Page 90 of Earthbound

Despair is something I have never felt before.

An obeah watches me. Its eyes are drops of pearls, silver like mine.

‘Mother,’ I call to the beast that is she. But when I speak her name, she does not know me.

Gone, her memories have gone.

Despair consumes me once more. The magic’s toll is great. For the first time I wonder if its power is too dangerous to wield, but in the next breath I call on my magic.

I touch my mother’s face and try to change the elements of it. Her body cracks and groans as I try to twist it back into a human. But I cannot change the fundamental structure of the living. I may be powerful, but I am still no god. My mother dies again, her soul this time moving on to the next realm, her obeah body a mangled wreckage.

I look at it in horror. You may think this is when I should have stopped, paused, considered the power in my fingertips. But I thought of nothing but righting this wrong. I called to another obeah. ‘Take me to my sanctuary.’

There must be a way to craft a new body, I think as we ride. For like the God Asase I am timeless too.

My sanctuary is full of all the books we have, so I pull them from the walls, searching for any reference to souls. I do not know how much time passes until I remember my children.

The babies, I think. Has the magic taken the twins too as sacrifice? Unborn and half-human?

Hady, tell me you are well.

Silence.

But I can still feel her connection to my soul, so I look through her eyes and I see what she sees.

She is standing in the centre of the fae, who not long ago had been holding her prisoner. They were the lucky few whose bones were not crushed beneath their falling city. Hady looks down, her hands cradling her body, and I feel relief. The twins live.

The fae cower beneath her, frightened as she weaves a spell. I smile.

Do not show them mercy, Hady, I tell her. Destroy them all.

She bends down and presses her hands to the dirt. From beneath her fingers a sapling grows.

‘Obeah, come to me,’ she says.

She calls them to her, to finish the battle, I think.

I try to hear the words of her spell through her ears, but the wind and rain steal the sound.

The sapling has grown, a baobab tree.

Hady? What is the purpose of this?

But she is silent.

I feel the air shift with movement. The obeah around me leave to answer Hady’s call.

I follow.

I’m coming Hady. I’m coming.

I can feel her pain, but she is still silent in my mind. She does not kill the fae.

When I am close, I feel the earth groan and shake. Hady has torn it apart. I watch through her eyes as she builds a cavern around the tree she has grown, a paradise, a haven.

Is it not a marvel, my love? There is no penance for this magic you weave. Strike at the fae and I will come to this new home you have built for us.

But still, she does not kill the fae.