Page 41 of Wolf of Ashes
He may not know everything about me, but I know hardly anything about him.
Whether or not his statement was directed at me, I exhale a heavy sigh. “Not for me, there isn’t.”
He doesn’t respond, although I don’t miss the tightening of his lips and the tension in his shoulders. In the distance, sapphire-blue lightning spears across the sky, piercing the quiet dome around us.
It suddenly occurs to me that the storm may not be a natural one. Indeed, the keeper may have created it; a manifestation of his power and his peacefully dark mood.
Despite his striking features, he’s dressed in a simple T-shirt and sweatpants. His feet are bare and his legs are long enough that his toes scrunch in the sand beyond the edge of the blanket.
“Do you have a name?” I ask him.
“Do you?” he retorts, flashing me a sharp glance.
My hands fly upward. “Whoa, touchy.”
“Is that your name?”
“No, I was describing your reaction.”
He scowls at me before he returns his attention to the horizon. “I don’t remember my name. My memories of my life before I became the keeper are sparse and, try as I might, I can’t recall my identity. The other keepers may have retained parts of their former selves, knowledge of their former lives, but dark magic is not like other kinds of magic. Over time, it destroys and consumes, eating away at life.”
I nod. “That’s how dark magic works. It feeds on life.” I grimace, suddenly realizing something. “Is that why you said you can only create illusions of clothing and food, and not the real thing.”
He nods. “Illusions involve simply rearranging what’s already there. If I want to draw power to create something from nothing, then dark magic demands I take life. The more significant the outcome I desire, the more life I must take. That is the cost of dark magic.”
I speak carefully. “I thought there would be enough power stored in your crown to do whatever you want.”
He holds up his left hand. “This crown allows me to access every kind of dark magic there is: sorcery, witchcraft, shapeshifting. It gives me the knowledge to use that magic and it allows me to harness the energy in the environment around me, similar to how elemental magic works. But there are limits to what I can achieve without taking life from those around me.”
I constrain my shiver as my focus shifts rapidly to the panthers, then to the trees, and finally to my own self. All of us are living beings that could feed the keeper’s dark magic.
“Yes,” he says, as darkness grows across his face. “The trees, the panthers.” He pauses. “You.”
This time, I don’t bother hiding my shudder.
“Cold?” he asks.
“Fuck, yes.” I wrap my arms around myself. As much as there’s a part of me that doesn’t want the details, I can’t stop myself from seeking answers. “Did you drain life when you translocated us here?”
“No,” he says. “I harnessed the energy in the crown to move us around.”
I relax a little. “What about using your compulsion power on the angels and humans?”
“I merely rearranged their thoughts. No life taken.”
“And illusions work the same way, yes? You’re just… rearranging something that’s already there. So if you wanted to change your shape into, say, a bear, that would be fine?”
“Yes.”
I relax even further, since there seems to be a lot that the keeper can do with the energy in the crown alone. “What about the lightning out on the horizon?”
He sighs and takes longer to answer this time.
Finally, he says, “There’s a palm tree farther down the beach that’s about to fall. Listen…”
Sure enough, acracksounds in the distance. It’s followed by a soft groan and athud. I picture the tree now lying on the sand, its trunk rotten.
My brow furrows. It’s not that I’m overly concerned about him draining life from a tree, but it has confused my understanding of how he uses his magic.
