Lilac Child Chapter 23

Night had long fallen across the city, leaving Zini sitting in the dark. Hours passed, but no matter how hard she tried, sleep wouldn’t come. Nothing calmed her mind, not the meditations taught to her by her friend Son’dali, nor the breathing techniques shared by the divers in the harbour. She wished she were out there on a boat, adrift under a sky full of stars. The swell of the ocean lifting her closer, raising her until she could touch them. She wanted to be anywhere other than where she was.

Her frantic plan to save her friend had failed. She thought herself a fool for trying, for thinking that she could change his fate. To have come so far from the mines of the Intraana, all the way to the most important city in all Nostvary, from the life of a miner’s daughter to a friend of emperors. It had all been a lie. Alone in the dark, she imagined herself under the machine, the clanging belt carrying ore overhead, that hungry snake that cut across the barren sun scorched land. She was still there, at least a part of her was. “Skara, will you accept me in your hall?” Her voice rung out, startling a mouse creeping along the wall. It froze and sniffed the air, pink ears twitching. “Will you take me home?” In all her time spent at The Grand Temple, she’d never crossed the floor to visit the Skarans, despite them being her people, her true soul mates. Could they tell she was one of them by her walk, her smell, or by the sound of her soul as she hurried past their temples? Son’dali was right, she worshipped no God, gave fealty only to those that fed her, that cared for her when she was sick. Liandra then, maybe. A Liandran cleric had healed her leg and erased the scars, all except one that refused to mend. Zini touched her brow, feeling the inch long indentation, a memory cut into her skin that her mind rejected. “Skara, I don’t want to go to you. I want the sea. To spend eternity swimming with sharks. I want to dive as deep as I can and stay down there.” Just the thought of the water’s embrace brought her some peace, and she knew the truth if her words. “Trade my soul with Diam. Surely one of his wants to live in the desert?”

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