round little sphere, its petals pried apart at the top, thin and delicate. She held it out to me.

But I backed a step away. “What does that mean? Am I to mark the end of sirens?”

“No, child.” Theia’s eyes flashed. “You are the beginning.”

I didn’t like the light in her eyes, the way she almost smiled without stretching a single muscle in her face. My one question exploded into a thousand more, but Theia’s face blurred and mottled. The mist around us eddied in a slow circle, though it quickly became faster, catching my hair, clawing at my eyes.

“Wait,” I coughed, the air thick and sharp in my throat.

But Theia had fractured, distorted, a haze of color within the vortex. The only thing I could make out was that silver bloom, straight and unharmed by the wind.

I fought for my flying hair, catching my balance as the mist threw me to one side. “I’m not finished!”

Theia was finished. The bloom fully opened, a thousand petals yawning wide, the most beautiful flower I’d ever seen. A single petal fell, immediately snatched into the maelstrom, disappearing from sight. And something in me knew that taking the moon-damned thing was the only way out of here.

I shifted and fell forward against the push of the wind. It rained against me with unseen talons, scratching at my face and neck, battering my eyes. More petals fell, eaten by the cyclone. Hands and knees, I crawled to her, a mere shadow behind all the twisting haze, the stem and bloom caught in her fingers the center of the storm. Six petals left.

Two more ripped away.

I reached for it, fingers stretched, my arm shaking the further I extended. My hand closed around the bloom. And the wind stopped. Mist around me froze, mid-blur.

The sand opened below my feet. Silver stem in my hand, Theia watched me plummet. Free fall. A weightless body under the exigent pull of gravity.

My stomach floated somewhere in my throat, my limbs winding, fumbling, searching for solid ground.

The initial shock of falling wore away like the snap of teeth, fast and cruel. I wasn’t dropping. I was hurtling toward a target. Distant stars hung around me, constellations beyond my grasp. I focused ahead. To the growing curve of a horizon, warm sunlight dusting over an expanding skyline. Small mountains peppered its crust, snow-capped peaks just visible through clouds like tiny pebbles jutting just over the surface of a tide pool.

In my periphery, two other figures flashed forward with me. A dull huff of laughter cleaved my head. Theia had sent us up her stupid mountain just to send us back.

The flight back wreaked havoc on my eyes. I could barely open them, and when I did, they watered and stung. Somewhere along the rim of the atmosphere, the stars dimmed, the world brightening, the air less black and more blue.

A hammer bludgeoned against my chest, a sudden forceful crack.

A heartbeat.

A moment later, I coughed. Oxygen.

That silver in my skin ripened with sudden color.

The vestiges of mortality trickled in. Things that, in a very short matter of time, I’d forgotten. I was cold. Angry. Thirsty.

I did not let myself admit that I was afraid.

I knew what we were heading into.

At some point, I realized I was running. Sprinting through cloud and ozone, the scent of it thick in my nose, like cold rain over iron. Toward a blanket of snow down a heavy slope. Black ants marching up the steep slant, one of them standing still as its neighbors continued up, facing a single dark speck at the bottom.

Go, I said. Move. Get ready.

But I just watched myself stand there like a fool, calling down the mountain at the figure staring back.

I pumped my legs and arms as though it would make me move faster. Somewhere just out of sight, a whoosh of air gusted behind me as Cebrinne and Kye followed, ready to land the moment I did.

Go, I all but screamed at myself, clearly in view now, though I simply stood there, unmoving. Go, go, go, go, go!

And through the thicket below, I saw them. Coats of red, bursting from the trees, advancing on Kye’s turned back.