Licking my lips, I turned to look at my friends. They looked really worried. Hell,
I was really worried. But we’d come too far to turn back now. With a last smile at them, I followed the stone path to the edge of the wellspring until my foot touched the shimmering surface. The surface looked like glittering semi-transparent mercury, flowing and rippling around my toes.
“Fear nothing,” Kaskawan called out.
“Easy for you to say,” I muttered under my breath and took another step into the Wellspring.
The deeper I went, the colder it got. Though it was amorphous and barely seemed to have any mass to it, the liquid pushed my robe against my leg, and a distinct wet feeling traveled up my ankles to my shins. Strange. It wasn’t water, yet it acted similarly.
Weirder still, the floor was flat and level, yet with every step, the liquid rose higher. After ten steps, it was up to my chest. It was almost like I was taking some sort of invisible stairs down. Fuck. I never asked how long I could stay under. How was I going to breathe? Did I even need to breathe? Would it be like swimming, and I’d need to surface every few seconds?
All those questions vanished when, with my next step, the bottom gave out, sucking me down. I yelped in surprise as the magic engulfed my face and head.
It felt like I was being embraced, swallowed, and lifted all at the same time. An immense and almost overwhelming ancient feeling filled me, like I was in the presence of some eldritch thing I couldn’t even describe.
Paddling my feet, I found that there was no bottom. I couldn’t move my arms to swim upward. I hung suspended as if I was floating in outer space. The most bizarre thing was that I could still breathe. A white, metallic shimmer filled my vision. It was liquid, gas, and solid all at once.
This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever done.
A voice spoke out of the shimmering light, coming from all around me, like some kind of organic surround sound.
“Welcome…daughter of…wolf.”
It spoke in a halting cadence, and I couldn’t quite figure out whether it was male or female.
“Uh…hello,” I said dumbly, surprised my mouth didn’t fill with liquid or smoke or whatever the hell this was.
“Why…do you…venture forth…into our recesses?”
I cleared my throat. God, this was weird. “I came to speak with the Hikshil tribe. The, uhm, the people who live around you.”
“The children…of light. Yes.”
“Right, yeah, the children of light. Sure. There is a war coming. It’s going to be bad. Dragon shifters will more than likely be destroyed or defeated in such a way that their race will vanish in a few generations.”
A strange rumbling moved through the wellspring, like a wave in the ocean, as though something massive had swum by, and I had to steel myself against thinking about some sort of massive creature swimming around in the magic ocean with me.
“We have seen. We know. The veil grows narrow. You are right…daughter of wolf… War comes.”
Well, at least that’s out of the way, I thought.
“We… I mean, I and the dragons need the Hikshil to help us. We need their magic, their numbers, and their power. But they won’t agree until I’ve been, uh, chosen or something by you.”
A long pause followed, long enough that for one terrifying second, I was worried the Wellspring had gone to sleep or fled or something else altogether. When it finally spoke again, I let out a sigh of relief.
“You come… to be accepted…by us. We sense that you have already…been cleansed in a ceremony…of light.”
I thought back on the strange things I saw when Jolon confirmed my identity. “I have.”
“Then…this…should be…familiar to you.”
With no preamble, the light around me brightened until I had to squeeze my eyes shut. Even then, the glare shone through my eyelids, blinding me. It felt like I was still staring directly into the sun?-
“Elle, come down for breakfast. It’s ready.”
“Coming!” I hurried out of my room and down the stairs.
When I arrived in the kitchen, Mom and Dad were sitting at the table. My two brothers and my little sister were already eating. Freddy had a comic book open, and Bastien was craning his neck to read it as well. A few dolls sat beside Sophia’s bowl of oatmeal, and she was diligently trying to eat without smearing the porridge over her entire face.
“Here you go,” Mom said as she put a bowl down on the table.
“Thanks.” I took my seat and pulled the bowl closer, but my stomach turned when I saw what was inside it. Thick crimson liquid, viscous and bubbling. Blood.
“You need to eat up,” Dad said, not taking his eyes off his newspaper.
“What?” I looked up. My siblings were no longer children but adults.
Freddy and Sophia gazed at me sadly, and Bastien had a wicked grin on his face.
“Your blood is impure,” Mom said, dropping a spoon into the bowl of blood. “You need to eat this to make yourself pure again. To shift. To become a true member of this family.”
I shook my head and backed away from the table. “I don’t want to.”
Mom jammed her fists into her side, and sneered at me. “You were always so difficult. The first born, and such a pain in the ass.”
Deep down, I wanted to shrivel up and die, to lower my eyes and tell her she was right. Not this time. Never again. I’d had to listen to this too often.
“No, Mom!” I screamed, kicking my chair aside and walking up to her, pressing my chest against hers. “I’m not the pain in the ass here, you are.”
Bastien’s grin faded, and his eyes went wide with shock.
Dad slammed his paper down and rose from his chair. “You won’t speak to your mother like that, young lady!”
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