Empire Island, Exile the First

Chapter 10

I barely slept that night alone in the yurt. I rolled and sweated and suffered from hideous dreams until I shot up in the pitch darkness, holding my chest, gasping.

"Fuck," I exhaled as the dream faded. There were fragments left clinging to my mind, images of my sister being tortured and lit on fire, a sharp relief of my mother's death.

I felt nauseous thinking about it, so I stood up and stepped outside. I looked out over the ocean where the waxing moon glowed above the waves crashing below. I took a deep breath of air, filling my lungs with the salt sting. There in the solitude of the night, I let my thoughts drift to the reason I was there. My missing sister and the magic faltering beneath my feet, the tendrils from the well source that normally rooted throughout the soil of the island dead in the ground.

I listened for any movement from the other yurts, but they were all dark and silent. I stepped around and glanced at the main house. Every light was blazing and long beams of yellow neon stretched out from them across the ground in front.

The chill air slipped under my skin, I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself, turning to go back inside. I'd check out the main building another time, once I got the lay of the land and knew who I was truly up against.

Once I was back inside, I lit a single candle I found on the bedside table, flopped onto the bed again and laid on my back to focus on steadying the scattered beating of my heart and calm my mind. I took deep breaths in and exhaled them out, emptying my lungs, then filling them again.

I started to drift off into sleep when I felt a jolt, the familiar sensation of falling as I was going to sleep, but this time, I didn't wake up in the bed. I jerked awake right into the middle of another waking vision. I didn't see my grandmother, and I was somewhere else, not Otherworld, but I'd definitely gone into the image of somewhere new to me.

It was daylight but there were dark gray clouds in the sky above me. The kind that looked thick and heavy with rain. I lay on my back, looking up through tall trees, birds flitted above me and there was moss beneath me.

I heard the rhythmic sound of an axe striking wood nearby, so I sat up and looked around. A spark like lightning shot out of my chest and zig-zagged through the trees until I heard a yelp from a man and the axe sounds stopped.

"Who's there?" he called out, his deep voice accented with a Nordic timbre. I didn't respond, it wasn't that I was afraid, it was simply that I was confused.

He quickly found me, crashing through the underbrush to discover me sitting on the moss in the middle of his trees.

"There you are," he said and I looked up to find a great, hulking Viking of a man with thick dark blond hair drawn back into a clasp, and piercing blue eyes set into his chiseled, stubbled, handsome face.

I wasn't normally that attracted to somebody with his features, especially when I was full of fear over my sister, but when his eyes locked on mine they deepened to a deep violet hue, sparking with knowledge. "Kairos Empire, it's been a long time coming."

He extended his hand and I took it, feeling the warm rough skin under mine, but I was still convinced this was a vision. None of these felt real, it couldn't be real, he was the man from my dreams. The man I'd seen before, but the man who didn't exist.

"Who are you?" I asked him, looking up still as he towered at least a foot taller than me. I was tall for a woman, reaching almost six feet, so he was a muscled giant.

"I'm yours," he replied, a smile playing around his full lips. "It's been too long, why have you made me wait?"

"What's your name?" I asked.