Page 17

Chapter 16

Sparks Light the Darkness

I tugged gently against the warm grip Nier still had on my hand.

“Alula, what—” Instead of letting go, he brought our hands up between us, and I stilled as I saw the barest glow of light coming from between them. If it weren’t so dark, I may have missed it. He gently edged his hand away from mine, and tiny shimmers filled the space between them, like the ones that shed from lumis orbs. They only gave off the faintest glow as they hung in the air between our palms, but they looked like tiny stars in the night sky. Their light was enough that I could see him staring at them, entranced.

“How did you do that?” he asked, as his eyes finally met mine.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. That’s never happened before.”

One dark eyebrow raised. “Never? This isn’t what you meant when you said, ‘Maybe I can?’”

“Uh, no.” I jerked my hand away from his, and the tiny shimmers faded out. “I meant something else.”

Shaking my hand out, I felt an odd pang of loss that was dispelled when I felt him slide a hand around my waist and step into my side, keeping me close as we slipped back into darkness. His comforting warmth pressing against me had a low flutter starting up within my body, and I had no idea what to do with that. It wasn’t something I’d ever felt before.

I elbowed him gently, knowing I’d never be able to concentrate while I could feel the heat of his body against mine. “I need some space.”

He huffed as he stepped back, his breath fluttering the hair that had again slipped loose alongside my face. I tucked it back into place and smoothed my robe, trying to settle myself.

We needed light, but standing here in the darkness, wrapped in shadows, I felt light.

I drew the curling sigil for an orb against my left palm, repeating the pattern over and over, just like I’d been taught. Only the motion felt wrong now, out of place in this space. Or in me.

No sigil had been woven for the sparks that had appeared between our hands.

My finger stilled, and instead, I left it grazing my palm as I recalled my mother telling me I needed to learn and grow with my light. There was a curious pulling sensation in the skin below, a tugging that moved through my body, urging me inward. I closed my eyes, following the flow of that tug to its source.

Coming back to that warm, familiar energy deep down made me realize how cold and bleak I’d felt for so long. It felt like a natural part of me I’d somehow overlooked, like I’d forgotten that I could see and had been living with my eyes closed.

As I settled into the warmth and thought about the sigil, a sense of resistance rose. To this light, the sigil felt like a trap—a box with a lock.

So, instead of trying to coerce it, I opened myself up to it and flowed with the energy as it rose within me. Picturing what I needed within my mind, I gently pulled my finger away from my palm. Needing to feel this same sense of safety, but when cocooned in light.

I hardly dared to breathe as I opened my eyes to see a small ball of light had appeared beneath my finger, connected by a shimmery trail to my palm, as if it had flowed from inside me.

My finger trembled lightly as my mind started racing, disturbing the sense of calm I’d held within. I’d never wielded light this easily before, even from the air, and I couldn’t feel that tainted, corrupt feeling within it.

Instinctively, I spun the tiny orb, watching as it grew more solid until, with a flick of my finger, I floated it into the air above our heads. It was still small, but gave off a pure, bright light that easily lit up the room around us, making Nier’s shadows retreat to the corners.

“That was extraordinary,” he said, his words hushed and almost reverent as he pulled back his hood to stare at it hovering above us. “I didn’t even know it was possible.”

Despite being secretly alarmed that I had just wielded light from my body in front of him without considering the consequences, I shrugged it off. “We needed light.”

“I thought your energy was different today,” he said. “Whatever was blocking you is gone.”

With his darkness driven back and light illuminating the room, reality crashed back in. I could feel his eyes tracking me as I silently moved away without answering him, needing to put some space between us for a moment. Connecting with the light within me had me feeling raw and exposed, and if I thought too hard about how it had unconsciously spilled between us, I’d forget how to breathe.

We had a tentative trust between us, but I had no way of knowing how deep that trust went, or what would happen if I ceased being useful as an ally and became more useful as a pawn.

The light of my lumis orb hovering around me brought a sense of comfort, much the way Nier’s shadows had, yet I still felt an urge to return to his arms that had me conflicted. I had never relied on anyone before, not even my brother, although it had been nice when he’d stepped in to care for me anyway.

Until I had time alone to consider the implications of all I’d just done, I refused to think about it. Instead, I focused on the neat piles of books stacked up in haphazard rows around us, some almost as tall as me.

Books. Plural. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of them. The barn had looked rickety from the outside, but there appeared to be secondary walls on the inside that were snug and strong. All the books were dry and mostly free of dust. They filled the room with the scent of paper and leather.

“Is this a library?” I asked as I gestured at the books. It was a clumsy diversion, but he took my cue and wandered down another aisle.

“No. There’s usually a little more care taken to stack and display the books on wooden shelves, keeping them off the ground. There’s also usually chairs scattered around to sit and read in.” I watched out of the corner of my eye as he picked up a book on the top of the stack closest to him and wiped a smudge of dust from the cover with a pinched expression, as if the presence of the dust pained him. “And the books are usually better maintained. This is more of a refuge for books.”

“Wood is in short supply amongst the clouds. Any timber furniture we have is mostly from before the citadel rose and gets handed down through families. It’s highly coveted.”

He didn’t reply. There was nothing to say; it was what it was.

I pulled my wings in tight, not wanting to accidentally topple a stack as I moved about in the narrow aisles.

“Why would this place need to be a secret?” I wondered out loud after a few minutes of browsing, not expecting an answer. “And who has kept it that way?”

“Your elders like to control how people think and what they know. If books were freely written, they’d lose control of their own story. As for who, I’d also like to know, because I’d be very interested in meeting them. These books go back a long time, possibly to before the city rose. Someone inherited them. Yet I’ve heard no whispers about anything so subversive within the town.”

It unsettled me every time he talked about my elders. Partly because his words rang with a truth I’d long suspected in the dark of the night, but also because they reminded me of how little I knew of my world. How easy I had made it for the elders to keep me blind, so determined I was to win at their game—a game I was only now realizing they had been manipulating since long before I was born.

My mind reeled as I looked around. Grabbing a book off the top of the closest stack, I read the title out loud. “A History of Sigils.”

Nier looked at it from across the stack between us, then scanned down the pile next to him, followed by another shorter stack. “They seem to be stacked in order of topic. These two are all family lineages. How did you find this place?”

I wandered farther away from him as I explored down another row, running my fingers along the spines and browsing titles.

“When we were young, Haniel and I used to visit Mara in town. Her mother was usually busy working, so sometimes we’d escape to explore. We were trying to get into the greenhouse because we spied ripe strawberries. They were Mara’s favorite, and a rare treat. It was locked, and nobody appeared to be working in it, so we came in here hoping to find another way in. We found this room instead. I didn’t see anyone watching us, but obviously someone was, because we were never allowed back to Mara’s again. She always came up to us in the citadel after that day. I had almost forgotten about it.”

“How young were you?”

“I don’t remember, but young enough that we shouldn’t have been wandering about the town alone.” His eyes burned into my back, but I didn’t turn around. Instead, I grabbed another book off a pile that all looked like journals, with a similar style of supple, dark-brown cover. There was no title on the front, just an embossed logo I didn’t recognize. I flicked through it, but the handwriting was all in a sloping script that was hard to read. I had to concentrate to decipher each word.

I lost all sense of time as I browsed, becoming engrossed in one book after another. There was so much knowledge here, but much of it was unrelated to the elders or even the goddess. What I read sounded foreign and strange—stories of other realms that were surely imaginary tales. Wingless Neven who lived in the Eyrie mountains and rode giant winged beasts. A citadel at the edge of a mighty river, surrounded by the dense forests of the Wild Vales, where Neven females ruled, not males. Even Neven who could shift into animals.

Yet there were also cookbooks that used strange-sounding ingredients, sitting alongside instructions for crafts that were beautiful but looked like nothing I’d ever seen in Lumière.

Eventually, the rumbling of my empty stomach brought me back to my surroundings, and I looked around for Nier. He had sat against a solid-looking stack of heavy tomes in the corner, absorbed in his own book. The stacks looked disturbed around him, as if he’d burrowed down into a pile and discarded the ones above.

My feet stalled, and I lingered, feeling like I was intruding on a private moment. His darkness looked stark in the illumed light. He’d removed his sword and had laid it alongside him, but I could see all the other sheathed weaponry still strapped to him, even beneath the swirling skirt that covered his legs. As I looked closer, I realized it wasn’t a skirt at all—they were wide strips of cloth hanging from a belt over dark leather pants, designed to cleverly move and blend with his shadows, like additional camouflage.

It was the most relaxed I had seen him, sitting cross-legged on the floor with an ancient book cradled gently in his hands. Hands that I had assumed were more comfortable holding a knife. The air of tension and watchfulness he carried like a mantle had been replaced with a quiet reflectiveness. Books obviously held an importance to him I’d never felt, with my only real experience before today being the codex.

I’d barely allowed myself to look at him since I’d illumed the space, because every time I met those amber eyes, every thought of caution seemed to abandon me. The opportunity to do it now, discreetly, felt illicit and dangerous, yet I was powerless to resist. I took all of him in, from those magnificent, darkly feathered wings trailing on the floor, to the broad shoulders and powerful legs. In the light of my lumis orb, his dark brown hair had subtle golden highlights at the front I hadn’t noticed earlier, and he’d pushed the sleeves of his tunic up, so his forearms were on display. I’d never looked at a male’s arms before, but Nier’s had me transfixed. The sleek muscles, smattering of dark hair, and sheathed strength in them had my breathing turn shallow. I tore my gaze away. Staring at him like this felt too intimate.

I was used to strong males amongst the Neven, especially the guardians, but they were palely beautiful despite their size. They had no sharp edges. Nier had a dark, barely leashed energy about him that lent an ominous air of danger. The only thing that came close to his intensity in my world was Aeron, but even he was a pale imitation. Watching him now, with his guard seemingly down, felt disconcerting. I had the strangest urge to curl up in his lap and let his shadows envelop us both. To let him read to me in that deep, melodic voice that wove an impossible dream over me.

Only, I didn’t know this male. Was this the real Nier, or a trick designed to lure me into a fall? I was out of my depth, even more than I had been walking into the vessel pool this morning. I had to remind myself he was a Fallen, forbidden in every way. Even if we had an accord between us while we had a common goal.

Looking at him again, I tried to be more objective but stilled as I realized he hadn’t turned a page the whole time I’d been watching him.

“I watch you too when you’re not looking,” he said, with a quiet honesty that threw me.

His eyes, when they met mine, held the world within them.