Chapter 4-565Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡg3H9KOdnNk
Owl didn’t press me to talk about Noah, but I knew he still wanted to know what had happened between us. But that meant telling him about my Sight. He was staring off into the darkness and his thumb was tracing circles on my palm. I trusted him. I trusted him just as much as any of my other friends. But I’d been holding onto this secret for fifteen years. I’d been lying to everyone I knew for fifteen years. There was this huge part of me that I kept away from the people I loved and respected, and I was afraid of what would happen if I showed it to the world, or even a tiny part of the world. I couldn’t bear the thought of any of my friends knowing that I’d kept this from them for so long.
But I was done lying.
I sat up and turned so I was sitting cross-legged in front of Owl. He moved his eyes from the night and smiled at me. My heart was racing but I closed my eyes and breathed like I was meditating. His warm hands on my arms tingled and he closed some of the distance between us, curving his legs on either side of me. I opened my eyes halfway and let the glowing energy of his body fill my mind. I drifted in the swirls of writhing lights and cradled myself in the warmth of his energy.
“You’re so beautiful,” I whispered.
“You can’t see me,” he said with a smile.
My eyes opened and locked onto his. I could do this. I made my voice as solid as I could.
“Yes I can.”
He listened quietly as I told it all. How I’d always had these flickers in the corners of my eyes. How they’d turned to solid lights when my parents had agreed to let me come to Syuna. At first I’d been afraid of this strange power, and once I realized how rare it was, I was afraid it would isolate me. Back home, I’d been different, always running and jumping and chasing the lights of my own world. I’d found a new home on the cliffs above the sea, one where I channeled my energy and where I found people like me, people who loved me. So when I found out that my Sight was something that would make me different again, I decided to hide it from everyone. And for fifteen years, no one had discovered that hidden part of me. Until Noah. When he found out, after Alik, he didn’t talk to me for weeks. I was terrified he would tell someone, but save for the fact that Noah was ignoring me, everything had gone back to normal. Then he found me in the middle of the night, and he told me he’d killed someone.
He’d been seeing the mayor’s daughter. I didn’t know for how long. Her father caught them kissing one night and attacked Noah. Caught by surprise, Noah was knocked down before he could fight back. When the girl threw herself on Noah to protect him, her father struck her. Noah lost control of himself and fought back, easily overpowering the mayor and knocking him unconscious. He’d fled, leaving the girl crying and confused over her father’s still body.
That’s when he came to me, broken, bloody and lost.
“When I first saw him, I thought he was a ghost,” I tilted my head up to the stars. “I hoped he was just something out of my imagination, not truly my friend come to pull me into a nightmare.”
And I’d told him to deal with it himself. I was so scared and appalled that I abandoned him, and the next day he was called for testing and didn’t come back.
At some point, Owl’s hands had slid off my arms and come to rest on the ground, a few inches from my legs. He would hate me now, he would see that I was a terrible person who lied to everyone and deserted her friends. I looked down and felt the weight of my shame pressing on my shoulders, pushing them down into a slumped curve.
I felt his hand on my cheek and looked up, curls snagging in his fingers. His golden eyes filled me with warmth and his magnetism pulled me in.
“You’re so strong,” he breathed, “You shouldn’t have had to carry all that without anyone else.” I shook my head, I was weak, I’d only ever done things to protect myself.
“You don’t need to carry it alone.” He held my eyes, “you can let me in.” I wanted to let him in, but I wasn’t sure I knew how. A mirrored hand on his cheek and he pressed his lips to mine and wrapped his other arm around my waist. He was the air I breathed in and the ground I stood on. I spun in his hold and drifted on the winds whirling around us.
I let him go for a moment and he pulled me back in. I fell asleep with him and woke up with Noah in my head.
✺
We were having a class with Lemur the next day when the Unicorn came in. Her braids were gathered up in a neat knot and her robes were cleanly creased, but her eyes were haunted and made her look like she hadn’t slept in days. We all stared at her for a moment, but a word from Lemur and we fell back into our pairs and attempted to turn our attention back to feeling the energy in their bodies.
Jelan shook out his shoulders and narrowed his eyes in focus. The desire to laugh bubbled up in me at his squinted eyes and I bit my lip. After a minute his eyes flickered and I felt a tug in my chest. He tilted his head to the side and the the pull intensified. My hands twitched and I fought the urge to run or fight or do something. A hand came to rest on my shoulder and a deep , musical voice reached my ears.
“Don’t resist,” Maliya told me. “I know you want to put up a wall, but you can trust him.” She moved to sit next to me, keeping contact with my shoulder. “You have to feel inside that he isn’t going to hurt you, your heart won’t lie to you.”
Jelan lifted his hand and curved it towards him, and tendrils of my energy ran across the gap between us. I gasped at the feeling of emptiness in me and bent over, shocked. Jelan frowned and the energy rushed back to me. He got up and came over to lift me up.
“Are you okay?”
“I-I’m fine,” I told him, “I just wasn’t expecting it to feel like that.”
The Unicorn got up and went to another group.
“Good job Aria,” she called over her shoulder. “You kept strong control to let him do that.”
I sputtered a laugh and turned back to Jelan.
After we had all finished, Maliya set her back to the door to face us.
“We all suffered a terrible loss yesterday. Noah was a good friend and a strong student.”
She looked at each of us before continuing.
“It’s a terrible shame that he wasn’t strong enough to join our ranks, but we will remember him for what he did do, not what he didn’t do. I hope all of you will keep him in your hearts and let him serve a reminder that we are all human and what we do here does not make us any better than normal people.”
As she spoke, threads of light left the room and channelled east. That wasn’t right, now that Noah was dead, the connection from all of our energies to his should have been severed. Where were they going?
She turned and walked out and we gathered our things then followed her out.
✺
Twenty minutes later and I found myself down by the channel sitting in the sand next to Levin. Everyone except for us was warming up for a game of hama. Levin was sitting, eyes closed, with a pained look on his face. I picked up a ball lying near me and pressed a point on its skin, releasing the sand within it. Hama was really pretty simple. You could use any part of your body to move the ball, as long as it stayed in motion. As the ball moved, the energy we used to propel it built up in the sand trapped in the treated and woven animal skins. If you hit the pressure point on the ball, or if it hit the ground, the wrappings opened up and spilled the burning hot sand all over you.
I filled the ball back up and tossed it at Merana’s back. She spun and flicked it up with her toe then let it roll down her neck to her hand.
“Nice try,” she said and lobbed it at Jelan, who kicked it lazily over his head. It spun all the way up and over Merana and started to drop a few feet in front of me. On instinct, I jumped up and stuck my hand out. As it landed, I spun my hand and let it fly back to Mer. She caught it and tilted her head.
“So you do want to play,” she said.
“No. I don’t.” I wanted to play a little bit, but Merana was baiting me and I wasn’t about to give in. “I’m too tired to move.”
She started to throw the ball towards me then stopped.
“Well if you can’t move….”
Her invitation dripped into the space between us. Either I could let her throw it and get splattered, or I could play. She stepped forward and threw it. My body lifted with a faked groan to intercept and redirect the movement. I sent it to Jelan and whistled the rest of our friends over. They all smiled when they saw me standing up and fell into a circle. We started off slow, the ball bouncing around the circle accompanied by idle chatter. I closed my eyes part of the way and followed the trails of energy the ball left. This was one of the first ways we learned to meditate when we were young. Hama taught you to separate your mind from your body and isolate your energies. The ball started to move faster and swung towards Mei. She waited a second too long to react and the ball hit her arm at an awkward angle before flying at Sage’s head. Sage, one of the younger and newer members of our pack, planted a hand in the sand and flipped her legs up to kick the ball.
The speed picked up from there and we started pulling out our tricks and targeting players. Jelan brought another ball in and a swirling vortex of movement settled in around us. Mei and Ketlan pelted each other until Ketlan slipped and let the ball splatter on his chest. He winced and sent the ball back into the circle, ignoring Mei’s victorious grin. I watched him go sit next to Levin out of the corner of my eye, but I was lost in the flood of heat and light washing over me as we flipped and jumped and spun, weaving in and out of our friends. I bared my teeth in fierce satisfaction as, one by one, they dropped and it was only me and Merana left. Usually at this point, we would let on the balls go, but neither of us moved to simplify the game. I took a deep breath and plunged into the energy lines. I was good, but Merana beat me four times out of five. I needed something to get her to falter.
The ball darted around us faster and faster until I could barely see it. I went deeper into the lines and the world opened up before me. This was deeper than I had ever been and I could see everything with a new clarity. I could see Mer’s movements before she made them, through the tensing of a muscle or the flick of a nerve. The ball’s path started to follow patterns and make sense. I pulled my arm back and punched the ball, letting it soar towards her leg, She spun to get out of the way, but the ball arced back and hit her calf. I pulled out of the lines and my heart stopped for a second. The world froze as I waited for my pulse to start up again. My friends sat, laughing and clapping in a circle on a patch of grass, Owl stood at the head of a pack of awed children, the Unicorn and Dragon turned away from where they stood on an overlooking cliff. My heart jolted back to life and I went over to Merana.
The little ones had beat me there.
“Wow Merana that was amaaazing!” one said around a missing front tooth.
“I didn’t even see your leg move in that last kick.”
Unlike me, Merana wasn’t one to blush at compliments. She nodded her head once and smiled.
“Thank you.”
One noticed me and pulled me into the clump by my arm.
“Aria! Oh. My. Spirits.” a boy named Alistair breathed as I settled awkwardly next to Mer and Owl. “Can you teach me how to do that?”
“Yeah,” another girl said, “all Owl will let us do is toss it back and forth with our eyes closed,” she glared at her teacher, “and half the time it hits me.”
I tried not to laugh at her pout
“I know it’s boring, but this,” I gestured behind me, “is a lot more fun if you do that first.”
The pout didn’t go away.
“Plus,” I dropped my voice to a whisper, “you can always throw it at him if he gets too annoying.”
Owl leaned down to whisper in my ear, “I heard that,” then wrapped his hand in the back of my shirt.
I leaned back into him and whispered back, “I know”
✺
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