Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
What did she do to me? She did something. I didn’t feel that different. Did she really put a gem inside my head? Was that why my leg healed?
But if you had a magic gem that could fix broken bones in a matter of hours, it was highly likely said gem could also regrow limbs. Why give it to me? Why not keep it and regenerate the arm?
Treasure your inheritance, my kind daughter.
All the questions. Zero answers.
The dead woman lay on her back. Her face had lost its vibrant color. The pink and turquoise dulled, muted, as if she were a wilted flower. Her blood-soaked robe stuck to her body, and the puddle of blood by her arm had congealed to a dark viscous gel.
Logic said I had to search her, but something about it felt fundamentally wrong, like committing sacrilege.
I circled the body and flexed. The corpse turned a faint violet, so light it was almost white. A sliver of deepest black lay by the woman’s side. The sword. My talent had no idea what to make of it, so it registered it as a slice of darkness. That only happened once before. Two years ago, the DDC made me sign a bunch of forms and then showed me an object that looked like an oversized metal brooch studded with small gems. It came from the forehead of a huge breach beast, and they wanted it assessed. The object had turned solid black in my vision. I’d failed to determine what it did or what it was made of.
I blinked my power off and knelt on the rocks by the sword. I remembered it being slender and blue, but now it seemed shorter and dull, washed-out grey in color. There was no wrapping on the hilt. The whole thing was one continuous chunk. It looked metal, but nothing I’d ever seen before.
A sword was much better than a knife.
“I’m sorry you died,” I told the corpse. “I need your sword to survive.”
And now I was talking to dead people.
I touched the sword. The metal felt cold, then instantly warm. The blade turned blue. The handle flowed in my fingers as if liquid and wrapped around my wrist.
Panic punched me. I jerked my hand away on pure instinct, flailing around like there was a poisonous bug on my arm. The band of metal around my wrist snapped open, and the blade clattered to the floor.
I froze, staring at it.
The sword lay on the stone, inert, once again a dull, muted grey.
A moment passed. Another.
The sword didn’t move.
Okay. One more time.
I reached for the sword. The moment my fingers touched it, the metal flowed again, anchoring itself around my wrist and fitting perfectly into my fingers. The urge to fling it away gripped me.
I clenched my teeth and waited.
The sword waited with me.
Was I controlling it? Was this some alien artificial intelligence? Was it alive somehow?
Nothing was happening.
I took a deep breath.
The sword flowed through my fingers to my forearm and wrapped around it like a pale-blue metal bracer.
I quashed the scream before it left my mouth. My fingers were free. I moved my arm around. The bracer stayed as if glued.
I moved as if to stab. The sword streamed into my palm, lengthened into a half-formed blade, and stopped. Was it waiting for a target? I lowered my arm. The blade slithered back into a bracer.
“Magic sword,” I told Bear.
The shepherd eyed the bracer and kept her distance.
I had a weapon now and I was almost ready to go. I glanced around to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I’d made the full circle around the cavern. The pool where Stella died was right in front of me. Her head was still on the bottom, dark hair swaying with the weak current.
I needed to fish Stella’s head out of the water and put it with her body. When the guild eventually came for the corpses, they might miss it, and Stella’s parents would need a whole daughter to bury.
The hair swayed.
I had to do this. It was very simple: wade into the water, pick up the head, put it with her body.
Oh my God. She was twenty years old. She was alive this morning. She was breathing, walking, talking, and now she was dead and her head was in the water, and Tia was only four years younger. Would somebody be taking my daughter’s head out of a pool like this one so I could look at her face one last time? When they got Stella out, they would put her in a box, and then they would bury her, and her mother would never see her again.
How do you survive this? How do you go on after this?
Her parents couldn’t be much older than me. They would have to live the rest of their lives without her. There was nothing anyone could do. This was done. She was dead.