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Silver
“Try it again,” Keelen urged, his brow furrowed. A dark, curled lock of hair fell at his eyebrow and he swiped it away, but it fell loosely there again. No, not Keelen. Rory...
“I am,” Silver said between clenched teeth. She slammed her hand against the wall, the strength from her magic causing several jagged cracks to run up its length.
All that did was make her palm ache, not open even a sliver of the portal’s entrance to Valgmyr. “I’ve been trying for days.” He’d been right—this wouldn’t be easy, even though she’d assumed she could do it in a couple tries, not hundreds of failed attempts. And not a single one had even gotten close.
“Only two.” He sighed, his lids fluttering. He’d refused to sleep—because she wouldn’t sleep.
“Rory.” Silver’s voice came out tired, frustrated.
“You’re going to call me Rory now?” He lifted a brow, trying to appear playful, but there was something hidden in his tone she couldn’t make out. If he remembered who he was, wasn’t that what he would want to be called by anyway?
“It’s your name, isn’t it?”
He nodded, shrugging. “You can call me whatever you want.”
“We don’t have time to sit here and argue over names.” She leaned her back against the wall, the stinging sensation finally vanishing from her palm. “Pick one.”
“Keelen.”
“You should have just said that to begin with then,” Silver muttered, even though calling him Keelen felt more natural to her.
Closing her eyes, Silver concentrated, digging deeper as she ventured down into the magic of the earth, the way she had in Ketill when she’d located Keelen’s soul from Valgmyr. Not Torlarah as she’d once thought. The magic in Enare perfectly matched that of Ketill’s, in strength and in the way she could use it, but she couldn’t grasp what she needed in order to open the damn portal and find her sister.
Silver knew how to maneuver through the different colors of energy, what strings to grab, how hard to pull them. The darkness was there, as it always was, a mixture of blacks and grays, muted hues, weaving together. But she needed to go farther, to find that pure obsidian where not a single drop of light or gray existed.
When sweat beaded her forehead, her upper lip, her neck, her back, and she couldn’t sink into the magic anymore, Silver pressed her hand to the wall and pleaded with it to open. Just a crack, a sliver. Enough so she could squeeze through. Her hand shook as she inhaled the energy into her lungs, letting it spread within her. Beneath her palm, there was still only hardness, and she couldn’t feel anything else, only the same amount of darkness she’d used to bring Keelen here over the years.
Silver yanked back her arm and slammed her hand against the wall once more. Pain radiated.
“Stop fucking doing that,” Keelen demanded. “It isn’t going to do anything except injure your hand, and you don’t want any weaknesses once we get past the barrier.” Not if. But when. His words made it seem like he knew she would get the portal open. She desperately wished she could. That it would happen now.
Silver turned to Keelen, her chest heaving. “Since Ragan and the imps travel through the portal easily, why can’t you?”
“I don’t know.” He bit his lip, scowling as he seemed to focus on the wall, the ceiling, the floor. “It has to be because I’m not inside my own body.”
Right... That part wasn’t new to her. Silver had known every time she brought his soul to Ketill that the body he was in wasn’t his. He wasn’t a raven, and this male body didn’t belong to him... But now that she knew where he truly was from, it felt different. Taking a deep swallow, she wondered what his natural form looked like. She remembered the imps slipping from the walls in her room and holding her down. Was that what he was? Skeletal, misshapen, soulless ivory eyes. Or did he appear more like Ragan did? She hadn’t seen the Valgmyr King with his wings or horns, though.
Shaking off the images and straightening her spine, she told herself it didn’t matter. Keelen had lied to her. Perhaps not in the beginning because he hadn’t known then, even though he’d concealed that he remembered her after they’d kissed. But he had lied when he believed himself to be the Valgmyr King. He could have told her what he suspected—should have. Maybe then she might have been able to prevent her sister from being taken or willingly choosing to go. If the imps hadn’t used their energy to knock Silver out, she could have stopped this.
“What should I do now?” She exhaled, locking her gaze with Keelen’s.
“Now we go to Javan to say goodbye. Take a break. Think.” His voice told her that she needed to rest before she hurt herself. Her body was starting to droop from weakness.
While she’d been working to get the portal open without any sleep, Keelen had taken a break to go outside and make a pyre for Javan. He’d gathered what he could from around the castle and hadn’t asked her to help him. She knew he’d done it for her, and she didn’t know if she would have had the strength to do that if he hadn’t.
Swiping her arm across her forehead, Silver nodded. She didn’t say another word as he led her outside to the front of the castle, near the rose garden that was no longer dead. The empty, withered branches were now healthy and blossoming with lush green leaves and deep red roses. Even the trees were in full bloom with oranges and pears—the returned magic had revived all the foliage around the castle.
In front of the garden were twigs, branches, and dried leaves that Keelen had collected. In Ketill, this pyre would have been considered pitiful, a shameful funeral, and it wasn’t enough for Javan. But it was the best they could do.
Javan’s body lay atop the cluster of limbs and brown leaves, his eyes closed, his sword and cane on either side of him. He was still, too still. His soul was no longer there, yet Silver could still feel his comfortable presence.
Keelen bent down, pressed his palm to the twigs, and a spark of orange erupted. Since remembering who he was, he had been able to dive into the magic, just as she could. She placed her hand at the opposite side of the pyre, trailing her fingers across several broken twigs and cracked leaves, letting flames ignite. Her veins thrummed as she pushed the flames forward to spread and conquer. Her fire became one with Keelen’s, licking at every inch of the dead foliage before encircling Javan’s body, cocooning him in its scorching embrace.
“Goodbye, Javan.” He was her family, and would have been even if they weren’t related by blood.
Silver and Keelen stood beside one another, neither saying a word because there was nothing to say in the moment. She watched until only ash remained.
Javan should have stayed in Ketill, then he wouldn’t have had to have a funeral in a foreign land. But it was his heart that had taken him, and it wouldn’t have pumped for much longer. She’d felt how weak it had become, through her magic, just before his last breath.
Silver couldn’t spend any more time studying the disintegrated pyre, so she fractured the silence. “What are you? Are you like the imps? You said they created you.”
“I do have wings. But I’m not an imp.” He pressed a hand to his forehead. “I have horns here, and flesh like I do now.”
“Oh.” That part was a relief, but would it have mattered if he looked like those creatures? Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. It didn’t matter right then anyway.
“So you’ve only left Valgmyr when I’ve brought you here?” she continued.
He nodded. “Only then.”
“And you had no other companions besides Ragan? Only the imps?”
“I had you when you brought me out. I thought it would never happen again before you brought me back and into this body. But Silver...” Keelen sighed. “Every time I returned from being with you, I knew I could never truly stay in Ketill. The imps would bring humans home, and I would take some of the females to my bed. After hundreds of years of Ragan seeing females and males die, he refused to get close to any of them. I’ve only been alive twenty-two years. Most of the humans were lonely ... and I was lonely too. And then they would die, or I would end their lives for them when their time was drawing near. I didn’t ever love them in that way, and they didn’t love me either—only a mutual caring, a necessity to survive. And I wished you’d been there instead...” His voice trailed off.
Silver blinked, not knowing how to react. She’d been alive almost as long as he had, but she hadn’t brought the entire world to her bed. There’d only been a few kisses. Something green and envious slithered inside her, even though he’d been trapped in a place with monsters and a brother who she wanted to slap again. “I see.”
“It doesn’t matter.” He paused, his eyes flickering with something new. Hope? “I think I know what we’ve been doing wrong. You’re not going to be able to open the portal. I need to open it. But I can’t with this body.”
Silver furrowed her brow in confusion. “Then how will we?”
“It still has to be you. You need to dip into the dark magic. Instead of directly opening the portal first, you’re going to have to bring my body from Valgmyr to here.”
A body? An entire body? Could she even do that? She had only ever been able to drag his soul from there. But it wouldn’t be her alone this time—he would be working alongside her. His strength matching hers.
“Just tell me what to do,” Silver said.
Keelen’s eyes flashed with anticipation, his warm hand clasping hers. “We have to draw a circle on the floor, step inside, and then you’re going to need to give yourself to me.”
