Soul of Furies (Book Three)

Chapter 8: Wish Granted

I can do nothing but stare at the picture, hands shaking. My parents' faces are still there, but the space where a smiling Viking girl once was is empty. I try to steady myself, the old wood beneath my feet creaking with the movement as the portrait slips from my fingers.

"Thora, what are you thinking?" Nightstar asks, nudging me gently.

"I...I thought I just had to find the me from this timeline, but...but..." I wince and hold my head, trying desperately to figure out what in Helheim is going on.

Nightstar makes a small noise. "If you aren't in the picture, maybe the gods took your wish seriously. They put you somewhere where you never existed."

My eyes widen, my body flooding with nervous heat and I stumble. Nightstar steps closer to me and I grasp her neck for balance. This is too much to handle all at once.

My attention flickers back to the chest in my parents' room. "But...the sword, the necklace..."

My fingers fly to the jewelry in question. The blue one is still there as always, but it feels different. I lift the gems up and touch each one in turn; light green, blue, dark green, yellow, white, red. I focus on the blue one, trying to get any feeling from it.

Sure, the magic has been absent from the gem ever since my resurrection, but even after that I could still feel the humming remnants of the power it once held. The blue jewel doesn't have that feeling now. It's cold, deader than ever.

"Thora, if you never existed in this world, then you never came back to your village and took the necklace and cloak," Nightstar reminds me, reiterating the story I told her once upon a time. "If you didn't take it—"

"Alrek," I squeak, dropping the necklace from my hand and letting it bounce against my collarbone. "He tried to find it before but he didn't because I had found it first."

"But you don't exist," my dragon utters.

I take a deep breath in before letting it out, snapping my fingers repeatedly as I try to get the gears in my head whirring. Vár's words bounce around in my memories, reminding me of my mission, of my deadline.

"Right what has been wronged."

"Nightstar, I have to find out what changed if I didn't exist," I say, looking to my dragon.

"Like with Berk?" Nightstar asks. She makes a distressed growl a second later. "Wait, but without you...I don't think I would've made it to Berk, which means I never met Toothless—" She halts, her bright eyes misting over. "Toothless...my babies...what happened to them?"

Hearing her say that only serves to remind me of my own children. I sigh and unclip my necklace, slipping off every gemstone except for the blue one before putting it back on. I pocket the detached ones, giving my dragon a sad look.

I patt her shoulder once. "I guess we'll just have to go and find out. Come on, we've got to get back to Berk."