SONG of EMBER

56

SHAPES OF LIGHT

🙜

Ky wrapped her arms around herself and glanced about curiously as other elements faded into being. Leafy earth shattered from frost. The trees themselves were black or ashy, as if a raging fire had swept through long ago and left behind the ghost of a woods. Stars twinkled overhead through a break in the clouds, but there was no moon. A light snowfall had begun to pile near the base of the trees.

A sudden gust whipped her hair around her face and the smudged grey dress billowed out in the storm; her skin tingled with dread at the touch of the wind. Only a few paces away there glimmered a little stream. She stumbled toward it and put out a hand.

Her claws clinked and scraped, digging furrows into powdery ice.

“Ember?” she whimpered, her gaze darting to and fro. Something snapped and crackled around her, and she glanced down to see that the earth itself was crumbling. The nearest tree creaked with a sound like creeping ice, or cracking wood.

She grimaced at it, unsettled.

This forest was both foreign and familiar, though she knew she had never once set foot upon its loamy soil. But I have sung to it, before… molded it with my voice, before, like damp clay.

“Hullo!” she called, a near-perfect imitation of the friend she had lost, such that she was sure it would have fooled even Ember’s keen-eyed Isabel. Her summons echoed through the woodland hillside, and instead of gradually fading, it grew louder, and louder, and louder—until she covered her ears from the din of her own cry. “Ember, hullo! Where are you?”

A bit of ash or snow swept from one of the trees overhead, dusting her hair.

She angrily dashed it away, and glimpsed the faintest wisp of light through the whirling darkness. A glowing, golden ribbon of ethereal wonder which lashed about in the storm. Ky instinctively reached out to catch it, and as her hand passed through the luminous strand, she snatched a whispering voice on the wind.

…can’t stay up here much longer—is that Ky? Wait, I need to—

The thread whipped out of reach, and the voice abruptly vanished.

Ky let out a grunt of surprise and annoyance, darting after it, and each time she thought to snag it in her fingers it lashed away, leaving her with only a fragment of a thought and a sparkle of color.

—don’t have much left. She can’t touch me here if—

—please hurry, Ky, if that—

—a big stick, broken branch? Or a throwing stone—

—Breath, I really am alone—

The last of these wispy fragments was tinted by lurid sunset colors of fear and soft swirling lavender blues of resignation, and it was these sentiments which set her scrambling to scale the snowy hillcrest before her. She had not quite made the ascent when a dulcet chant drifted forth on the ash-scattered gusts of wind.

The power in that wordless incantation together with its dread familiarity slowed her steps, yet still she fumbled clumsily up the slope, bracing herself with frost-bitten fingers. As she reached the top of the hill, she reluctantly allowed her gaze to be pulled along the length of the whipping golden thread…

A skulking figure paced a circle around the tree, red hair trailing through tracks in the snow, and the source from which the ephemeral thread unspooled sat above, legs dangling, holding a sturdy stick in his hand, roughly the size of his old fishing spear—the end of it was broken-off and jagged.

Ky opened her mouth to shout her name, but it was little more than a whisper in the wind. "Sil..."

It was enough.

The figure whirled, crimson tresses flying, and locked stares with Ky.

Her chanting ceased.

Dried blood streaked from both nostrils to her gaping mouth, and ruddied her chin. Her nose—once perfect—was now slightly crooked, but the imperious face of Sil Veli, High Maven among the Council of Whispers, the Blood-Sworn, She Who Had Become before any else of her brethren—and Faithful Warden of Ky the Unbecome—remained a perilous countenance which could never be forgotten nor mistaken. Full lips twisted in a furious snarl, and black claws curled in taloned rage.

“Halfwit!”

Ky yelped like a wounded wolf pup, cowering beneath the thunder of that voice—it blotted all but the basest of intentions from her mind: if she could but reach Ember, that was all that mattered now.

As she tore her gaze from her sister, his blue eyes found hers in the swirling storm. He had shifted into a precarious crouch on the limb, and was edging closer to a pile of snow and leaves which had mounded up at the base of the next closest tree. Before she could decide what to do next, he launched himself into a wild and foolish leap, flailing for a moment before tucking and rolling in a cloud of lofted powder with an impact that ought to have toppled him. He sprang up, dusted in ashy snow.

Sil unleashed a shrike’s call that billowed a gust of withering wind.

Ky stumbled as Ember seized her hand in a shocking grasp.

He knew, as she knew.

She suddenly wished that she didn’t always have to run; she wished she could turn and frighten her sister away, lull her into submission. But she was weak. All her life she had fled from adversity, hiding away in the thickets and stony clefts and lonely tide pools, where none might witness her cowardice but little songbirds and absent-minded mussels and buzzing dragonflies, and now that Ember was by her side, she must pull him along with her. Running was the surest path to survival.

For her, the only path.

Find shelter, Ky thought miserably, though she had scarcely thought it when a darker resonance overwhelmed it through their clasped hands, like a clanging bell: Find a weapon!

Ember’s fleeting recollection of his lost fishing spear distracted her, and she wondered why the pretty sword had not followed Ember into his dream. Ember wondered if it was because he had not been holding Fishbiter. Ky realized that she had never known the runes spelled Fishbiter.

But they both agreed in their minds that this was foolishness—none of it could avail them now.

Ky had once embraced Ember’s mind without sight, and now that she stood in the midst of it, there was no barrier to occlude her from the shifting colors of his dream. Perhaps this landscape of wishes and thought was a real place, perhaps not. Even so, a siren’s breath had power here.

She cast out a searching sound, the first baleful enchantment of every siren infant—a glottal, chirping inquiry. And when the echo returned to her, she shaped a resonance with it, breaking and cracking her natural range to sink deeper, and deeper, still…

Until her breath just touched the song of the roots. For it was surely in the dark and loamy places, in the sleeping calm where the wind and snow could never reach, that Ember would be safe at last.