“Not going to happen,” he whispered fiercely. “Not ever. I’ll always bring you back.”
She stared into his amber eyes, the only place she could lose her doubts and share his certainty. Suddenly his mouth pressed against hers as his fingers combed up into her dark hair.
Magiere stiffened, still afraid to drop her guard because it was him so close. But his mouth worked softly against hers until she felt the tip of his tongue touch against her eyeteeth.
Nothing about her, not even those teeth that changed, elongated, whenever she lost herself, revolted him at all. He loved her ... wanted her ... entirely.
Grabbing the front of his shirt, she leaned back, pulling him down atop her.
“Magiere,” Leesil whispered with his hands still in her hair.
That was the last word either of them said for a long while.
Late that night, Magiere lay on her side watching Leesil and hoping he was sound asleep for once. She feared even moving and waking him after so many restless nights aboard ship. But sleep didn’t come for her.
Her head was too full of worries pulling against fragile hopes. And that opened the floodgates of memory. She couldn’t stop thinking about, remembering, so many things buried inside her. Like on another night, when they’d shared a rare welcome and a meal by the generosity of Hammer-Stag at the village of Shentángize.
Leesil believed her problems had begun later than that, on the way back out of the Wastes.
Magiere knew better.
It had all started in that tiny back room of the common house, or “greeting house” as the dwarf had called it. She’d lain awake then, as now, watching Leesil sleep....
Magiere lay in between Leesil and the chest containing the orb. Though her eyes were on Leesil and watching him by the lantern’s dimmed light, her hand still rested on the chest, as if she feared removing it but didn’t know why.
Leesil’s rib cage rose and fell almost in sync with Chap’s snoring, where the dog had curled up on the mat closest to the door. She would—could—never tell either of them how she felt while touching the chest.
As long as she remained this close to the orb, she kept reliving the moments back in the six-towered castle in the Pock Peaks. She’d used her thôrhk gifted by the Chein’âs, the Burning Ones, to hook and pull the orb’s spike, releasing its power.
She didn’t know why the thought of that moment brought her more satisfaction than food or sleep or sometimes even Leesil’s touch. She tried not to think about what this device had been made for, what purpose it had served in the end war of the Forgotten History. But each night she grew eager for the silence and stillness to relive those moments again. Yet every time she did, the urge to know what was within that orb, what held such power, ate at her more and more.
Magiere quietly looked from Leesil to Chap.
Both appeared fast asleep. Slow and silent, she peeled off her wool blanket and turned on her side to sit up. When the straw-stuffed mattress crackled under her shifting weight, she froze and looked over her shoulder.
Chap let out a slight grumble but immediately returned to his short, doggish snores. Leesil didn’t even skip a breath.
Shifting closer to the chest, Magiere carefully pulled its latch pin and lifted the lid. Reaching inside, she drew aside a fold of canvas wrapped around the chest’s contents.
There it lay ... the orb.
Slightly larger than a great helm, its central globe was made from a dark material. Not black, but as dark as char, not metal or any stone she’d ever seen, its surface was faintly rough to the touch like smoothly chiseled basalt. Atop it was the large tapered head of a spike that pierced down through the globe’s center—and the spike’s head was larger than the breadth of her fist. Its roughly pointed tip protruded through the orb’s bottom, and both spike and orb looked as if they’d been fashioned from one single piece. There was no mark of separation to hint that the spike could ever be removed.
Magiere knew that it could, because she’d done so.
Knobs at the open ends of her thôrhk fit perfectly into two grooves in the protruding spike’s head. She suddenly found herself reaching for her pack, where the thôrhk was stored, and she pulled it out without even looking.
That circlet, broken by design, was made of metal. Thick and heavy looking, its circumference was larger than a helmet’s, and it was covered in strange markings even Wynn hadn’t been able to decipher. About a fourth of its circumference was missing, and those protruding knobs at its ends pointed inward across the break, directly at each other.
An impulse took Magiere as she looked down into the chest.
She wouldn’t fully open the orb—no, of course not, or not as she had accidentally in the six-towered castle. Just a little, just to peek at what might lie within it, if she could. It would do no harm to pull the spike only far enough to see it separate from the orb. That was all she would do.
With one last glance to check on Leesil and Chap, she lowered the thôrhk’s open ends around the spike’s head. Fearful of any grating sound, she took what seemed like forever to slip the thôrhk’s knobs along the grooves ... until they settled fully into the spike’s wide head.
The thôrhk fit perfectly, like a handle made for this. An almost sleepy contentment stole over her with a soft buzzing inside her head, but she didn’t retreat. Her eyes widened as she wondered ...
Were those words in that sound?
A painful urge flooded Magiere; it was a hunger unlike the kind she felt amid rage whenever her other half overwhelmed her. It was far more sorrowful than that.
There were no words within that buzzing in her head. Only the urge, the need to do ... to go ...
North ... and farther north ... and farther ...
Magiere tugged steadily upon the spike.
A hum rose around her, seeming to fill the dim little room until it was all she could hear. She felt moisture on her face—from nowhere. A sudden mist formed around the orb before her eyes, like hanging vapor over a dawn field after a cold night. Droplets condensed on the back of her hand holding the thôrhk. She saw moisture begin to appear and cling to the orb’s dark surface.
A fierce hunger grew inside her ... and still she didn’t stop.
Under her pull, a crack appeared between the orb and its spike.
Light washed up over Magiere, blinding her for an instant. Rainbow hues spread through the orb’s sphere, bleeding into each other until its whole form burned her eyes with pure teal.
Any and all traces of hunger vanished inside Magiere. Her flesh felt fully sated, with no need to eat or drink, as if she would never again have to face the world as that monster that lay within her.
But the sorrow kept growing with the hum.
A droplet fell away from her face without her knowing how it had gotten there. It arced in toward the crack between orb and spike and was sucked away.
“Magiere!”
That shout was followed by a rolling snarl on the edge of her awareness. She ached inside, and in place of that vanished hunger in her flesh, a more sorrowful hunger in her spirit wanted to go ...
Amid the orb’s brilliance, the ghost shape of two hands slammed down on top of hers.
The thôrhk wrenched from her grip as its knobs slipped out of the spike’s grooves. She heard it clank off the orb’s side to clatter into the chest’s bottom as the spike dropped back into the orb.
All of its light winked out.
“No!” Magiere cried in the sudden dimness.
She lunged in, clawing to find the thôrhk.