Page 24 of Ignite
“Iamcoming for you,”I vow into my mind.“Tell me how to get to you.”
I wait for his answer, hoping he can hear me.
But I’m only met with more silence. More stars that stare at me, their light pulsing as if laughing at me.
I’m dreaming, my limbs feeling the same heaviness as when Annora was teaching me to dreamwalk. Is this just my mind telling me what I want to hear? Or is there a tether that binds us in my dreams, a connection that even the Vale can’t break?
“Graylen, please,”I scream into my mind.“Tell me you’re here—say anything.”
I hold my breath, praying to Eurydice that he’s there.
Once again, silence weighs like a thick blanket around me. If he were somehow able to communicate with me here, I might’ve just lost my only chance to get through to him.
Ten
Kyanite
Vidaris plagues my dreams.She’s given me a vision of Lunaria tonight, her soft brown hair floating around her like a halo—an angel of hope. A symbol of everything that I cannot have. Lu is among the stars, shining as if she were the moon.
I can only catch glimpses of her, a flash of breathtaking hazel eyes one minute and a sway of her loose hair the next. She’s blurry, like she’s hidden behind a wall of frosted ice. It takes me a minute to focus on her gaze, to make out the emotions swirling in it.
It only lasts for a brief moment, but it is all that I need. She looks troubled, her eyes misty as she calls out to me. Her mouth doesn’t open, but I hear her voice drift into my mind.
“Tell me you’re okay.”
She blurs back out of focus, the wall separating us.
A bitter laugh tumbles from my mouth, and I shake my head. Another one of Vidaris’s tricks. As much as I want tobelieve Eurydice is still out there, connecting us through our dreams, I know nothing that good could find its way here.
Red skies loom and blood rains from above, coating my lungs with the sticky substance and filling my mouth with a tainted metallic tang.
“Wakey, wakey, little Aegis.” Vidaris’s sickly voice scratches against my ears. “Time for the next show to begin.”
I don’t ask what she means—don’thaveto ask.
My body tenses, preparing for what horror Vidaris will create for me to watch just as a scream fills the air. Bile creeps up my throat as an image of Lunaria appears before me, her mouth agape in a wail.
“You said you’d never hurt me,” she cries.
Lunaria looks down, her beautifully wild eyes wide as she stares in horror. I follow her gaze, my hand suddenly free and feeling slimy and cold.
My back goes rigid.
A heart rests in my palm.
“Lunaria—” I choke out.
She falls to the ground in a heap, a gaping hole where her heart should be.
Pain ripples through me, agony raw and untampered as I look down at the woman I love—her heart in the palm of my hand.
I blink, and the image shifts.
Suddenly, Lu is gone—and my hand is bound once more.
Everything is moving too fast for me to keep up with, too many images of the woman I love tortured and hurt. Flashes of Moros using his dark magic to drain the life from her, then her trying to use all of her magic to defeat him—only to not have enough, using up her power until she’s gray and lifeless.
The wordstopsits on the edge of my tongue, close to begging the Goddess of Vengeance to make it all stop.
