She pulled her hand away and wound the leather cord back around the fictional pages, then rested the journal on the small kitchen table.
“You could ask him if you wanted to."
I shook my head, the carousel of crazy still spinning in my brain, then narrowed my stare and looked at her, the words not sinking in.
"My father, I mean. If you wanted to know why he wrote those things. How he knows them. I can take you there."
“Of course. Let’s go." I stomped out of the cottage toward the edge of the mountain searching the sky for her magnificent bird. I put my fingers in my mouth and whistled, but Alizeh didn’t come.
"Fallon. I didn’t mean right now. My father is traveling from the Emerald City and it’s barely even daylight. You're going to have to wait." I turned around. Veda gripped her bare arms, contracting her body close, smaller than I’d ever seen her. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I thought you already knew.”
I dropped to the ground and held my head in my hands. My father was a monster. Not just a beast, but a kidnapper. And my parents, my real parents, they didn’t even want me. Let me on a doorstep to be raised by strangers. This couldn’t be true. If this were true… “You should hate me. Me and my family, and everything we stand for.”
“Why would I hate you?” She sat next to me in the dirt, her knees pulled to her chest. “You haven’t done anything wrong, and you still have the chance to make it right. Be better.”
She placed her hand on my leg, but this time her touch didn’t soothe the demons in my mind. “But what if I can’t?”
6
25th May
"Are you coming, Fallon?" Veda called from the front yard.
I peered out the kitchen window. Alizeh had arrived, strutting around the mountaintop her bronze wings shimmering in the morning sun. Veda faced the edge of the cliff, her hands on her hips as she leaned back and let the sun warm her face. Strands of her hair blew in the morning breeze and I caught myself wishing to tangle my fingers in it, but shook my head to erase the thought.
"Just a minute." I wound the leather coil back around the journal and slid it into its place on the shelf. It's not like I even needed to read the pages anymore, I'd scoured over them so many times in the last twenty-four hours that all the words were committed to memory. Every horrible thing my father had done. Every detail of how I didn't belong.
I raced out of the cottage, closed the door behind me and took one last look. The quaintness of Veda’s cottage had started to grow on me, the quiet allowing thoughts to blossom like flowers of truth in the thorny garden of my mind.
"If you're having second thoughts, I can just take you back to the castle."
"No. I need this." I joined Veda and Alizeh near the edge of the cliff and stroked Alizeh’s feathers on her wing. The whole world lay before us as the sunlight glittered off the tops of forests and cities in the distance. "Unless you don't want to go?"
She shuddered and turned away, staring off the mountainside. "I'm just not sure if my father will be angry. He's never said I couldn't share his journals, but again, I've never really asked either. I haven’t even read them all myself."
I took her hand and rubbed my thumb along her bony knuckles and she softened, then gave me a half-hearted crooked smile. We'd reached an understanding—a closeness—built in the midnight hours of poring over books and stories searching for answers. A cause for the darkness and anything to back up the words her father had written so many years ago. We’d talked through a full day and most of a night until we both fell asleep beside each other on the cottage floor. When morning came, I still hadn’t figured out if I was happy to be leaving.
She squeezed my hand. "I'm sure it will be fine. Besides, you deserve to know where you came from. What your future may hold."
She let me go and mounted Alizeh’s back. The bird dipped lower to the ground so I could fumble my way up behind her.
She spread her majestic wings and I risked taking a glance down into the depths of the ravine. Veda didn't move, sitting stick straight in front of me. The urge to wrap my arms around her waist and make her feel better pulled strong, but I forced it down, instead I savored in the sweet scent of her as the early morning breeze swept through her hair and her dark strands danced in the upstream.
The muscles in Alizeh's back moved and I dug my hands into her feathers as she took a running start toward the edge of the cliff. We plummeted over the side before swooping back up through the sky again, the weightless sensation of freedom reigniting in my veins, except this time something didn’t feel right. I closed my eyes, my stomach slowly starting to twist into knots as we flew closer and closer to the truth.
Morning bled into afternoon, the sun rising high on the horizon as Alizeh crested the tops of the highest peaks in the Aborian mountain range. The splashes of green from the small patches of forest disappeared as we soared beyond the clouds, the elevation too great for much vegetation to grow.
“Almost there,” Veda shouted.
She hadn’t said a word in hours, the silence prickling up my spine for the entire journey.
Alizeh leaned right and I shielded my eyes as a blinding glow appeared in front of us. In the distance a temple rose,
