I smile at her, my most charming smile if I do say so myself.
As we look at each other, I feel the need to tell her the truth.
"You can't bring Kathera back. The Stone of Ilina was used hundreds of years ago. Its essence is gone." The words come out in a rush, as if I could not hold them in any longer.
She looks like I have just hit her again, anger taking over her face. Then she laughs softly, an eerie sound, as if she knows something I do not.
"Then tell me why it is thrumming like a heartbeat. My heartbeat. I can feel it." Suddenly, two voices become one. "My soul is still here. I never left. Help, Sahora. Bring me back."
"Kathera?"
An eerie nod.
"What are you doing here? You are dead." The dead should stay dead. Fate says so.
"The Fates do not show us everything. They like to see what we do when they twist the lines." She starts to speak with two voices again. "Put the essence back into the stone." Her voice shifts, sounding like Sahora once more. "Sometimes it is up to us to untangle the lines."
"What just happened?" I ask her.
"I don't know," she says, her voice shaking a little.
"Kathera was talking through you," I say.
"She has been coming through really strong lately," she tells me, her breath ragged. "All I know is that it hurts more than anything I have ever experienced."
As Sahora's storm calmed, my own began, although not physically.
The others with her began to crowd around us.
A graying brunette woman walked over to Sahora and instantly seemed to be looking her over, as if she were going to set fire to the rest of the forest. Behind her stood a man made of mountains, his eyes set on me, his violet stare seeming to look straight through to the core of me. My blood went cold.
"Are you okay?" the woman asked Sahora as two more people approached, one carrying maps with fraying edges and the other seeming to have her hands hovering over a small pouch.
"Oliver, tell them what happened," Sahora said quietly, as though the words hurt her to speak.
After I finished telling them what happened in the eye of Sahora's storm, silence hung in the air.
"Our next steps are clear," said the dark-haired man, his face carved from something more substantial than stone. "We must find the essence of the blood shard and find the rest. Restore the essence to each."
Sahora groaned. "But how do we know where each one's essence is kept?"
"We will find out as we go. The first one is the blood shard, we know that much." The man was stern and matter-of-fact.
Sahora looked down at the shard now in her hands, glowing in a pulsing rhythm, like a heartbeat. The words of Sahora and Kathera flooded me again: my heartbeat.
If she still had a heartbeat, she was not dead. Death was cold, and a heartbeat could not exist within it.
How did this happen?
How was our Empress caught between life and death?
How was I supposed to keep my oath if the one I was oath-bound to was the one telling me to bring her back?