Page 103 of The Darkening (The Darkening)

I find other things. I find faces I once knew. Stories that were once whispered to me. Laughter, promises, a mother’s kiss. The blanket my father wrapped around me as he carried me from our home, the day things went so wrong for my parents.

One by one, I pick up the lost pieces of myself. I find dreams, a fistful of seedlings, a wooden doll. My father’s chuckle and a golden warmth from before I knew words.

These things fill me up like a sun bursting in my chest; I’m full of light and a weightless warmth.

But there are other things. Things I don’t want. A slip of oil that curls around my throat: my terror. A trembling that rattles my bones and tastes of cowardice. And then I come upon a shape I know well. Seven strings that stretch the length of a carved neck, resting on curved rounds. Amma’s sitar.

My hand goes to it, but I hesitate.

With just the tips of my fingertips, I touch it. A thrum of pain trembles through me. Sorrow, unending, unyielding.

This I don’t want. This I can’t take.

You must, even if you cannot.

I take it.

Seven burns meet seven strings. Sorrow crushes me, folds me double.

The faces of those I’ve let down. Amma and Jem. All the stormtouched who leapt into my life, who I couldn’t keep by my side. Their loss hits me over and over again, like waves of an endless sea.

A hundred thousand crystallized tears glitter like diamonds. I pick each and every one up, adding more to their number with every sob.

For a thousand years, I weep, bent double, hand scrambling in the sand to gather my tears.

The end comes slowly, miserably.

I rise, heavier, more real.

And I go on.

I find yet more things. Strange things, unknowable things, vast and boundless secrets from within. I find things that I have never seen, yet I know the shape of them like the ocean knows the shape of the seafloor. I find mysterious things, a spark of creation and destruction kept deep in the warm dark, and a far stranger thing, a cavernous thing, an inexhaustible and subtle power I can only poorly describe as love. Butloveis such an insufficient word for the potential that purrs within me, an ability to accept and to give and forgive; a transformative power to turn villains into penitents, sufferers into the healed, the abandoned into family. For a second I understand.

I swallow the nameless things—forgetting the wholeness of the understanding as soon as they pass my lips but feeling the shape of them within me.

I become whole. I become me: light and dark and mystery between.

I sink down. The bone-sand rushes over me, and I plug my ears and close my eyes, feeling the earth under me give way and melt into a swamplike sludge. The earth itself swallows me, and I claw my waythrough, going deeper and deeper, diving through not sand but dark water.

My head breaks the surface of an upside-down pool in a clearing of an ancient forest. I right myself, knowing instinctively that this is as deep as it goes, this is what my father called the heart of the Storm.

Surrounding me is a copse of giant trees; surrounding them is the corpse of a slain serpent. These are trees with trunks so wide it would take a dozen men standing fingertip to fingertip to encircle them. They are old enough to both have earned names and to have earned the right to forget them.

One stands larger than the rest, set apart and forward with its roots dipping into the pool. The greatest tree of all is also a tomb; a woman hangs within a hollow, glasslike core within the wooden trunk, her arms splayed, fixed by branches. A thin branch grows over her mouth.

In the slumbering lines of her face, I see the lines of my own. But she is not me.

I wade through the pool, reaching for her. I tear her from her bindings, wood turning to ash under my fingertips, green glass melting away at my touch.

When the branch falls from her lips, her eyes open with a sudden force, not a blast but a sudden drop. As if her eyelids were shields against the dark: every shadow, every sorrow, every scrap of the nothing between stars.

I flinch at the massive presence within those eyes, half certain my own eyes are going to melt out of my head for daring to look.

“Who are you?”

You know me.Her voice sounds a hundredfold; the trees and the water and the wind lend her their voices.

I meet her gaze, gingerly. It’s like looking into a dark mirror. I haveher eyes—not the power but the almond shape, the long lashes. The curve of my mouth, the proud length of my nose—both are something like hers. But it can’t be. “You’re not Ma.”