Allegiance (Causal Enchantment #3)(39)
Author: K.A. Tucker

The air grew denser and drier, until it was compressing my lungs, making it hard to … breathe? I opened my mouth and felt the draw of the atmosphere pour into those useless masses in my chest that once kept my mortal self alive. I was breathing! For the first time in a hundred and twenty years, I was desperate for air! In … out … in … out … Large, long drags through my nose, into my lungs.

I continued on, my footsteps lighter, bouncier. A few strands of hair flew up to tickle my nose as the beginnings of a welcome breeze took shape, carrying with it a tranquil sensation. It was so calming, so soft, caressing my cheek, reminding me of meadows and children’s laughter …

The tranquility vanished in a heartbeat as a wall of sand and grit slammed into my side, forcing me down to my knees. I cowered with my head buried in my arms, flinching as grit whipped at my skin, like a thousand wasp stings. Out of nothing rose a deafening screech, a loud, high-pitched engine sound. At first I ignored it, content to hide my face. But it only grew louder, angrier, until I couldn’t ignore it, convinced that I was about to be pulverized by a speeding freight train.

Forcing my head up, teeth gritted, eyes opened, I expected to kiss a metal train grill. The instant my eyelids lifted, though, the wind and sound vanished. There was no train. There was nothing but a strange hissing sound and a wall of dark gray wind rotating furiously ten feet in front of me. Behind me. All around me. Tipping my head back, I saw the tunnel rise all the way into the sky. A tornado. I was standing motionless in the eye of a tornado. Not a hair on me shifted, even as the deadly force embraced me in a cocoon of particles and shriveled plants, as it spun at speeds powerful enough to toss a car like a toddler tosses its toy.

Closer and closer the dark wall came, tightening around me, the powerful mass now within arm’s reach. This wasn’t normal. This is not what a tornado did. This tornado was alive, and morphing. It was going to swallow me whole.

Never one to suffer from claustrophobia, something about the uncontrollable chaos unnerved me. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Reaching inside, I began plucking threads of my magic.

I shrieked as invisible hands ripped at the flesh and muscle that kept me whole. It was as if my own helix strands were retaliating against me. I crumbled to the ground in agony. Agony like nothing I had ever encountered before, and I knew pain. I’d had more than my share of being scalded, skewered, stabbed, shot, and tortured a dozen different ways. None compared to this. This was sweeping and excruciating to my core.

Clenching my teeth until I thought they would crack, panting in pain, I peered down at my arms, almost expecting them to drop to the ground. Why were the Fates punishing me like this? Why bring me here to drag on this torture?

And then it dawned on me.

It was to demonstrate their divine power. They were showing me the force I was up against. I was a simple organism next to them. A feeble nothing. They controlled all; they granted all. Next to them, I was but a mortal. How dare I use my magic to counter what they were conjuring?

As if my thoughts triggered relief, the tornado vanished along with my agony, leaving me hunched over in a small pile on the dirt, disoriented and unbalanced. Taking a deep breath, I lifted my head, preparing myself for the next exhibition. The next test. My eyes met white. All was white. Like a psychiatric ward, only there were no decipherable walls or ceiling or floor. No doors. I was sitting inside a two-dimensional blank canvas and the artist hadn’t begun yet.

A shimmer somewhere off in the distance grabbed my eye. A tiny ripple of light—like a tear in the canvas—broke through. Then another … and another. All around me, shimmers of light appeared and grew closer until my surroundings undulated like sunlight glimmering on a thousand diamonds. Out of these iridescent waves floated four forms with no discernible features. They glided forward and began to take shape.

My environment morphed yet again. I was no longer crouching in a white nothingness. I was now perched on a round marble pedestal, maybe a foot in diameter and the axis of a shallow, round vessel, divided in four equal sections by short walls. Each section brimmed with tiny glass marbles.

A forest of peculiar trees outside of the vessel had appeared in the seconds that my eyes were focused on the glass marbles. The trees were the size of enormous ancient oaks, their canopies sprawling, only their trunks were made of a crystalized substance. I gazed in awe at the perfectly round, stiff leaves of kaleidoscopic colors hanging from the branches. Though no breeze touched the air, they shifted and glistened in the sunlight. Sunlight from not one but seven glowing masses above. Ferns with the same kaleidoscopic leaves covered the forest floor, looking all the more bizarre given the glimpses of lush green grass peeking out from beneath.

A crunching sound attracted my attention to the left, to a grove where a pair of deer grazed on the fern leaves, seemingly unbothered by the unusual texture of their meal.

I could’ve spent hours mesmerized by the peculiarities around me—the two-headed owl settled on a crystal branch, the patch of rainbow-colored four-leaf clovers, two squirrels prancing along the ground on their hind feet, holding hands as a loving couple would—but the four figures now standing beyond the bowl were more than enough to occupy my attention. Two men, two women, dressed in gauzy white gowns. That much I could tell. They had the typical human traits—noses, eyes, limbs—but there was nothing typical about them. Four sets of perfectly round irises like stained glass windows studied me as I stared back at them. Their noses were long and excessively narrow, their lips thin and wide and tinged with blue, their cheekbones high and angular. They all had identical long blond hair, only the strands looked like spun gold and floated around their shoulders as if immersed in water. These creatures were both hideous and hypnotically beautiful.

The Fates.

One of the females stepped forward, her soft white gown billowing around her. “You called?” I shivered at the sound of her high-pitched voice, like chimes in the wind.

I cleared my throat, buying myself some time. My mind was a pool of scrambled questions, and grievances. I hadn’t thought this through. I hadn’t ever expected this chance. Now that I had it, what did I say? “My name is—”

“Sofie,” all four finished in unison in that same fluid sound.

My lips pressed together as I silently admonished myself. Of course they know your name! But, then again, they would also know why I’m here, wouldn’t they?

“To ask us to reverse our answers,” the speaker answered. An inkling of worry lanced me. Can she read my mind?

“Yes …” A smile stretched those thin lips.

My breath caught as I took a turn around the circle, studying the rest of the faces, all similarly peculiar. Can they all read my mind?

“Yes,” the chorus of voices confirmed, their laughter ringing out again, their brows arching into half-moons. Were they enjoying this? Bile rose in my throat. I hated having anyone in my head. I had despised Nathan for it when I was human and I loved him! Now I had all four of them dissecting my thoughts.

I felt my shoulders hunch under their inspection. In my world, I was at the top of the food chain. Here, though, in their arena, I was a vulnerable, weak mortal …

And a sitting target, balanced on this pedestal, I realized, as I surveyed my situation again. “Would you mind if I come out of this bowl so we can talk?” I kept my voice controlled as I peered down at the marbles again. They weren’t typical marbles, I could see that now. I squinted to get a closer look. Some had swirls of burnt orange and red, others were a pale yellow, and others brown. But the ones with small patches of green, blue, and wisps of white swirling around caught my eye. There was no mistaking what these little balls were now. Tiny worlds! My jaw dropped as I scanned over the giant vessel, at all the tiny worlds resting there. There had to be thousands!

“Yours is here.” The female Fate pulled a blue and green ball out of her pocket and held it up between her index finger and thumb. My heart jumped as she tossed it up in the air and deftly caught it, as if it were no more precious than a quarter. With a toothy grin displaying slightly elongated canines, she slid the tiny orb back into her pocket and gestured with a hand. “Come forward, please, but be careful. These worlds are fragile.”

To demonstrate, one of the male Fates leaned into the vessel and picked up a marble. Holding one hand below the other, he squeezed the tiny ball between his fingers. I heard a soft popping sound and then watched dust drop to his outstretched hand.

He obliterated a world. A world of living, breathing, loving humans. Little boys and girls, devoted families, the innocent. Just like that. I gaped at him, trying to quash my rising alarm. If he could do that to a world without a blink of an eye …

“Does that bother you?” His brow quirked as if genuinely surprised. “But there are so many others,” he offered, passing his hand in a sweeping direction over the other worlds.

When I didn’t give him an answer, he closed the outstretched hand that held the destroyed world dust and reopened it to show the tiny world perfectly whole once again. “Very well then,” he said and placed the tiny ball back into the pit.

We are all-powerful. That’s what they were telling me. They could give life and take it away, and give it back again. With the clench of a fist, a quiver of a thought, a sour mood.

I looked down again at the bowl before me. With my vampire traits, I could sail over these worlds with no effort. But I was certain those traits were paralyzed here. Without them, I would crush dozens of planets, kill billions of creatures with an awkward shift of a toe. Would the Fates recreate them if I did? My eyes grazed over their expressionless faces, harder to read than an ancient script. They were reading my thoughts right now. They could answer me if they wanted to, to alleviate my worry, and yet they didn’t answer. They wouldn’t give even a hint.

No, I’d stay right where I was.

“We wondered when you would request an audience with us,” another of them said. “We so rarely grant them.”

“Request … that’s one way to put it,” I answered sarcastically, adding, “Why’d you do it?”

The Fate with Earth in her pocket smiled. “Because you are special.”

My head cocked in surprise, not expecting that answer. “In what way?”

She didn’t answer my question. Instead, she asked one of her own. “Do you not wonder why you are so powerful? Where your magic comes from? Why you can do things with ease that other sorceresses seem unable to even consider?”

“Yes,” I answered truthfully. Countless times, in fact. But I’d always shrugged it off as the result of being more experimental than the typical witch. Reckless, Nathan used to call me …

A ring of laughter surrounded me, like a melodious tune carried in a breeze. “You are reckless.” She was reading my mind again. The female with Earth stepped forward, bare toes sliding under the tiny worlds. They spilled and rolled off her feet and ankles as she slipped through, unconcerned about breaking any of them. “But you are also unique.” Her hands lifted to her chest in meaning. “I gave you your extraordinary power … my child.”

Those last two words slammed into me, almost knocking me off my pedestal and my mouth struggled to form words. In reality, if she considered herself a god, then she’d consider all people her children, and yet a stir in my gut told me there was more to it than that.

“Yes,” she crooned, answering my thoughts. “You are my child. One of mine.”

“No …,” I responded slowly, straining to grab hold of flashes of a pretty auburn-haired French lady taking a wire brush to my own red locks. Mama … such a gentle, young woman …

“She was merely a vessel,” the Fate answered, her voice turning icy cold.

“A vessel who gave birth to me and raised me? Whose genes and eyes and nose I share?” I threw back, anger sharpening my tone over her disrespect for Mama.

The Fate smiled as I would imagine a mother smiling at her four-year-old child when she said something silly. “You are my child. I chose you.”

“Why? Why did you choose me?”

Another round of melodious laughter. “Why not?”

A spike of irritation raced through me. I wasn’t going to get a straight answer from them, and yet this was my only chance to get any answers. I decided to probe differently, even though it was futile given they could read my mind. “All four of you gave it to me? Or just one of you?”

The Fate cocked her head to the right. “Numbers are subjective, aren’t they?” In the blink of an eye, the group of four Fates multiplied into dozens of long-haired forms. I blinked and shook my head to focus. When I did, they now numbered in the hundreds. Then, just as quickly, they all vanished, leaving only four.

I worked hard to school my expression.“Neat parlor trick.” Awe and annoyance competed for my attention. If my attitude bothered them, they didn’t let on.