“You will be the one to die, Gower,” I cut him off. “Long before you make it to Efnysien to claim your supposed immortality.”
I must appear calm to him in that moment, with my serene expression and even tone. But inside, I am far from calm. Inside, I am a gathering storm. A churning cyclone, growing in strength. Rising to meet the rage that thrums through my veins as I stare at this traitor who intends to steal away my future.
I am not about to let him.
Not when I have the power to stop him coiled at the center of my chest, poised to strike with a viciousness I have only felt once before.
“What—what are you doing?” Gower’s face is no longer full of scorn. It is full of fear as he shouts over the growing wind that fills the wagon. Planks of wood rattle as the entire rig rocks back and forth with increasing velocity.
“Stop this!” he screams, pulling his face back from the slotted window. “Whatever it is you’re doing, stop right now!”
“Goodbye, Gower.”
I close my eyes, surrendering to the storm the same way I had on the mountainside when I held back the inferno. The power bursts from beneath my skin, exploding out of me like a shock wave of electrified air. There are no ancient wards to contain it this time. No bond of support from Penn’s formidable presence.
I am untethered.
Unencumbered.
Unrepentant.
My bonds rip away, snatched from my wrists like they aremade of paper. My back bows under the force of it—spine arching, head falling back. I hear the sound of splintering wood. My eyes sliver open and I see not the wagon’s ceiling, but open sky.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, Penn is shouting at me to contain it. To lock it down before it kills me. I pay him no heed as another shock wave blasts outward, this one even stronger than before. So strong, it lifts me clean off my feet. I brace myself for a fall, but my body does not hit the earth below; instead, it rises toward the sky. I ascend into the air like a bird in flight—arms outstretched, hair billowing all around me, skirts fluttering like wings.
I hover there as the wagon combusts beneath me. Nails shudder loose from their holes, wheels fly from their axles, boards shred into shards. The team of mules bolts with a clatter of hooves, their tack trailing behind them in the dirt. I do not see Gower in the melee, but I hear him cry out in pain—a brief bleat of agony—before the sound is snatched away by the wind. All around me, the vortex kicks up a cloud of dust and debris as it lengthens into a towering funnel cloud that stretches from the earth to the clouds far overhead.
Someone is wailing—an unearthly, inhuman sound. It’s me, I realize after a moment, feeling the strain in the hinge of my jaw as the cry spills out. Blood drips from my eyes like tears, tracking down my face into my open mouth.
It tastes like copper.
It tastes like pain.
It tastes like madness.
Raw power. Too much to hold without shattering. Too much to endure without my skull cleaving in two. It is cracking me open. Flaying me into fragments. I float there at the center of the tornado, losing myself in slow degrees as the pulses of power strengthen. My consciousness flags beneath the crushing mass ofagony and air, beneath the biting cold at my breast that pierces my lungs and steals my breath. I am no longer me—no longer Rhya Fleetwood, Remnant of Air.
I am simply…air itself.
The wind itself.
Think of every breeze that has ever stirred between every blade of grass in every corner of this world…Think of every ripping squall that has ever filled the sails of every ship in every far-off sea…Think of every soaring current that has carried every bird that dared spread its wings in every distant sky…
Strange—it is Soren’s voice I hear in that final second before my mind blanks entirely.
From a whisper to a scream, from the lightest puff to the wildest tempest…
All that resides within you.
All that and still more.
Another shock wave crashes outward, carrying with it my last semblance of strength. My mind tapers into darkness so suddenly, there is no time even to brace as I plummet from midair to the hard-packed roadway below.
If the landing hurts, I have no inkling of it.
I am already unconscious.
Dawn is peekingover the horizon when I shake off my dreams, pushing out of the deep, dark sea where I am drowning, gasping awake as my head breaks the surface. I blink up at the sky, thoroughly dazed.