Even a year later.
“You’re wondering why you’re here,” a voice said from behind me. I turned in the direction I had faced at first, towards the Spirit element.
That element meant nothing to me. All I knew was that it was a void. That was the only way I knew it was Spirit at all. I had no idea what it could do. Hadn’t truly met anyone who could Wield it.
While the rest of the elements were physical, Spirit seemed to dwell within.
I knew the Spirit Wielders could walk within my dreams and give me dreams. I knew that they could heal. But I didn’t know if that was because it was me, or if it was their element.
Though it wasn’t as if I could ask them.
When the Spirit Wielders came into my dream, they tended to talk to me, not with me.
I should have found that annoying, but that was how all of my training had gone for the past year once I returned to the human realm and moved away from the Maisons.
I had quickly found out that the world was not as it seemed. Another world was pressed tightly up against ours, connected by portals that led from the human world to the Maison realm.
And a thousand years ago when the Maison realm was five territories, five kingdoms with kings and queens who worked together, there had been peace. And then, over time, Earth and Fire had become the Obscurité Kingdom, and Water and Air had become the Lumiére.
Light and dark. Opposites.
And they had warred.
I didn’t know the reason for the war, although it is said that the King of Obscurité started it all.
But after meeting the latest king and his mother, the late queen, I wasn’t sure if anything I had been told about the Fall was true. When the war had paused and became what it was now, at least in its abstract form, the Fall had begun. The Spirit Wielders had left the Maison realm to hide with the humans.
I didn’t know if my ancestors had been among those to hide, but none of that mattered now. Because everything had changed. The Maison realm was fracturing. It was failing.
People were losing their ability to Wield. Some had been stripped of their Wielding powers by magical forces, others nearly losing it because the crystals that powered the Maison realm were dying, as well.
And I knew all about this because, apparently, I was the fabled Spirit Priestess.
The one who could save them all.
Or so they told me.
“Why am I here?” I asked the Spirit Wielder in front of me. I couldn’t see his face, his cloak covered him completely. Although I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to see the Spirit Wielders’ faces. For all I knew, this was all just my imagination trying to help me come up with answers for what I needed to know to remain sane.
“You are here to learn. You are here to remember. You can’t stay here forever, Lyric.”
I shook my head, not wanting to hear the words.
It had been a year since I ran from my responsibilities and what could be. I’d needed to figure out who I was, and I still wasn’t sure.
But I didn’t have time for myths and dreams.
But they apparently had time for me.
A movement in the dream, a shift in the wind, caused me to pause. Then the elements around me burned, flooded, ached. This wasn’t my dream. And it wasn’t the man in front of me.
“You must go, Lyric.”
“Where?”
There were so many places I could go within the kingdoms once I left the human realm. But it wasn’t like I could just figure out my journey without help. I didn’t know what I needed to do, and nobody was actually guiding me. Not anymore.
“All is not what it seems.”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes because that was the understatement of my year. Of my life.
But then, before I could speak again, Earth rumbled harder, and Fire lashed out at me. Water seemed to wrap itself around my ankles, and Air slammed into me, so hard that it felt like ice sticking to my skin.
This was different. This wasn’t the same type of dream I’d had before. And then the Spirit Wielder lifted his hood, vacant, dark pools of shadow where eyes should have been.
“You must go. Before he finds you. Before they all find you. The Gray is coming. And you are still too weak.”
And then the elements slammed into me with such ferocity that I screamed.
I startled awake and winced as the others in the classroom around me clapped. I wasn’t in the Maison realm, and I wasn’t alone. I was in a classroom with a bunch of students, most of them glaring at me. I had fallen asleep, and the others had seen.
I had left the Maison realm to find myself, to heal. But I had been left wanting. I waited to learn the next step, but the nothingness around me only pulled me farther away from where I knew, deep down, I needed to be. A place I was afraid I’d never reach again.
I had left those who needed me.
And I knew I needed to go back.
No matter the cost.
Chapter Two
I had already packed my go-bag weeks earlier, knowing this time would come. I repacked it every night, ensuring that I had what I would need, unpacking and changing things out when I thought better of it. Items made in the human world didn’t last long in the other realm. So, I had most of the things I’d taken with me when I left the Maisons, as well as some stuff Alura, a friend of Rhodes and Rosamond who also lived on my block and happened to go to school with me, had given me over the past year.
I was ready to go back. And my new friend—my only friend these days—wasn’t of this realm either, so it seemed I wasn’t really alone.
I paused at that thought, wondering why that seemed to be the first thing that popped into my mind.
Maybe it was because the idea swept over me with each passing day and every passing dream, all the memories of what I had left behind.
I’d abandoned it all because I was scared. Because I’d needed time to regroup. But so much time had passed at this point, I wasn’t sure what would happen next.
I wanted to go back. I didn’t know if it was about facing my destiny because, honestly, I didn’t know if there was a true destiny there for me. But I had to go back because people were counting on me, even if I wasn’t sure I could rely on myself.
I couldn’t just walk away again and pretend that nothing had happened.
The very evidence of what had happened currently sat in my bag, purring and licking her toes.
My little polydactyl cat, the one with bat wings.
Yes, a cat with extra toes was extraordinary on its own. A cat with extra toes on each foot and wings? That wasn’t of this world, or of this realm.
But Braelynn, my best friend in the entire world, had once been from this realm.
“Please stop getting your cat hair all over my clothes,” I said, reaching out to pick her up out of the bag. “I swear, you’re mostly black, but your little white hairs on the tuxedo part of your front stick to my clothing, showing themselves to the world.”
She just snorted.
Damn cat.
I tended to wear black these days. I didn’t know if it was because the color happened to look good on me, or if it was because I was in mourning.
Grieving the fact that my best friend had died, only to come back as a cat that was now in my arms. Or maybe it was me mourning what I once had.
I had once thought my life was normal. Normal heading into boring. I hadn’t been able to pick my major, I was almost about to watch my friend and my ex-girlfriend—the only two people I truly talked to often—walk away from me as they went off to undergo their own college careers.