Fickle creature. Melakatezra’s words taunted her as behind them the battle continued.
Melakatezra both laughed and cursed as her shadow shifted away from Jenny’s skillful sword swings. The ravens danced around Rupert’s head and his feet stamped the earth. Jenny flung her blade in a beautiful, deadly arc only to catch shadow where Melakatezra had stood a mere second before. In Jenny’s eyes, the madness and the magic masked over the warmth and kindness of the woman Dnara had come to call a friend.
“This is not how it ends,” Dnara said again as she looked into shadow, Athan sagging in her arms.
The clang of steel against tree echoed through the forest, joining the ravens’ noisy chorus. Melakatezra’s cackling filled the grove, amused by Jenny’s vain attempts to rend shadow with blade. Rupert whinnied in anguish, trying to shake the ravens loose from his head, and Treven tugged at Dnara’s hair in an urgency to do as his brother asked and run.
But she didn’t want to run. She wanted to stand. The weight of growing despair drew her downward, and all seemed lost before it had begun.
The beginning. One should always start at the beginning. How strange for her to long to hear her keeper’s voice as all hope crumbled around her.
‘Pay attention, girl! You can’t just start in the middle. Concentrate. Find the beginning in that head of yours. The first page, not the last. Now, tell me, what do you see?’
“Keeper Ishkar,” she muttered, eyelids heavy. “I see...”
Closing her eyes, Dnara tried to block it all out, the clashes of fighting and sounds of suffering. Athan sank further, and she too with him, the earth offering a damp and cold place to lay down her struggles. The black sea lapped first at her thighs then rose as high as her chest, the temptation to leave everything behind rising with it. Her eyes clenched shut, and she took in a long breath, then she let the sea swallow her. Downward she drifted, the world becoming nothing more than distorted sounds and flashes of light folded within the inky void. There, she was alone; there she felt safe.
But this, she thought in the moment right before the air left her lungs, was not how the story should end.
In the darkness she felt safe, but she didn’t want to be alone. She wanted to live freely, and for those she’d come to call friends to live freely with her. They who had sacrificed, they who fought for her, they who had chosen to give her the gift of freedom; she could never abandon them. A barren shore full of unwanted memories may await her, but on that shore she could stand up for those who had been lost, and she could reach out to those waiting for her return.
With powerful strokes, she swam to the surface, shaking loose the strands of shadow that tried holding her down. Breaking through, she gulped in a deep breath and basked in the moonlight that greeted her. A breeze caressed her cheek and smiled with her, and she remembered another gift she had forgotten.
A gift. Not a curse, and it had become undeniably part of her. Like the secrets waiting for her in the grove, she had to stop running from the magic within her and embrace it; no longer letting it carry her along but accepting her part in its formation.
“I see it,” she smiled. “And this is not how the story ends.”
Her eyes snapped open and a gust blew through the leafless trees. Melakatezra stopped laughing and looked to her flock, dread entering her eyes for the first time in a thousand years. Feathers went flying as the wind knocked the birds away from Rupert and broke their bodies against the tree trunks. The sickening thumps of a hundred birds hitting wood then ground filled the clearing, and Melakatezra let loose a wicked, monstrous screech. The wind gathered around the mage in a blustering squall and begun plucking away her black feathers. Melakatezra swatted at the wind in growing frustration, all the while cursing Ishkar’s name.
Jenny stood fast, leapt forward with cat’s grace and drove her magicked blazing blue blade into Melakatezra’s gut. Instead of striking shadow, the sword found flesh and the mage staggered. Shocked by the hit, Jenny let go of the hilt and took a step back. The sword remained where it had sheathed itself within the mage’s body, its sharp point cutting through the back of her dress.
With wide black eyes, Melakatezra looked to Dnara and muttered in disbelief, “This is not how it is meant to end.”
Dnara stood, and with the wind’s help, Athan stood with her. “No,” Dnara replied. “This is how it is meant to begin.”
Melakatezra drew in a ragged breath and sadness sagged her expression. “You are certain?”
“I am,” Dnara said, her back braced by the wind. “I choose to learn my own truths of this world.”
To this, Melakatezra nodded solemnly and closed her eyes. “So be it, child. So be it.” Her eyes reopened, and in them swirled unfathomable melancholy surrounded by a deep black sea. “But do not say, when what comes to pass breaks this world apart, that I did not offer you a different path.”
With her foreboding prophecy spoken, Melakatezra raised her arms to the night sky. Darkness gathered and all the fallen birds took wing around her. One last crescendo of ravens’ song filled the knoll, then all went silent and Melakatezra vanished into shadow. Jenny’s sword fell to the ground,
