A Clove of Fates

25. Like A Bridge

The air up here tasted different than the air on the sea, or the air back home. Those had always been filled with smell. This place was almost devoid of it. The wind brought nothing but a chill as it stung my face. I didn't know if I liked it. It was different.

It felt thin enough to get enough of it into my lungs, a least. Lately it's seemed as if the air was too thick, as if each breath got caught somewhere, as if I hadn't been breathing at all. But this breath in felt like breathing. And this one too.

I'd stumbled out of the cabin while he was in the middle of talking. I think I was gaining the unadmirable habit of upsetting gods. It wasn't the kind of thing my parents had warned me to stay careful of, but it seemed pretty common sense. Maybe I was stupid. I didn't feel smart.

I let that thought go as easily as this breath came out. With my exhale, thinking I was stupid and then that was okay.

Elke was harder to rid myself of.

I was fiddling with my glass shard. What had it started as? I couldn't remember. I thought back to when I'd enchanted it. How in that moment, the path before me seemed so clear. And now...

My thoughts were brought back to the Shard. It was Elke's spell that I'd used. It was my blood that kept it going. Was it a piece of my soul? Would Ifera forever be a piece of mine?

Ifera.

She was coming, wasn't she?

I didn't turn to look at her. I shoved my hands into my pockets and continued to look out over the fjord. It was pretty. I could have never imagined anything like it before, and that was a shame. I had had my corner of the world, hadn't I? Maybe I would like to see more of it.

"Hey."

She stood beside me.

"Hey." I said back. It was the first word that I had said to her all day. I had been scared earlier, I think. That if I started talking I would never stop. And she would know all these things that she couldn't, and I would learn all the things I didn't want to know.

There was no fear of that now. She wouldn't die, I wouldn't kill her. This, whatever magic pulled the air between us to nothingness, wouldn't be ripped away. It was ours. Our souls could not be unBound.

It was the first thing I had that truly felt like mine, a thing that I wanted as opposed to something that others needed me to have. And I was so willing to just throw that all away. Like that, I would have chosen the world over myself. But now that there was space in my head to think, I was glad that we hadn't been unBound.

I smiled a bit at the thought. How funny. We'd come all this way, and it was all thwarted by the utterence of such a stupid word. Two. No unBinding. Was it a double negative?

"How are you feeling?" Ifera's words were experimental. She was walking on thin ice, she knew. I was the ice. Smooth and cold. On the precipice of shattering into some unforgiving icey blackness.