Draka

None of us, neither Herald nor Mak nor myself, was very enthusiastic about moving on from the village. But we were all big girls, and we sucked it up and got back in the air. We had Nest Hearts to eat.

I followed the threads generally due north. My plan was simple: I’d avoid goblin villages. Anything else was fair game. Even with what Jekrie and the others had told me about the goblins, that they were aggressive and just took rather than trying to trade, I’d felt bad the last time I’d eaten a Heart in the middle of a village. My first meeting with goblins, with Nalleeka and her Something Goat tribe, had been good, and I hoped that all goblins had the same potential to be reasonable.

The Hearts were dense on the ground, noticeably denser, and further south, than they had been only weeks ago. At least that was how it felt as I cruised above the northern forest, following the glut of bright threads, each dragging me towards its source. I’d follow one, feel its source, only for another to entice me, only miles away. I slowly forgot about the rain and my discomfort, spoiled for choice until Mak called to me.

“There! Wasn’t that one? We just passed over a Heart!”

Damn. In the moment I’d forgotten that she and Herald could both sense Hearts when they were close enough. She was right, of course. I’d just passed right over one, for no reason other than that there was another right ahead.

“I didn’t like it,” I fibbed pointlessly. Mak could tell when I lied. “Didn’t feel safe.”

Mak kindly kept silent.

By the next Heart I thought I saw some tents through the trees, but the next one lay alone. I had no way to tell what kind of creature it might be connected to — hopefully not trolls — but with the horrid weather I hoped that nothing would come to visit.

Previously, when I approached Hearts in the forest, I’d Shift low above the treetops. For obvious reasons I couldn’t do that now, so landing took a while before I found the right approach. Still, within a few moments I was among the trees, standing ankle deep in water on the mossy forest floor. I had my wings up, creating a canopy for all three of us to shelter under.

“And now what?” Mak asked. The Heart hung before us. It spun lazily, a long, narrow core of solid blackness both taller and wider than Mak and surrounded by whirling streamers of shadow. Every part of it was bordered with a golden glow, and when I switched to shadow sight the whole thing shone, a needle of light descending from the infinity of space to pin it to the ground.

“Now you stick your hand in there,” I told her, “and you try to draw it into yourself. Or try to turn it off, to use Herald’s analogy.”

“It is just like turning off a light-stone,” Herald said matter-of-factly.

“Well, I mean… it is,” I agreed. “Herald did it just fine last time, so try it, would you?”

“All right,” Mak said dubiously, taking a few steps towards the Heart. I followed her, keeping her sheltered from the hammering rain, and watched with growing excitement as she extended her hand. At first she only allowed the swirling shadows to brush her knuckles, but when that didn’t do any harm she became bolder. Soon he had her entire hand inside the roiling mass of darkness.

“Go ahead,” Herald said. “Draw it in!”

Mak hesitated, just staring at the void into which she’d plunged her hand. Then she set her shoulders and focused. At first there was only a tendril, separating off the core and plunging into her arm, where it turned to golden light and traveled to her heart. More joined it, one by one, until a torrent of shadow was flowing into her, transforming to liquid gold as it touched her skin. And yet, just like with Herald, it was nothing compared to when I did it. The Heart was only barely diminished when Mak jerked her hand back, breaking the connection. She fell to her knees, breathing heavily.

“Oh!” she gasped, looking around herself. “Oh, wow!”

“Bloody fantastic, isn’t it?” I asked.

“It’s…” She turned and looked at me with wonder. “Was the world always this beautiful?”

“It was,” Herald said, bending to help our sister to her feet. “You just did not have the right eyes.”

“I feel like I’ve gained something that was always missing,” Mak said with wonder. “Like a void inside me has been filled that I didn’t even know was there, and now I feel amazing!”

“I bet,” Herald said, giggling, and Mak swatted her on the arm in mock outrage.

“I’m trying to have a moment here!”

“For real, though,” I said, “that’s how I felt, too. Now, you do it, Herald. And be quick about it! I want to finish this thing off once you’re done.”

Herald did as I’d asked, eagerly sticking her hand into the Heart and drawing in as much as she could before withdrawing. It again surprised me how little my sisters took in order to fill themselves. When it was my turn I drew as quickly as I could, and I could tell just by looking that I was drawing the stuff in ten, twenty, a hundred times faster than they had.

It ended as it always did. Once all the streamers of shadow had been stripped away, the Heart itself, the solid core, collapsed into me. It joined the rest of what I’d taken in the ball around my heart, which pulsed, collapsed, and exploded.

Shortly thereafter I awoke to my sisters shaking me and demanding I put their shelter back up. Not a word of worry, not a single “How are you?” Just laughter mixed with, “Get up you lazy lizard,” and, “Please, Draka, get your wings up! Oh, Mercies, why did I agree to this?”

My sisters were so demanding. Luckily for them, eating the Heart had me in an incredibly fine mood. The cold autumn rain was bracing, and I raised my face to it for a moment before putting my wings up for them. They instantly huddled in close, laughing as they shook off their raincoats, with Mak squeezing herself between me and Herald where she was properly sheltered.

“Now what?” Mak asked. She was full of excitement, and when I looked down I almost laughed myself. Standing there, pressed in as she was and wearing her raincoat, she looked like a little kid following her older siblings around. “Wanna go find another one? We should find you another one, Draka! I don’t think Herald or I could take anymore, but have you ever tried to eat another one when you already have one in you?”

“I… haven’t,” I admitted, the words coming slowly as I asked myself why the hell not? Why hadn’t I tried to just eat two, or three, or more Hearts in a row before expending all the power they gave me? It was one of these things that was obvious once someone brought it up. Maybe I’d just always been so satisfied; as it stood, with the Need gone I didn’t feel any urge to find and eat another. I’d sated my hunger, so why be a glutton?

Why? Because I could, of course! I could at least try.

“There’s another less than four miles away,” I told them. “Get on, Herald! Mak, get ready! Let’s try this!”

Over the next hour we found three more unclaimed Hearts. I ate two of them. Each time the feeling of fullness and energy increased, and the euphoria lasted longer. Herald told me that I shone brighter in her shadowsight, too. At the third one, though, the fourth in total, I’d barely started to draw when I felt a definite stop that I didn’t want to try to push past. It was like I’d been parched and drinking glass after glass of water. One was great, two was good. Three was fine. Four? I could force a fourth down, but I might regret it. With water that meant that it might come back up. With a miniature sun that I built around my own heart? Better not to find out.

“What would I do without you two,” I said fondly as we huddled together under a tree. It was a huge old thing similar to a fig, probably the same as our tree by the lake, and still had foliage dense enough to keep the rain off us.

“You’d’ve tried sooner or later,” Mak reassured me, still grinning happily despite the high having worn off and her hair being plastered to her face. “Sometimes you just need some fresh eyes on things, right? So what do we think? Will eating more Hearts make you stronger, or will it make the extra power last longer?”

“With any luck, it will be a choice,” Herald said. “Though my gut feeling is that it will last longer. Draka, you do not feel weaker, as such, as it drains away, do you?”

“Not really, no,” I mused. “It’s more like I either have the extra juice or I don’t. Though with the dreamwalking, I haven’t exactly done it enough times to notice if there’s a difference if I do it right after eating a Heart, or when it’s been a while.”

“We really should set up some trials to study the limits of your powers. We have done so with Mak and Kira, and I have done it for myself.”

“What about Tam?”

“Tam as well, though that took all of five minutes. His power is very much off or on, and works the same every time he uses it until he is exhausted. My point was, we should do trials with or without Hearts, and with single or multiple Hearts as well. Time permitting.”

“Time permitting, yeah,” I said. It all sounded interesting, and at the same time incredibly boring.

“And Mak and I should repeat our trials, now that we have this extra power. I will admit that I squandered mine last time, after the gremlins.” Her slight smile turned into a grin. “All I can say is that it made everything easier. I was simply having too much fun to be scholarly about it.”

“You could try a little right now, couldn’t you?” Mak asked. She was moving around and fidgeting restlessly, full of energy and excitement. “Like when you make things invisible? Oh, or could you do something with the Heart? Besides eating it, I mean. It’s mostly shadows, isn’t it?”

“That’s…” I looked at Herald, who looked back at me with her mouth slightly open. “Like try to move it?”

“Or hide it, or change its shape, or see what happens if you push magic into it—” Mak fired some ideas off quickly, then looked up at me, bright eyed. There wasn’t only excitement there, but hope. Hope that she’d said something interesting and useful, something that I’d like and would appreciate. Something that would make me appreciate her more.

“That’s brilliant,” I told her, and bopped her on the top of her head with my chin. It had become one of our go-to gestures of affection, with how much bigger I was than her now. But even if I hadn’t said or done anything she would have felt how impressed and pleased I was, directly through our link, and she beamed up at me with undiluted joy and satisfaction.

“We can try your known powers back at the inn,” Herald suggested. “But I am very curious to see if you can affect the Heart.”

“All right. Yeah,” I said looking at the Heart hanging there in the rain in complete violation of every law of physics I could remember. I hesitated to begin; I hadn’t expected to be so apprehensive.

“Get you weapons ready, girls,” I told them. “I’ve seen trolls come out of these things.”

They both nodded and drew their swords, standing ready as I left the shelter of the tree and approached the Heart.

About ten feet away I sent my shadow questing towards it, and it looked for all the world as though it were actually stalking forward rather than simply elongating, only the tail connecting it to me as it approached the hovering rift. For a moment I chided myself, feeling like an idiot when I realized that the Heart didn’t actually touch the ground, but it didn’t seem to matter. My shadow reached the area beneath it, where the light pinning the Heart would pierce the earth, and began to climb thin air, flowing up and vanishing about the roiling tendrils.

I felt nothing. No connection at all. I couldn’t touch the shadows of the Heart through my own the way I could with normal shadows. Then I began to feel a tug. Not the pull that let me pin down the Heart’s exact location in the first place, but an actual tug on my shadow, as clearly as if someone had pulled on my tail. I instantly pulled my shadow back. To my relief it came with only a little resistance, and I only freaked out a little bit and for a short moment before I calmed myself and turned to my sisters.

“Yeah, so I think the Heart tried to eat my shadow.” I tried to sound unbothered by the whole thing.

“That is… pretty damned troubling,” Herald said. “Do you want to continue?”

Mak, who’d felt my worry and determination as though they were her own, only nodded to me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m going to touch it directly and see if I can do anything.”

The rain beat down on me, but I was too curious and focused to think of putting my wings up as I closed the distance to the Heart. I thrust my hand into the swirling mass of shadow carefully, as though it was my first time all over again. I carefully drew just the tiniest bit, stopping as I felt that overfullness again.

I reversed the flow. Energy and power trickled from me into the Heart, and I could literally see it join the whipping tendrils as then spun around the core. Then, without me doing anything, the flow became self-sustaining, and increased. It was slow, but the rate at which the stuff of magic left me grew steadily, as though I’d poked a hole in a tank which was now growing bigger and bigger.

When I noticed the increasing drain my first instinct was the same as when the Heart tried to eat my shadow: pull back immediately. But I stopped myself. The drain wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t anywhere near the rate at which I sucked the stuff down when I gobbled up a Heart. Sure, it was increasing, but…

“It’s trying to drain me,” I told my sisters. “But I think I can control it.”

Herald’s face scrunched with worry. “Just be careful.”

“Right.”

Instead of cutting my connection with the Heart, I did my best to choke how much it could take from me. That didn’t work exactly; the drain wasn’t something I controlled directly. What worked was to drain the Heart right back. And it was a very distinct back-and-forth flow, which I did my best to adjust so that the balance would tip towards the Heart, just in a controlled way.

“All right! It’s working!” I said excitedly. “Now let’s see what happens if I…”

“Draka, are you sure—?” Mak said, while Herald repeated her “Careful!”

“Yeah, yeah, she’ll be right!” I tipped the scales a little more. With so much energy in me I could be generous, and I was really curious to see what would happen. As more and more magic flowed from me into the Heart it seemed to spin faster, the streamers of shadow grew longer, thicker and more numerous. I switched to shadowsight, and it was brighter than I’d ever seen, the needle of light piercing it having grown into a pillar.

“Damn!” I shouted, full of excitement. “Herald, look at this! Use your shadowsight and look at this!”

“I am!” she replied, and I could hear real concern in her voice. “Draka, I think that is enough! Please, can you—?”

“Right, yeah, all right,” I agreed. It was a bit much, perhaps. I pulled my hand out.

My draw on the Heart stopped. Its draw on me did not.

“Ah, girls—” was all I had time to say. The Heart had been drawing steadily more energy from me, while I’d been increasing my own draw to compensate. With nothing to balance it out, a full Heart’s worth of energy was torn from me in seconds. Then the draw stopped, suddenly and completely.

The Heart collapsed on itself, and exploded.