Joshua
Eliyana!” I call to her from my pit, invisible hands cupped around a nonexistent mouth. This dematerialization experience has become second nature, a comfort I welcome and dread in the same instant. She’s Reflections away, but saying her name acts as its own weapon, driving a nail into the heart of my greatest enemy.
Myself.
Reaching to all sides, I hope for a wall, or a stairwell, or any path that might lead me to the light. In my mind I have walked for hours, forcing my soul to remain alert. I hear those who surround me conversing, yet they do not acknowledge my desperate attempts to be heard. Have I made headway? No way of knowing when my entire world is ink. The darkness is an exhaustion of its own, one I don’t know if I can endure much longer.
“She can’t hear you,” my dominant self jeers. “Face it, Joshua. Your time is running out.”
Running out, eh? His goading only fuels my determination. I mistook love for hatred as I pursued the Unbinding Elixir, believing it was my love for El that truly drove me. How could I have allowed myself to become so blind? My desperation to have her forget Kyaphus and return to me became my undoing. Was it worth being trapped within my own soul?
“Yessss,” Josh hisses.
“No.” I break into an envisioned jog to keep my hypothetical heart pumping and legs moving. I cannot feel my body, but the action isn’t difficult to imagine. Does my fight have any effect on Josh whatsoever? Am I simply doomed to be an insect in his ear until I’m lost to nothing? I almost stop to take a mental break when a voice breaks through. But not Josh’s voice this time.
“I need to hear you say it, Joshua.”
El?
“Say it.”
Her voice is clear as the daylight I can almost see.
“Don’t even think about it,” Josh responds in his typical tone of condescension. “It won’t work anyway.”
My soul picks up its pace. Could my efforts be taking form?
“Stop,” Josh orders. “Your attempt is futile.”
I move faster still. I can almost hear my breaths become life. The darkness seems to dull, the blackness not as sharp as it once was.
“Say it,” I hear El say again. She was so angry that day in Wichgreen Village. Angry and hurt and jaded. The lie I let loose was a sword across my sternum. I could not bear her heartbreak, yet at the time, what option did I have?
“Say it.”
I draw a deep breath, feeling my actual physical lungs expand in my chest.
“What are you doing?” Josh says. I feel his body—my body—jar.
I’m going to say it. But this time I’m not going to lie. This time I will break free from the chains I’ve locked myself in.
“I love you,” I say aloud. My own voice rumbles my throat. “I love you with all my heart.”
“I love you too,” I hear her say.
I blink, picturing her standing beside me. She’s smiling with lips that cannot exist without being kissed. The image is hazy but it’s there, outlined in the shadows before me, a cool drink of water in this wasteland, not of the Fifth, but of my soul.
“No!” Josh’s voice comes out distant and far off. Muted as if he’s calling from beneath a pile of rubble.
“I love you,” I say again, hoping to the Verity my words carry through. That it’s my voice and not Josh’s telling her how truly, deeply I adore her.
“Well, it’s about time.”
I open my eyes to a desert landscape blanketed in night.
I’ve broken through. It is not Eliyana beside me, however.
Wren laughs. “Welcome back.”
I flex my hands, roll my neck, and feel the stubble on my chin and cheeks. I swallow hard. I hate to hurt Wren, to tell her my words weren’t meant for her. “Wren, listen—”
She stops me with a palm in my face. “Don’t bother. I know.”
Lips pressed, I nod my silent apology.
“This won’t last,” Josh jeers. “You don’t have the strength.”
We’ll see about that. I’m alert to my shortcomings this time around, not about to give up so easily again.
I have, indeed, returned.
But for how long?
TWENTY-ONE
’Til Morning
Can’t see the forest for the trees, huh? Well, I’ve got news for you. Because I can’t see anything for the trees. No ceiling, no walls. No way to decipher if we’ve stepped outside the Emerald City and into an actual forest, or if this is some sort of indoor arboretum. I inhale, long and deep. The aromas of earth and cedar infuse my senses. I welcome the homey fragrances. One reminding me of Joshua and the other pinging my memory, taking me to . . .
My. Dark. Place.
The Verity pulses alongside my heart. A warning to stop. Don’t. Cease. Desist.
Is this what a Shadowalker fights each moment? Constant anger and bitterness? Depression? I feel like I have PTSD. How could the scent of earth trigger me into this spiral of resentment?
Poke. Blood on his shirt, Kyaphus tosses an unconscious Joshua into the Threshold.