Page 32 of Commanding Flame and Shield
“Correct.”
We both laughed, and I was grateful to feel the tension leave the space between us. He sat still for a moment, eyes closed, breath deepening. I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful he was. His muscles held more weight than most of us—he was broad, like Aren, where many of us grew lean. He had new thin lines on his hands and callouses had already healed where his sword and bow had worn them yesterday. Ascension had worked well.
“Alvara,” he said my name slowly this time, like he was rolling marbles across his tongue. “Can we…know if we’ve cycled together, without—”
“A reading?”
He nodded.
I shook my head, slowly, lips pressed together.
“I don’t understand a lot of what I feel in this place. But. It seems…urgent. To know. Like I’m drowning. And answers will feel like…air.”
“I know that feeling.” I breathed deeply. I had to force the motion, because I was also drowning. Drowning in the steady pulse of his heart and strength of his energy. In the need to feel his mind. To feel his skin beneath my fingers. He was right. Everything about August felt familiar, and alien all at once. But a reading was an intimate thing. Not even everyone in the coven had opened themselves up to my mind in that way.
He inched towards me, but I leaned back, turning my back to the headboard. Like drawing up a shield, I forced myself to picture the petite young woman dressed in red, her gold hair in curls down her back, denim blue eyes too large for her pretty face, and red, painted on, kewpie doll lips.
His chin quivered just a touch, and he nodded.
“Yeah. There’s that.” There wasn’t a great deal of affection in his tone. A begrudging, protective edge on his voice.
We sighed at the same time, and then exchanged familiar smiles.
“You love her.”
He eyed me deliberately, and then nodded once. “Yeah. I did—do. Being here. In this place. It’s as though she’s…a memory. I don’t understand. When I try to imagine her, it’s like, a shadow of the Layla in real life. Everything feels. Wrong.”
I remembered what it was like when the veil lifted for me. After ascension, my memories of my human life—the friends I had left, the distant memory of family, seemed to fog. And as I recalled past lives, and started training under Aren, they quickly swirled away into the mist. No easier to grasp than catching steam with your hands. Only triggers pulled the memories into clarity. Only memories I needed for survival.
All that remained real was here in Grayshell—Aren, the others, and our endless hours of training. I could only remember a few ascensions from my past cycles—each of them starting with the agony of grief, as though I had lost someone dear to me before being saved, always by the soul we call Aren. He was my guardian, always waiting for the familiar pull of his calling reaching maturity, prepared to pluck me away from the mortals like a ripe grape falling off the vine. Always alone. Always aching for someone whose face and name I couldn’t place when I woke.
I was born to be a spirit warrior. Not a mortal. And my mind seemed to shake off the memory of humanity like a terrible cold. Each ascended body was different, but it was always the same mountain of protection waiting for me to wake, and each wave of recollection came faster and harder, knocking the air from my lungs. But my training built upon the layer of mastery from the last round, and I grew sharper, faster, and more in control of my capabilities each life. This was my longest life so far—usually, if I was lucky enough to make it to ascension in the first place, I’d make it a century or so.
Aren had been quite anxious as we rounded my one hundredth ‘birth’ day by his side, and his nerves weren’t really still for another fifty years. Finally, he relinquished his controlling hold on my whereabouts and released me into the role of second in command.
Aren was the longest lifeline recorded. The only fitting mentor for a soul like me, which I supposed, was why God continually sent him back for me, round after round. I couldn’t recall a life before him. The fog was an impenetrable wall of white, like the gleaming ceiling of Grayshell. It called to me from time to time, and I tried to force my consciousness into it, only to rebound back into the here and now. Frustrated, flustered, and mystified, I eventually gave up on retrieving anything before Aren. He had little in the way of inclination as to what was hiding in the depths of my soul. His past ascensions didn’t seem to include ‘his little shadow’ as he referred to me now. The mist seemed tantalizing, as my eyes looked over August’s expectant face.
“Alvara?” He said, amused, and I knew from his tone it wasn’t the first time he’d said my name.
“Yeah?”
He chuckled. “What did those monsters do to you yesterday? That crippled you so badly? I kind of had it in my head you were invincible.”
“Definitely not. They must have learned who I am. Did Aren tell you what I can do?”
“I’ve heard bits and pieces. From Alec, mostly. Aren seems...protective. Alec said they knew your powers and hit you with sand or sea? Is that a parable?”
I inhaled. “Unfortunately not. So, you know I’m a reader. I read objects too. Their memories. The older an object, the more memories it holds. Water holds memory. Everything does, but the immensity of the sea is too vast for my mind to comprehend. All those memories have settled in one enormous space, and collided. It’s like it…sends my mind into…overdrive. If that makes sense?”
August nodded solemnly.
“There’s too much input for me to unwind or separate them. You said it felt like you were being sliced in two—that’s what it feels like, when I’m hit with sand or sea. Like I’m being ripped into pieces. The sound. God, the fucking sound. It’s like a million screaming voices, a million radios blasting static, all at once. Clay helps to absorb the chaos and cleanse it for me. That’s the closest description for it.”
My head was throbbing, just explaining it to him, and I rubbed my temples. August’s low chuckle caught my attention.
“What?” I asked.
“That’s where I hold tension too.”
