91

Ash

The butterflies dissolve, leaving me suspended above a vast space. Where am I?

“Below,” the creature says.

I drop my gaze and dive like a falcon, pulling up at the last moment to land on a hard wooden chair. My child-size hands fold into my lap and my bare feet swing above the polished floor. I know this place. It’s Brogal’s chambers.

“A memory of it,” the creature confirms.

I remember it, sitting in quiet meditation under Master Brogal’s guidance. We did it daily for months.

“Do you know what it was for?”

He was helping me.

“Was he?”

In the back of my mind, I hear scraping, like workers rebuilding a wall as the child-me chants. I twist, glimpsing with my mind’s eye a barrier that is nearly complete. Something golden is behind it, about to be sealed in. I tremble, suddenly feeling nauseous. Brogal did this?

“You both did.”

“Pay attention, Ash.” Brogal sits at his desk, leaning forward. “Repeat only this chant, no other.”

He promised it would raise my phantom, I say to the creature, but I can hear the doubt in my voice.

“Then why did it raise a wall instead?”

I turn to watch the masons whistling as they work. The job is nearly done, just a few more bricks to go. Behind the wall, the golden creature twists and turns, evading the fire that erupts when it tries to scratch and bite its way out. All the while the whistlers keep working and I keep chanting. They tap the final brick into place, sealing the creature away in the darkness. Mortar smooths over the chinks, obliterating every trace. I reach out, but it burns me, and I jerk my hand back, blowing on my fingertips.

From behind the wall are muffled cries.

“Master Brogal? Did you hear that?” the child-me asks.

“Keep chanting, girl. It’s nearly done.”

I take a deep breath and continue repeating the words Master Brogal taught me, the words that will help raise my phantom.

“Enough,” he booms, and I come back to awareness. A shock goes through my body, like a heavy door slamming shut. My jaw clamps tight, mid vowel, and I bite my tongue. The rhythm breaks and I cry out.

Brogal shakes his head. “Ash,” he says, so very disappointed. “We must accept that you are non-savant.” His words pierce my heart.

“Please, Master. I will try—”

His features contort like melting wax. I see the wall fail for the briefest of moments, coming down in the Sanctuary of Baiseen, only to be built again. This time the binding is done with living filaments, unbreakable strands that come from Brogal himself.

A soul binding?

With that thought, I snap back into the High Savant’s chambers, but it’s some future, I think. He’s so thin, and he babbles, his shoulders twitching from side to side. Something’s very wrong.

“Bindings come at a price—as do their breaking. Brogal pays with his mind, as do you.”

The next moment I’m on the Isle of Bakton. A shadow phantom clawing at my mouth and barreling down my throat. The CRACK resonates through me. I can fell the wall split.

“So it began.” My inner voice brings me back to the present.

The wall? Cracking?

“You might say that the shadow was our liberator.”

Our? I still can’t believe…

“Protect yourself, Ash.” My inner voice cuts in. “Protect us, or we will not survive this battle.”

This battle? Which one is that?

Suddenly I’m back in the field of Avon Eyre, a sword slicing so close to my face the rush of it whips my hair back. I scream from inside a closed mouth, jaw clenched tight as I block the next blow. Somewhere deep inside my mind, a single brick cracks and mortar trickles down in a tiny river of rocks.

“Protect us, Ash. Set me free.”

Adrenaline courses through me and I fight back.

Bodies lie scattered over the field as second, third, and fourth waves of the assault roll in. I can’t see Tomik and his lion anywhere. And then, a red-robe flashes in the early dawn light. Tann. The High Savant who destroyed Aku, stole their first whistle bone, and tried to destroy Baiseen as well. He catches my eye, and like a storm changing course, he strides straight for me.

Beside him is a reptilian ouster, walking upright on hind legs. Its snout is long like a garfish, eyes limpid and round. It begins to twirl its short front legs in a conjuring motion. The wind picks up around him, funneling like a dust devil.

“Set me free!”

I am inside my mind, pulling frantically at the bricks. There’s movement, a glimpse of gold as another brick falls. The creature—the phantom!—twists and turns in the confined space, spiked tail lashing, its skin a writhing sea of darkness and light. Large eyes open and shine up at me.

It’s like looking into the eyes of everyone I have ever loved.

They brim with uncontainable emotion, but around them, phantom scales tear off and bleed.

I pound at the prison wall and see the crack widen, just a bit. I pound harder, desperate to bring it down. Pain shudders through me and more of the wall splits apart. There’s room to reach for a strand of the pulsing blue soul that strengthens the prison. I grab it, pulling until it snaps. I break another, and another. Inside the falling prison, the half-blackened, half-shimmering creature uncoils, reaching out a long, slender claw. “Free me!”

I scratch at more bricks, ripping them loose. When I can stretch through far enough to reach the phantom’s head, I grasp the last bind, a muzzle cinched tight as barbed wire. Energy rushes up my arm and into my hand and I snap it in two.

The phantom’s mouth flies open as it lets out a roar that shakes the rest of the bricks to the ground. She dives headfirst out of the cell. The phantom, my phantom, channels through my body until finding its way into my soul. There she burrows deep, encased and protected, surrounded by all the space in the infinite path.

My eyes fill with tears as she says, I am Natsari, your phantom, and you are my savant.

The final brick turns to crumbles as Brogal’s tattered blue soul strands writhe about before dissolving—the cursed prison destroyed.

But it hits me. Well, not all of it, because that is too much at once, but the name… Natsari did she say? “Um, I need to ask—”

Maybe deal with the red-robe first.

I look up and time slams back into place at high speed. Tann towers over me not a foot away, my white robes suddenly blooming with blood.

“They tell me you are the missing child of the Japera line,” the red-robe says in his deep, growling voice. “Deemed marred and drowned. Indeed, we can assume that was a lie.”

My body begins to quiver, muscles acting out of sync with each other. “Japera?”

“I wonder what she will say when she finds her scheme exposed?”

I stare at him, uncomprehending.

“Pitiable child.” He shakes his head. “You really were cursed to hide in the shadows.” He bends closer still. “And it would have worked, if they’d plucked your eyes from your skull at birth and let you live sightless. As it is, they’re a dead giveaway. I’m surprised Brogal didn’t notice sooner.”

I shrink back from his words.

“Or did he?”

“What does he mean?”

Later, Natsari says, replying with a growl of her own. Let me up.

Up? I may be a long-lost savant, but there is no way I can raise my phantom, wounded as she is, on the first try, let alone face down a red-robe. My heart is rich with her presence, but I haven’t lost all sense. Our reunion will be short-lived. Tann is about to throw us right off the path.

Quick as a snake, he grabs my hair and wrenches my face up to his. As he searches my eyes, he snarls. “Brogal blundered the job.” He slams my head to the ground, cracking it on the ice. “But I won’t.”

“Stop.” I gargle the command. Strings of blood fling from my mouth to paint us in red streamers.

He doesn’t hear me or notice the energy building in my core.

Heat infuses my body. “Stop!” I shout, using his grip on my hair as a lever to rise to my feet. I strike with my fist, an uppercut to his jaw.

Tann rocks back on his heels. I guess he didn’t expect me to have the strength for that. But I fall back down to my knees.

My chin is on my chest, arms hanging limp, face hidden. I’m wheezing as if on my last breath, head bent low but really, I’m struggling to make room for all this…

Power? my phantom says. Call me up!

I scan the battlefield with my mind’s eye. “We have to make sure Tomik is safe.”

Natsari huffs. Be quick.

“Tomik!” I call to him, mind-to-mind. “You and the rest of the Brotherhood get behind us, fast.”

“Who’s us?”

“Just get behind me!”

Under the building whirl of energy, I turn to lock eyes with Tann. Puffy skin frames his dark eyes, his pupils dilate. The blackness takes up most of the irises, like an animal with their prey. Only I don’t think he knows what he’s caught in his trap this time. 

“Natsari? Are you ready to rise?” I ask, knowing that there has been no time for healing.

I will try. Just like my dry inner voice, the word try drips with sarcasm.

It’s a good sign.

I’ve sat beside Marcus a thousand times before when he tried to raise his phantom and hold it to solid form, so this isn’t new to me, in theory. But it’s different to be the one on their knees, calling up what has been so long imprisoned. I visualize the process, but not with Brogal’s chant. Never again will I utter his poisonous words. And there is no telling its true size and strength. Huge in the vision, yes, but it could be a sprite, the size of a house cat, or maybe a hunting dog. I’m fine either way, but…

Will you get on with it?

“This is all new—”

No, it is not. Let me up!

My knees shake as I chant Gaveren the Great’s own call, as Marcus used to practice it. “On-gal-ma. On-gal-ma…” Heat builds, starting with my feet and coursing up my spine. The fire nearly consumes me until, just before it reaches my head, I whisper aloud, “ON-gal-ma.”

“What do you think you’re doing, girl?” Tann steps in to grab me.

But he’s too slow.

A crack booms through the ground, knocking him over.

“…on-GAL-ma.”

Fissures radiate in all directions.

“…on-gal-MA.” I pound both fists into the earth in time with my chant. My skin grates on the ice, and my wrists bruise as they connect with rock, but there is no denying my phantom, even in such a damaged state.

Damaged is not always a weakness, she says, and the thought warms me.

The ground shudders, splitting farther, a web of crevices glowing from the depths. I feel the power of Amassia meet me and I sway, gaining my feet.

“Now rise!” I say under my breath.

Everything goes still, and then white light sears across the sky as the entire field from the stables to the feet of the mountain range implodes. A deafening boom follows. Bodies fly high alongside wood, dirt, and snow, catapulted toward the distant trees. Tann is flung away, and for a split-second everything hangs in the air until another impact discharges.

Dirt and ice spray a hundred feet high, momentarily blocking the early morning sun. From the ground leaps a phantom of the purest golden light and blackest shadow. Emerging out of the void, its draconic jaws open in a war cry that I hear only in my mind—a torrent of grief, pain, passion, anger, joy, injustice, freedom, desire, fear, love, hate...an avalanche of feelings that shoot skyward as Natsari springs into the air. All I can think is, she’s huge—twice the height and the length of three horses from head to tail. I know I’m supposed to be directing her, but it takes a moment for me to close my mouth. Um…go get Tann. No way will I let him escape.

In seconds Natsari gains an impossible speed, a streak of light with a singular intention. Tann is still falling from the initial shockwave and my phantom catches up to him with a force so colossal it rips the fabric of the world. A sphere of dark energy engulfs everything and in that negative space, Tann folds in half, spinal column shattering as the tear in the sky collapses, sealing itself, creating a third, excruciating explosion that knocks me to the ground.

The red-robe Tann joins the streak of light on a new trajectory. My phantom sends him spinning into the trunk of an ancient spruce, uprooting the tree and arcing it through the air. A cloud of particles flows from him. Ants? After a moment’s pause, Tann, along with a sky full of debris, comes crashing back to the ground.

Natsari, undulating in the rays of sunrise, turns to me. What’s next?