Michelle Sagara - Cast in Ruin

“What are you doing?” she asked Tara.

“Containing the storm,” was the reply. “There is a reason that the Shadowstorms do not leave the fiefs.”

“Wait—are you always aware of the storms?”

“No. Not always. But even were I not sensitive to their proximity, I could hardly fail to notice this one.” She lifted her arms. Her wings spread and their tips rose, framing her. They also almost knocked Kaylin off her feet.

“Watch,” Tara said as Kaylin adjusted both her stance and her distance.

“Watch what?”

“The storm. I do not see as you see, Chosen. I see as a Tower sees. Watch. My Lord watches, as well.”

“Not at a very safe distance.”

“He is behind the border. The storm will not pass me.”

The storm drew closer. Kaylin took an involuntary step back, and felt Severn’s hand on her shoulder, steadying her. She smiled; he couldn’t see it, but it didn’t matter; he could feel the hand she lifted and placed over his. The clouds were thick and as they approached, the darkness revealed itself as a gray-green haze. They looked like thunderclouds to Kaylin, although she’d never seen them this close before.

But thunderclouds moving at a distance were impersonal; only the lightning they shed was a danger. These clouds, similar in color, contained a more immediate threat. She had seen the Devourer as a void or a spreading darkness; she saw these clouds as something entirely different. Their moving folds hinted at shapes—both familiar and new—breaking and distorting them before Kaylin could fully catch or name them.

She heard Dragon conversation, but at a remove, as if it were thunder.

Which was strange. She realized this storm and its clouds were silent. Shapes continued to unfurl as they approached Tara, blocking out sunlight and shadowing her white visage. White, pale, it was as giving as stone.

Stone could tell a story if one understood its cracks and the way it wore over time. But this stone was new. Kaylin thought, watching Tara, that it hadn’t yet been tested. Or maybe it had, and it had faltered once. As if she could hear the thought, Tara tensed and her wings flexed.

The clouds hit then.

All sense that they had anything in common with the storms that occasionally covered the city skies vanished; they battered the air above and in front of the Avatar, stretching and thinning as they did. Stretched and thin, they were blacker, darker; they lost the tantalizing hint of moving forms, and for a moment, became two large hands, fingers pressed and curved against nothing.

The storm roared, as if it were a disembodied dragon; there was both agony and fury in the sound. Through it all, Tara stood like a wall, lifting her chin as she gazed into its heart in defiance.

The heart of the storm gazed back. Kaylin could see its eyes, disembodied but visceral, present. She could see a mouth, made of dense shadow, forming words that she couldn’t understand but could almost see.

Tara’s response was clearer; it was more solid. Seen more than heard, runes filled the space between the two: Tower and destroyer. The ground beneath the Tower’s feet shifted, cobbles melting and reforming over and over again as the storm sought purchase and Tara defied it. Denied ground, it rose, warping the heavens. Above the storm the sky became what opals might have been if they had been truly repulsive. And cold.

Lightning sheared stone, but this lightning, from that sky, wasn’t a flash of white: it was a lance of many colors and those colors bled, like chaos, into the ground itself, defining the hard line of the border in a way that nothing else had. Where the Tower’s Avatar stood, the known, the reliable, held sway; where the storm raged, nothing did.

Kaylin looked toward Sanabalis, who hadn’t yet gone Dragon, although his eyes were almost red, and his nostrils—in human form—were flared. He’d also managed to singe his beard, something she’d’ve bet was impossible. “Sanabalis, is this—”

He lifted a hand, swatting her words to one side. Given the color of his eyes, she let them go, and turned, reluctantly, back to the storm. It was screaming.

Severn caught her wrist and yanked her around, stepping to the side to avoid the flailing edge of the sword she hadn’t dropped. He pulled her into his arms, her back to his chest, and held her tightly, lowering his jaw until it rested close to her right ear. She knew he was speaking. But she felt his words as a tickle of breath and a sensation; she couldn’t hear anything but the sound of the storm itself.

The storm and her own answering cries.

She wanted to run to it. To run into it. Hadn’t she done that once, already? Maybe this time, maybe this time, she could travel back to the night that Steffi and Jade had died. And this time, she would be armed. This time she wasn’t thirteen. This time she knew what would happen. She could change it. She could unmake it. She could do what she’d failed to do then.

She swallowed her screams, opened her eyes, forced herself to look.

Why doesn’t it affect you the same way? she asked Severn in the silence and privacy she almost never used.

I’m not you. She felt his smile. It’s almost passed, he added, and she opened eyes that she hadn’t realized she’d closed. The sky was still the wrong color above the angry mass of darkness, but the darkness itself was dissipating, and its screams had faded into attenuated cries that still broke the heart.

She preferred multi-eyed demonic heads with obsidian claws and mouths in their butt ends.

“When will the sky return to normal?” she asked as Severn released her almost reluctantly and stepped back.

“Normal?” Tara lifted her head, her eyes narrowing briefly. “Ah. Not, I think, anytime soon. It is…a statement, Kaylin.”

“Of what?”

“The sky is…off limits? Is that you how say it?”

Kaylin nodded.

“The sky is off limits for my Lord, should he choose to attempt to cross the border in that fashion.”

“What will happen to him if he does?”

“No one can say. But we can be certain that something will.”

Kaylin hesitated, and then said, “The Shadows aren’t fond of the storm, either.”

Tara frowned, and then inclined her head, lowering her wings and folding them across her back. Silence descended, and as it did, the wings folded themselves into the shades of brown that were the Avatar’s gardening clothing. It was a surprisingly effective indication that the conflict—and its inherent danger—was over. “No,” she told Kaylin, her gaze still fixed at a point beyond her own borders, “they are not.”

“Then you don’t know for certain what might happen.”

“No. We know only that there is change, and it is neither predictable nor, in the end, desired by those who have been changed. Our history is…incomplete.”

“But I came to you, at your awakening.”

“Yes.” Tara still spoke in a voice better suited to the height of cold stone fortification than the gardening clothes she wore.

“And I came through the storm.”

“No.”

“But Tiamaris called it—”

“He was incorrect.”

“Does he know he was wrong?”

“Yes. The borders and their defense are the reason I was…born. They are not, however, the sole reason I was reborn. I want this life,” she added, and as she did, her voice softened, and her eyes lost the hard flint of steel. She now looked exhausted. “We’ve discussed this at length. My Lord felt that the storm—that what he had identified as storm—had not only proved fortuitous, but, in some fashion, benevolent.”

This stretched Kaylin’s strict definition of benevolent, although she couldn’t argue with the eventual outcome.