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The dark pressed in around Nara. Her body ached, and either the fever crawled over her skin again or the stone beneath her moved. Something pulled at her, that feeling that there was more to come and that the world was not as it had been.
She reached for Haven. Fear pressed on her chest at the lack of him. Her fingers searched across the cool stone surrounding her, but there was no sign of anything else with her in the dark.
How many lives together had it taken to learn they could not be separated? How had they ever thought that the world might be something different? That it might not try to kill them or drag them apart.
The memory of the first life, when his head had bounced across the gravel, reared before Nara as though she were watching it unfold again. That surreal moment of disbelief that he had actually died. In some strange way, despite the fear she had felt that day at the sight of her father and the old lord, she had not truly believed that they would die. And in a heartbeat, Haven was gone. The only hope she had found in all her years, and it was lost.
Haven’s outstretched blade had sparkled in the sun, calling to her. She had pushed forward without hesitation, without fear of what might be waiting for her beyond death or what she might have left behind. There had been moments during her lives where she had told herself she had done it in some small part to help her sister—to save her from the same life—and yet she knew that was false. She had been selfish and sad, and she couldn’t be left behind again.
Her mother’s face loomed in the shadows of her mind. Nara had missed her so terribly, and now someone stood before her, the same in every way other than her smile. Had that smile worried Nara or scared her? She was the last face Nara had expected to see here, or anywhere. Nara had never seen her since her first life.
She had seen her sister, she thought, although she could no longer be certain. Her sister was always a small child flitting around at the periphery of her memory. She had always been a child. And despite the need to grow quickly given her mother’s death and her father’s expectations, Nara had been very much a child herself.
Nara pressed her cool fingertips to her eyelids and then dragged her fingers down her cheeks, trying to remind herself that she was still alive. Although, had she ever truly been dead? She had thought she would be following Haven to a better place. Was all this some dream, some madness created by her own selfishness?
Her fingers moved to her chest, over her heart as it beat too fast. There was no mark, no scar, nothing to indicate that she had thrown herself against the sword at all. That wide, pointed, and too-sharp blade.
She squeezed her eyes closed, watching the memory unfold in slow motion through her mind. The straight blade slicing through the air and Haven’s neck, as though there was no resistance at all.
How many times had she looked at that neck and run her finger over the mark that did not exist for him either. The blows that had separated them over and over disappeared. None of the slices through necks and limbs and chests, nor slashes of claws and blades and teeth that had taken them from one life to the next were evident when they reached the next life. Nothing to remind them of what had gone before, and yet she remembered every day, every move, every touch, and every death.
“Haven?” she whispered into the darkness, the weight of the world lifting as the sound of his name echoed oddly around her. Had the walls closed in? Had she moved, or had she been moved?
There was no reply, nothing to give her any hope. The only sensation that indicated she still existed in the world was the cold stone she lay against. She took a deep breath and coughed at the cold and dust that filled her lungs. There was no hint of the fire tree. The idea that this could be their last life returned, scaring her further. If there was no coming back from this, they couldn’t take the same risks.
Whether this was their last life or not, it was certainly very different to any other life. The enemy was lost to them, their reason for being here unfathomable. As was the illness that had wracked her body when they arrived and her willingness to follow these creatures that had tried to kill them.
Did the woman who looked like her long-lost mother connect them? Was Nara following odd ideas and throwing away what lifetimes lost had taught her? But then, she hadn’t sensed the woman in the stones.
Something was coming, some force that scared her. She knew, even in the fog of her fever, that this threat would be more dangerous than anything else they had faced, and yet there was no sense of danger.
Mer swam past her memories, dragging the image of the snow away, leaving swirling dark water behind. Something was drawing them away from their purpose here. Or something was drawing them apart to reach that purpose.
“Haven!” she screamed, her voice raw, the sound not travelling nearly as far as she thought it should. There was no sound in the space around her at all.
The cold ground pressed against her back, and she sat up slowly. There was no hint of the huge creatures that had curled together, no sound of movement, breathing, or anyone else. She reached out then, feeling across the ridged stone floor for her sword. She had held her sword in her hand. Not her stones—Haven had her stones, and she missed them more than she did when she was beneath the fire tree. She wondered again at the reason she didn’t have those things there. Was it to separate her memories in some way, to make her think when she returned to the world that it was her sword, that they were her stones?
Her mother’s stones, she thought, although Haven had long ago reminded her that they were not. They belonged to Nara, although that did her no good now, other than they in some way led her to Haven. She found nothing around her but the ridges of stone, her fingers searching. She lay back for a moment, trying to focus her strength and calm her mind in the oppressing darkness.
Taking a deep breath, Nara stood slowly, telling herself she didn’t need the sword. She had been lost in the dark before and could survive again, if for no other reason but for Haven. She stretched out her hands and found nothing on either side, then did the same above her head. Nothing there either. She stepped forward slowly, the narrow ridges cold against the soles of her feet. She inched forward, her hands stretched out before her, feeling in the dark for anything.
Her toes met something colder. When she squatted down to feel it, her hand closed around the handle of her sword. Or a sword, at least. As her left hand moved slowly along the too-smooth blade, she understood there should be something else there.
There was something missing from the blade, although she knew it to be hers. The familiar weight of it, the soft leather of the handle... It was as though she had carried it for a lifetime, for many of them, and yet she knew with everything she had that this was wrong. That this was not her sword. It had been replaced, and she couldn’t quite get her head around the idea that it might have been replaced every lifetime. That couldn’t be. It was hers.
As she imagined the symbols she thought should be on the blade, they appeared beneath her fingers. Something deep within the blade drew her in, and a soft blue light illuminated the etchings. That too was wrong and yet so right. She traced over them, still ignorant of their meaning.
Had she tried to work them out at any stage? Had they made sense to her in any lifetime? Other than they marked it as her sword and contained the magic she needed to help defeat the monsters they were cursed to hunt out life after life after life.
She allowed the sword to drop down by her side. The faint blue glow did not appear real, as though it was what she needed it to be but not what it was. She was likely still lost in the dark, imagining a world that no longer existed.
She touched the tip of the sword to the stone floor, and the point slipped easily into a groove in the stone. The world suddenly lit up around her, a spiral pattern in the floor awash with a fine blue light as though the stone itself glowed.
The pale light showed that Nara was alone. Nothing and no one else close, not even the walls of whatever darkness she was trapped in, other than the pale blue spiral of the floor. She turned slowly, trying to take in the world around her and see if there was anything that would give her an idea of where she might be. Of what this might be.
Haven had yet to tell her where he had gone or what he had found when he’d left her in the cavern. She wondered if he had become lost in the same way. Disappearing from the world to find himself within the stone. The idea made more sense than anything else they had seen or learnt so far. She was inside the stone. Not the stone she had seen with Shadow—not the larger version of her own stones. It was something else, something darker.
And it wanted something from her, from them.
As she lifted the sword from the stone, the pale blue light continued to light up the floor. Nara stepped forward, unsure what she was searching for, but the answer was in the stone somewhere here, and she was going to find it. The light started to fade, and then it pulsed through the stone, moving outward from her in waves, trickling along the ridges in the floor as though it were water running through the grooves. She followed the pulse, and then it moved up and along the walls, showing just how large the space was.
Had she fallen beneath the ground? If the stone could move, as she had seen it do in the cavern, then perhaps it could swallow her whole and she would be trapped beneath the ground, within the stone, far away from Haven.
Her heart beat fast, too fast, as the panic started to close in around her again. The light went out. Darkness pressed in on her, darker and more frightening than before. In the next heartbeat, the blue light pulsed once more, followed too closely by darkness.
Nara tried to steady her breathing and the panic. She would find a way back to him; she always did. She just needed to find out where she was and who wanted her here. As the memory of the soldier and his desire to take her for his father flashed frighteningly close, the next pulse of blue light lit up a tree.
Blinking in disbelief, Nara stepped forward and reached her hand towards it. The next pulse lit up the leaves. She pressed her hand to the trunk and found the tree made of cold stone, then pulled back. It was so like the fire tree that she was certain that even the next world was gone. She dropped to her knees, the sword clattering from her hand across the stone, and the tree remained in the pale blue light, barely lighting its surroundings.
Nara was lost in the dark. Regardless of the Fates or what they had in store for her next, it no longer mattered if she was alone in the dark. There was nothing worth fighting for, nothing worth trying to cure or hunt or learn.
“Sunshine,” whispered from leaves that moved as the flames did on the fire tree, and yet she knew it to be an illusion, that the tree here was dead and lost. “Sunshine,” it whispered again.
“It is gone,” she replied, her voice angrier than she thought she was. It echoed around her, growing darker and harsher as it reverberated around her.
“Sunshine,” it whispered again.
Haven used the name often, and yet no one else had ever called her by it. No one else had known why he had called her such a name. Such a silly name, she thought now, the anger still strong that he would think she was something special—something that would light up the world and save them both. She slumped then, her hands meeting the cool stone, not nearly as cold as she thought it should be, and yet it didn’t have the same warmth as the cavern she had been in.
There had been another place, made of white stone. As she thought of it, the tree before her changed. The trunk paled and travelled up through the branches, the leaves turning white and then pulsing blue again as though just for her, due to her. Nara dragged herself to her feet, leaving the sword where it was, and reached again for the trunk.
A leaf fell slowly, as though carried on a breeze she couldn’t see. She reached out her hand to catch it. It was cool, and as soon as it settled, it dissolved into dust. She brushed it from her palm, and a red mark was left, an indent as though she had leaned on something for too long. The imprint was of a tree surrounded by circles, made up by a continuous line, etched into her hand forever. Was this the hand she had touched to the trunk? Was this the hand she pushed to the ground? Or was this the stone marking her as its own?
“Stone man,” she whispered. Shadow and her people had said something about a stone man. That she was working with the stone man. Was he the force that moved the stones, that dragged her here and pulled them to this life?
The world around her dropped back into darkness. It scared her more than she had thought it might. Perhaps it was the idea of the stone man that had caused the light to go out. Her hand throbbed as though calling her. She stood in the dark, waiting for the light to return, for the tree to glow blue again, and yet it didn’t. Nor did the stone around her. The floor remained steadfastly dark. She stepped back, feeling for the sword she was sure she had dropped at her feet, then fell to her hands and knees searching for it.
She felt about, knowing she had the ability to draw it to her, to guide it. Then she squealed and pulled her hand back as the blade sliced through her palm. She missed Haven in that moment, missed him more than she had when she had lost him, fearing she would never find him again. He had thought he had cut her once before with her sword, in their last life, although she had done that herself. Fear, again, had driven her.
She squeezed her hand around the cord on her wrist, knowing it would do nothing to stem the bleeding. The sting of the wound only increased. It was fine, she thought, but she had no idea how deep.
Her hand tingled, longing for the stones she had given to him for safe keeping. If she didn’t return, would they become useful to him? Would they tell him what they had told her and keep him safe?
“Run,” whispered through her mind.
Haven had wanted to run in their last life when he had tried to read her stones, tried to see if they whispered to him in the same way they whispered to her. The message he had heard was to run. They had never run away. But that was a lie, she thought, sitting heavily on the cool stone, her hand still gripped around her wrist. Her palm stung, and it wasn’t healing as it had before. She winced as she reached for the sword again.
She had run away with Haven, followed him to a place she could never return from, where they tried to be together and yet couldn’t be. Nara’s fingers found the handle of her sword, and she dragged it closer rather than pick it up. Despite the risk of cutting herself further, she sat the sword across her lap and, with her hand around the handle, set her wounded hand across the blade. The blade was smooth once more; the markings had disappeared.
Nara was lost, she thought, and far from everything—including herself. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes against the darkness, no longer trying to see what was not there. The sword pulsed beneath her hand. Could she make it glow if she wanted to? Her lightning might find a way out of wherever she was, but she didn’t trust that either.
No, it was herself she did not trust. Nothing was as it should be. Nara was not what she had been, although she had always been selfish. The feeling made her shoulders drop even more, and she hunched over the sword in her lap.
Maybe there was no monster here but them. Perhaps she was the monster she had feared, and she had to find a way to sacrifice herself for these people to survive. Like her mother might have done—although that wasn’t true either. She had simply died, leaving Nara and her sister to fend for themselves. Nara had then abandoned her sister in the same way, leaving her at the mercy of her father and possibly the old lecherous lord.
Her father had wanted her to save him, Nara thought as she wrapped her fingers around the sharp blade. He had been willing to sacrifice her to save himself. Perhaps she had saved him; perhaps her actions had allowed him whatever freedom he demanded. Although she couldn’t imagine what he had meant at the time. For many lifetimes, she had thought his words had cursed her, had created the world in which she was trapped.
But she had done that herself. The more she dwelt on it, the more she tried to piece together all the odd clues and strange creatures they had met over their lifetimes. It was all in some way caused by her, created by her selfishness to save a man she didn’t know and remain with him.
A hand rested on her shoulder, firm and yet comforting, and yet not Haven’s. She did not deserve the faith he had in her, the love he gave her, or the belief that they would remain together.
“No,” rumbled softly around her. Nara couldn’t tell if it was female or male. She glanced about in the darkness, trying to determine who might be there. The sword glowed in her lap with the longing to see, bright and brilliant, and she squinted away from it. Only emptiness surrounded her.
The tree was gone, but her hand was unmarked when she pulled it away from the sword, other than the impression of the tree in her palm.
Haven would come for her, Nara knew that. She was just as certain she didn’t deserve saving. Even if there was no chance at the fire tree and another life.