Yet another thing she didn’t know. The list seemed to be growing. She was really getting tired of consistently being the least informed person in the room. In her mind, she cursed Laureline. A whole month of lessons and she left this particular pearl out?
Chi studied her, his intelligent brown eyes searching.
“But I guess you don’t need to worry, do you?” he asked quietly. “You’ve already crossed the Veil into the Between. You already know what it feels like.”
Allyra shook her head, fighting a cloud of general confusion. “What do you mean?”
“The Five Finals always tests Evanescence. It’s an artifact of a time before the Betrayal, when The Five Finals were meant to find the strongest Gifted pair to enter the Between and renew the Source. Evanescence is the closest thing to actually crossing the Veil,” Chi explained.
Chi fell silent, his long artist’s fingers stroking the pages of the book in front of him. He turned to her suddenly and words tumbled from him. “What was it like?” he asked. “Crossing the Veil?”
Allyra took some time to consider how best to describe the moment of infinite light as she’d crossed the Veil. The almost irresistible siren call reverberating through her mind like an endless echo, screaming for her to let go. The strange, indescribable feeling of being so small as to be utterly irrelevant yet somehow a part of something infinitely large and important. It had taken every shred of willpower to remember what and who she was. It had been both intensely exhilarating and desperately terrifying.
“I don’t really know…” Allyra said slowly. “It was like being me and not me at the same time. Like standing on a knife edge. On one side, you return to yourself and carry on living. On the other side, you become… You become part of something more.”
Chi nodded, his expression troubled, and silence stretched between them. Allyra fidgeted, feeling awful for not being able to offer him a more concrete explanation.
He brightened suddenly and turned to her, asking, “Do you want to hear my favorite description of Evanescence?”
Not bothering to wait for her reply, Chi dug through his various piles of books, searching for the correct one. He pulled out a large, bound volume, flipped through it to find the right page, and then started reading from it.
“Perhaps, above all else, Evanescence is the thing that defines us as the Gifted—the privilege to be more than ourselves, to become part of the Elements that make up the world around us. It is a privilege never to be taken lightly or ever to be attempted by the unprepared. For those untrained in Evanescence, it would be best described as attempting to find a single grain of sand on a beach covered in identical grains. Even for the most talented and skilled amongst us, the experience is akin to searching for a single red grain of sand on an infinite beach covered in straw-colored ones.”
Allyra tensed. Like lightning on a stormy night, electricity leaped through her nerves. Those words were familiar. Too familiar. She’d heard them before—on Alex’s lips.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Chi asked, oblivious to her sudden horror. “At least, it’s equal parts beautiful and terrifying.”
“Who said them?” Allyra asked, trying to keep her voice light and neutral, feeling anything but.
Chi grimaced. “The Elemental High Master from the Betrayal. Not exactly a respected source these days. But it’s still a great description of Evanescence.”
Allyra’s throat tightened, and she felt as if the air was being choked from her lungs. Ice crawled through her veins, covering her skin with a swarm of goose bumps.
Is this finally going to be the confirmation I need?
Am I finally going to find out whom Alex really was?
Chi flipped through a few more pages of his book. “Do you want to see a picture of him?” he asked.
Allyra nodded, not trusting her voice anymore.
Chi held out the book to her, and her fingers trembled as she took it from him. She forced herself to look down. And then suddenly there he was.
Alex.
My Alex.
It was a copy of a painting, but the artist had successfully captured the elegant, beautiful lines in Alex’s face. A passable attempt had even been made to reproduce those extraordinary eyes that had always seemed to contain every shade of blue—from the pale light of a dawn sky to the heavy darkness found only in the deepest fathoms of the ocean. Even as a painting, Alex’s fierce energy was unmistakable, almost leaping off the page.
There was no denying it anymore. The man she’d met in the Between, the one who had saved her life, who’d trained her, was not some unfortunately named descendant of the Elemental High Master of the Betrayal. He was the Elemental High Master, the one who’d convinced an entire generation of Elementals to betray everything the Gifted stood for, ultimately leading them to their deaths.
“He doesn’t look like a power-hungry, homicidal maniac, does he?” Chi asked thoughtfully, jolting her from her thoughts. “I guess that’s why they say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.”
Chi glanced at her when she didn’t reply and took in the stricken expression on her face, now utterly devoid of blood.
“Are you feeling all right?” he asked with gentle concern.
Allyra nodded and did her best to force a smile back on her face. Judging by Chi’s continued look of concern, she wasn’t completely successful.
“I’m…” Her voice caught, and she tried to swallow down the lump that had formed in her throat.
She tried again, her voice still hoarse. “I’m fine. It’s… It’s just that he changed everything…”
Chi turned his eyes back to the picture in the book and nodded eagerly.
“And the fact that they’ve never found him—it really adds to the mystery,
