The Trinity War (Book 3 of the Trinity series)

Chapter 32

I spent the next couple weeks training. In the mornings until the afternoon, I would retreat to the forest to meditate. In the afternoons, after eating, I would join Gerrard and learn the intricacies of mastering air. 

Now that I had figured out what it was that I most desired, I could now work on actually figuring out how to attain it. I wanted to be happy and the only way I would be happy was to find the countercurses and break the curses that I had. In my time meditating, I would sort through the information that I had so that I knew exactly what to ask Mikael when I found him.

If I found him.

Master Yoqi was cryptic as ever. He still wouldn't disclose the information on the whereabouts of the old wizard to me. He said that I wasn't ready and that I needed to come to the answer myself. As if I knew where he was somewhere within the depths of my mind. In the meantime, until that "answer" came to me, I mulled over the information that I had gathered about the curses.

The blood oath curse was a tricky one. My blood was infused with that of Elijah's and as long as Elijah's magic-spiked blood was pumping through my veins, I was cursed. The only way to get rid of the curse, as far as I was concerned, would be to get rid of his blood in my veins, but there was no way of doing this. I had researched several different ways of trying to purify blood. I had raided the monk's library and poured over books about magaical herbs and medicines that could cure cancers, but I found nothing on how to remove poison from the blood.

I then realized that the curse that Elijah had bound me with was created by the ancients. They most likely had no knowledge of cancers and blood poisoning. So the answer surely wasn't in the books. When I presented Master Yoqi with my dilemma, he didn't say anything. He told me once again to continue to look within myself for the answer. I honestly didn't know what he thought my capabilities were. He must have thought that I was an arsenal of information, but every time I went back to reflect, I came up short. I had nothing.

Then there was the elemental curse, which was giving me an equal, if not greater, amount of trouble. I was even more lost when it came to this curse. At least for the blood oath curse, I had a rough idea of where I had to go for the countercurse, but for the elemental curse, I was lost. 

My mother had thought that a sacrifice was needed to break the curse. Jeya, the seer that I had met in Aghbad, also said that sacrifice was the most ancient type of magic. She said this was because magic was all about a balance; that if I wanted one thing, I had to give up something of equal importance. She said all of magic was like that--in order to conjure up an energy ball, you give up part of your own energy. All of magic worked that way, but I couldn't understand where my mother's idea went wrong.

Her plan had been to sacrifice herself out of love for my father. Since the elemental curse at its root was a love curse, the sacrifice needed to be one of love. That much made sense to me. The curse could have gone wrong in one of several ways. It could have been that she didn't love my father enough and that the sacrifice wasn't valid. This was unlikley, because from the way that her mother had talked about her father to her and from the way her father was so unwilling to think about her mother because of the incredible amount of sadness it gave him, she knew that the two were irrevocably in love. Just like she and Trey were. So that was ruled out.

The other mistake could have been that the curse was initially put on the original water master who had toyed with love. If it was a water master's fault from the beginning, it should have been a water master to reverse the curse. My mother was not a water master; she was a fire master. So it was possible that the curse didn't work because she was not master of the right element. This option seemed more plausible to me, but I was still uncertain about it.