Page 20 of Claim the Light
Not when I survived Tyler and my mother and found peace and hope with Micah.
But the longer I beat my wings and the harder I try to escape this abyss, the more I find myself going nowhere.
A thread of despair cuts across my hope, but I refuse to give in to it.
That’s when the keeper’s voice echoes back at me. The way he’d told me he knew the strength in a dragon’s heart and that I was perfectly capable of escape.
If I imagine for a moment that there is a shred of mercy in him, then perhaps he was trying to give me a message in a dark-as-fuck way.
I can’t really rationalize anything right now, since my body is at breaking point and my mind feels like it’s tearing apart, but I latch on to the fact that we fell through water to get here.
There’s a river up there. If I calm my fears, maybe I’ll be able to sense it.
Maybe I can call it to me.
Use it as some sort of conduit to help me move.
It’s a last thread of hope that I latch on to before I close my eyes and seek again the feeling that flooded my body in the moments before I kissed Micah. I’d been acutely aware of my new power and had opened my senses to the beauty around me. The touch of his lips, the sheen of sweat across his body, the soft breeze on my skin. All of those had become intense sensations for me.
I seek the same sensations now, expanding my mind and my senses beyond my immediate location.
I gasp when the immense body of water above me is suddenly clear within my mind. It swishes and swills against the otherwise imperceptible boundaries of this place.
When Bella Vorago was my dragon, I could walk in the rain and a pocket of air would form around me, keeping the downfall at bay. When I first met Micah, I attempted to latch on to that rain and throw spears of it at him—only succeeding in soaking him. But now I need that same skill.
I need to call the existing water to me. The whole enormous body of it. If I can somehow make it form a tunnel into this place, then I’ll have a path to follow back to the river’s surface.
Still beating my wings, but more slowly now to conserve my remaining energy, I focus on the incredible weight of the river far above me and the energy within it, the rush and swirl of it.
Come to me, I whisper in my mind.Fill the darkness and surround me. Become my tunnel to climb out of this place.
The water’s weight increases in my mind and I sense it responding to my command by pressing down hard on the invisible boundary high above.
I shout within my mind:Come to me!
A single drop of liquid lands on my upturned cheek. I can’t pinpoint exactly where it fell from, but I’m hoping it means that whatever opening we fell through to enter this place has a weak point.
I can force it to open again.
“Water!” I scream, casting my entire will upward. “Churn and boil! Cut and tear! Come to me! Become my escape!”
A thin stream of water pours down onto my face, rushing down my neck and across my wings, and it’s all I need.
Suddenly, my wing beats carry us higher, propelling us upward.
The air changes and then—
Water rushes around us. Real, glorious water that swills and churns. Far above, I can see the surface, but now…
It’s as if we’re at the bottom of a deep ocean.
I tell myself to keep moving. Beatrix and Micah are still unconscious and the returning danger is that they’ll inhale the water and drown before I can make it to the surface.
I can’t use my arms to swim, so instead, I beat my wings, telling myself they can be my arms, convincing myself it will work.
I didn’t escape oblivion only to fail now. I refuse to believe that there’s no happy ending for me or that peace is nothing but an illusion—
Light suddenly slices through the water above me, pure beams as bright as sunlight.
