5
“This is amazing, isn’t it?” Aylia said.
She had walked me around the outskirts as we watched people using lightning to damage their targets. Sometimes, they’d toss things through the air with telekinesis. It was all mind blowing to watch and confusing.
Everyone was a rider, complete with the expected white hair.
Some stared at me curiously while waiting their turn for whatever exercise they were working on. Others focused solely on their tasks.
“I don’t understand,” I whispered.
Aylia sighed. “Neyil isn’t the bad guy here. Everyone wove this story about how he wants to take over the world, rape the Divines, and force us into his bidding, but that isn’t true at all. He knows where the real threat is, and he has only ever wanted to face off with it before it becomes too powerful to stop. To do that, Divines needed to learn how to truly wield our magic. Neyil built a place for us to do that here. Safely. Without the danger of dragons.”
“If there really were a threat in those mountains, wouldn’t others have figured that out by now? It’s been a long time, yet no one has ever seen anything, no hint there was something hidden there about to destroy the world,” I said.
“Because it isn’t awake yet. It’s there. The animals sense it. Nature does too. You walked through those mountains, and you saw firsthand what exists in them. No doubt some of it is because of what lives deep in those mountains, while the rest is because Nature wants to fight back.”
“Are we supposed to be the solution?” I asked, not wanting to think too hard about my experience in the mountains.
It had been a long, dangerous journey, not just against Nature that seemed to want to get us killed but also involving escape from the Fae. And the fairies. Those fucking fairies. I shuddered, remembering the swarm of tiny creatures that almost would have devoured me if Philit hadn’t reached me in time.
“Wearethe solution.” Aylia sounded so confident as she said that.
I went back to watching the riders train, trying to wrap my head around the information tossed my way. A dangerous, mysterious threat in the Crotlyn Mountains? Neyil not being evil?
I shook off the thoughts, holding steadily onto the fact that he was dangerous. So many had lost their lives because of him. I had firsthand experience with how dangerous the Fae were. My dad was dead because of them.
The Fae painted a pretty picture of strength, beauty, and safety here in the castle, but it wasn’t enough to hide the thorns they held, ones covered in blood. It just couldn’t. This was all a false sense of security meant to lull us into complacency.
Aylia must have sensed she was losing me. She grabbed my hand, squeezing it a little too tightly, to break me from my thoughts. “Do you want to try?”
Her eyes were bright with excitement, and something else, something that left my skin feeling prickly in warning.
“Try?”
She pointed over to a section where people were currently working on attacking balls made of cloth and about two times the size of my head. They were set up about thirty feet away from the riders practicing throwing what looked like threads of lightning.
“Come on. You need to do it to believe it.” She tugged me with her until we were with the crowd.
They quickly cleared a space at the end for me while they took up the three other spots. No one complained or seemed irritated with having me take a spot for myself.
In fact, many of them seemed curious, giving me glances as they went through their exercises. I didn’t know what they thought about my presence. I was a stranger to them, one who definitely believed in my mates while everyone else seemed to fear the dragons. How could a couple like Tanja and Captain Corniz be wrong when they were so right together?
Aylia positioned me on top of an X painted white on the ground and had me face the target. She held out her hand until it seemed like her palm was crackling with white lightning.
“First, we need you to be able to call forth the magic within your body.” She moved her hand around slowly, the magic following her motions.
Something in me pumped faster. There had been a small spark of curiosity and excitement that grew inside when we had first entered the training ground, and now that pulsed bigger, growing with each moment.
“How?”
“It’s about feeling. You did amazing things with your mates, and while I hate to say it, you need to think about what you felt in those moments. Recall what your state of mind was. What was it?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
She smiled at me patiently. “But you do know. You did it. You felt it. You knew enough to repeatedly do it. To make your dragons breathe fire without you on their back. To help them do it in their humanoid form. What was that feeling?”
“You know a lot of what I did,” I said suspiciously.