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“And I’m just inhaling this drug?” I ask, suddenly feeling claustrophobic in the dim, smoky room.

“It does no harm but open your eyes,” Sae Balek says. “It also takes a little while to work. Please relax, Lady Aihr. I can hear your heartbeat from here.”

The fact that he can hear my galloping heart makes it worse, but I will myself to calm down. The last thing I want is to run out of the room because I can’t handle a little mind-altering substance, though I suppose that would be very valid.

“Lady Aihr, please tell the goddesses why you are here,” Sae Belak says, and he must see the consternation on my face because he quickly adds, “and if you have no such beliefs, then tell me and I will relay the message.”

I take in a deep breath. The cool smoke fills my lungs and as it does so, it seems to clear my head, as if it’s blowing away the cobwebs. It strips away the lies, uncovers all I want to keep buried. I feel it pushing out the truth.

“I am…grieving,” I say simply, though it isn’t simple enough. I want to elaborate, but I can’t. My chin starts to tremble, words becoming thick and choked in my throat.

“That much is visible for the whole world to see,” Sae Balek says. “I am sorry about the passing of your aunt. I will not ply you with platitudes about her spirit and better worlds, because I know you are not here for that. You are only here to learn, as Vidar has, to move past your grief.”

“But I don’t want to move past it,” I say, almost snarling, the anger inside me quick and vicious.

“You have the fear of forgetting,” the Truthmaster says. “You are afraid that if you don’t grieve, you will forget your aunt, your father, your mother.”

I suppose there’s no point in asking how he knew about them. “Grief is love,” I tell him. “I don’t want to not feel it, as painful as it is. My grief keeps them alive.”

“It can keep them alive but at the cost of living,” he says. “You need to find a balance or you won’t have much of a life.”

I go silent at that, pressing my lips together. I’m so terrified that if I don’t keep my aunt in my thoughts, I’ll lose my connection to her, just as I fear I’ve lost my connection to my mother and father.

“You are a vessel for all your untapped grief, and that is only fuel for rage, rage that will always burn out in the end, taking you into the ashes with it,” Vidar says blankly.

I look at him in surprise. He hasn’t said anything for some time, his cool eyes studying me from across the fire, gazing through the smoke.

“Very true, Vidar,” Sae Balek says before he turns his metallic gaze back to me. “These sessions aren’t for wiping the people from your life but for honoring them. It gives them space to exist still, while you can connect to them with time.”

“I just…” I begin. “The last two weeks I’ve been busy, so busy that I haven’t had time to grieve, and then it hit me all at once. I don’t want that to keep happening; the blows, they’re relentless, like they’re trying to pummel me into submission.”

“And that’s why this here”—he gestures with his arms, his robe swinging and moving the smoke—“is a place for you to let it out. So that you may go on with your life and keep living like your family wants you to, knowing that you will pay respect to them and their energy and memory in a holy space, with the goddesses watching. You won’t be alone, but it is wrong for us to grieve alone.

We are social creatures at our base, and grieving with others sharing and making space for your pain is something that society has long forgotten.

Perhaps all the wars and all the death have taken their toll on us, have made us forget what it is to share collective sorrow. ”

I stare at his face, his pale skin, his low brows, and the dark shadows under his eyes and cheeks, the wavy red hair that frames his face, and of course the eyes made from metal.

I wonder who he is really and where he came from, what grief he may have encountered over the years, and how long ago he was born.

The things he might have seen. The people he might have known.

“A good magician never reveals everything at once,” he says in a low voice, giving me a lopsided smile. “In time, you will see things. You will know things. When you are ready to. For now, let’s start with looking into the fire.”

I look at the flames. Before they were small orange, red, and blue flickers that enveloped the chunk of resin.

But now the flames are large and dancing.

They move in unison, like each flame is its own entity and entirely sentient.

I get the impression that they are moving for me, trying to show me something with each flicker.

I don’t know how long I stare at them, my brain is feeling sticky, like it’s been condensed into a mushy paste inside my head, and I’m thoroughly hypnotized by the fire.

And then I see it. The flames come together to form an image. Shapes at first, as if the shadows in the flames are attempting to look like something. Then it turns into something utterly, terribly real. I see color and texture and it’s like looking through a portal into another world, another time.

I gasp. “I see…I see something. I really see something.”

The others are silent as I try to grapple with and convey what I’m looking at.

“It’s a cave, I think. A cave with black walls, and in the middle of the cave is a pool of lava.

Bubbling lava that slowly streams out of the cave through a narrow channel, maybe a foot wide.

The pool…I have a feeling this is the Midlands.

Yes, someplace in the Midlands.” It looks like many caves I’ve been to before, including the one I stayed in overnight with Andor, but none of those caves had lava inside them, obviously, or we would have never ventured there.

Then the lava pool starts to move; it no longer just pops and crackles in molten bubbles, but it’s waving like there’s something inside.

Suddenly, a head pops up out of the middle of the pool. A woman’s head that seems both vaguely familiar and horrific and beautiful all at the same time.

“There’s a woman,” I cry out softly, afraid to take my eyes off the scene.

“What kind of woman?” the Truthmaster asks sharply.

“She’s made of lava,” I say excitedly, and I watch as she steps out of the pool: full breasts, small waist, thin hips, long legs. Her body cools slightly in places, holding her shape while turning black, and the rest of her burns molten-hot. “She’s a woman made of lava.”

“And what else do you see?” he asks. “Is she saying anything to you?”

“Why would she be saying anything to me?” I ask, but he doesn’t answer. It doesn’t seem like I’m part of this scene with the lava lady, especially since her attention is at the back of the cave where…

“She’s not alone,” I tell them. “There’s a dragon there, I think I see a clawed foot, I…” I pause, blinking at the sight. “The dragon has two heads. It’s blue, metallic blue, and it has two heads. She’s talking to it and it’s listening to her like it…”

“Slangedrage,” Vidar whispers. “The dragon that lays the egg of immortality. This means we’re on the right track.”

I watch as she continues to say something to the dragon and then the dragon reaches down with its head and picks up something in its mouth.

A body.

I gasp again, hand to my mouth, but before I can see whose body it is, if it’s human or not, the image suddenly fades until I’m staring at a hunk of resin again.

“It’s gone,” I whisper, feeling lightheaded. “It’s gone.”

I look across at Sae Balek. “How do I make it come back?”

“You can’t,” he says calmly. “It showed you what you needed to know for now. You can come back another time and try again, as the Kolbecks do, but—”

I shake my head. “I wish I knew about this sooner. We leave for Esland tomorrow.”

“Then this is all that the goddesses decided you should see,” Sae Balek says. “Including Voldansa, the goddess that you saw. The unworshipped goddess of the Midlands.”

“That was Voldansa?” I ask.

“The very one that the people of Esland choose to ignore and put their faith in the dragons instead. It will be their biggest mistake.”

Well, that is ominous.

“What you saw is the future,” Vidar says quietly. “And I have never seen any goddess in my future. We must take this seriously. We must take this as a sign.”

“But you said the resin is a drug,” I protest, looking between the both of them. “That this is a hallucination.”

“Hallucinations aren’t real,” Sae Balek says.

“Prophecy, telepathy, those are real. The drug merely opens your mind to what your higher self has already seen. What your higher self has already gone through. You are existing on a plane of reality right now, but there are other versions of yourself on other planes, and the drug opens the passage through them, like a tunnel into all timelines of your soul. Your future self is sending you something you need to examine deeply, perhaps even take heed.” He pauses, his mouth crooked as he smiles faintly.

“Time is a circle, Lady Aihr. You are everywhere all at once.”

I blink, trying to take that in. Maybe I’m too stupid to understand it, but time being a circle instead of something linear is something that I just can’t accept.

“Tell Lady Aihr what you saw,” Sae Balek says to Vidar. “Tell her what you saw in the flames. Tell her you saw her…last year.”

I stare at Vidar. “Last year?”

He slowly nods. “I was having a session. I saw the Midlands, a long shoreline of lava rock and black sand. And I saw you, and your dog. And Andor. I saw the three of you running before the image faded out.”

“Did you tell Andor?” I ask, feeling incredulous. He knew about me before I even showed up?

“I didn’t,” he says carefully, in such a way that makes me wonder how many secrets the brothers keep from each other. “Andor never believes any of the resin visions at any rate. But once I had heard about you, I knew my vision had come true. And so the same will happen for you.”

“But this still doesn’t help us,” I tell him. “We aren’t even supposed to go to the Midlands tomorrow.”

“No, but we will be heading there after the heist,” Vidar points out. “That’s the whole reason we’re bringing Steiner with us. He needs to stay on the ship in the event we’re successful with stealing the fertilized dragon eggs that my father has asked for.”

“How is a lava lady going to help us with our heist?” I mutter, mainly to myself.

“You never know until you get there and beyond,” the Truthmaster says. “We never know how one thing impacts another until we’re past it and have the privilege of looking back. Keep faith that the goddesses showed you Voldansa and the dragon for a reason.”

Doesn’t he know how little faith I have?

The rest of the session was uneventful, with it being Vidar’s turn to stare into the fire, but his vision was hazy and unclear, or so he said. I couldn’t help but get the feeling that he was keeping something from us, mainly me, but I couldn’t quite call him a liar.

Because I’d left something out of my vision, too.

I never told them about the body.