CHAPTER NINETEEN

Falia

 

A wave of alarms slammed into Falia’s mind.

I have reestablished a connection with Ryol.

Falia bolted upright, startling the Healer bent over her recovery pod.

“You’ve been—” the Healer began to say.

Take me to her, Aurora, Falia said to Aurora. The translocation band on her arm released a burst of light that tore a hole through time and space. Falia stepped through before the Healer could finish her sentence.

Falia’s stomach twisted and kinked, spilling over and under itself. Traveling across Dimensions did not involve actual motion, but her body responded to the sensation with intense vertigo.

She exhaled softly through her nose, waiting for the spiraling dizziness to subside. Firm ground appeared beneath her feet along with a brightly lit hallway strewn with alien bodies. The Graesian High Lord Tzalear lay curled on his side. His leg twitched intermittently between shallow breaths. Despite her best effort, Falia could not establish a connection with the Graesian’s shattered mind. He was not dead. Nor was he fully alive.

Ryol’s crumpled body lying in a pool of silver blood obliterated any pity Falia might have felt for the Graesian.

Falia screamed in a way only a mother losing a child can. Her pain stretched across the galaxy and shook the alien world. She cradled Ryol’s limp body as if Ryol were only a sleeping child, and wept, lost to the world in a flood of memories that blurred the line between reality and mere thought.

Falia scoured her daughter’s mind for a flicker of life. Nothing remained, but still she clawed at the enamel of Ryol’s quieted mind in vain hope of tearing away the wall of death’s prison.

Falia held her daughter and succumbed to the anguish, shedding tears that carried pieces of her soul.