Destroyed
Book Four in the Untamed Series
by Madeline Dyer
Amazon Kindle | iBooks | Kobo | Nook
—
ONE
“We need to stop, Sev.” Corin’s voice is raspy, raw, and his hand closes around mine. Grime streaks across the right side of his face, makes his stubble look darker. His eyes are grim, but focused.
I shake my head before I realize I’m going to. We can’t stop, I can feel it. It’s the power inside me—it has to be—the Sarr legacy rising up, taking control, because it’s trying to help, to guide me, and I feel like I know it. Know it well. Like I’ve always been waiting for it. It’s part of me—and it shouldn’t be. It should feel new, unknown, strange.
It doesn’t.
I point at the horizon, at the fast-spreading flames. “That’s going to reach us if we stop.”
But it might anyway, I know that. I curse and look at the sky, but all I see is the strange yellow-gray light, the heavy dust in the air, the ragged debris as it dances in gusts, swirling round and round. No spirits are visible—and something tells me they’re not here at all, not even in their weaker, invisible forms. But we need them again, we need to move. They brought us to safety before, took us away from the flames, but the world is still breaking, and fire is greedy. Patches, growing and growing, taking the world, orange tongues waiting. My fire.
“Esther and Taras are really struggling.” Corin tugs on my arm, then turns his head, braces himself against an angry gust of wind. “We have to stop.”
“We can’t.” The ragged wind snatches my words away, carries them, rips them into shreds that fall into the flames.
Long, dry wind-swept grass slaps against my bare legs. Fire will easily spread through it, and, for a second, I think it’s happening now—flames taking my legs, my skin smoldering, peeling, the stench of burning flesh hanging in the air. It doesn’t stop, because nothing is damp here—not even the air, even though we’re so close to the sea. The waves are just over the edge of the cliff on my right, but they’re untouchable.
I jolt, separate myself from the nightmare, and look behind me, feel my hand brush against the bottom of my shirt, where dried blood has hardened the fabric. Taras is a few feet behind Corin and I. His left arm is tied in a makeshift sling. His face looks older, his skin more leathery, worn, accentuated by the eerie light, as if he’s aged twenty years in the last few hours, since the—
I snap that thought off and force myself to look at Esther, behind him, but her features are nearly indistinguishable in the murky grayness. I can just make out her shape—her pregnant form. Jana’s next to her, sort of hovering as she tries to help her, though she doesn’t touch her. The dog? Where’s the dog?
I turn, catch my foot on a ridge in the dry ground, and stumble. Corin’s hand shoots out and catches me. Then I see the terrier, feel my heart lighten a bit.
Taras stops next to us, panting, then leans forward, braces his right hand against his knee. His twisted posture makes him look like he’s going to fall over in the next gust of wind.
“How long do we keep going?” Jana shouts. Her voice is like an arrow weaving through chaos, death, and unheard words.
Words.
I inhale sharply. There are words around us—words I can’t access, but something in me can. And it knows, and it urges me forward. I’m walking again, and I cannot slow down, because something is calling to me. No. Calling to a Sarr inside me. And the Sarr is responding, and I’m both here and not, and it doesn’t feel bad.
“Sev?”
“No! Wait! It’s not—”
They all shout after me, but the power in me pushes me forward. Heat floods my body, energy sweeping through me, reversing the numbness in my feet.
The skin on my face tingles with adrenaline.
We’re close. Close to whatever it is.
The connection—it’s strong. I feel it. A sense of familiarity, of knowing. Energy pushes outward from my core, until it’s at the forefront of my being—this other person, guiding me and my powers.
It’s okay, the Sarr says. She’s not my mother, but she feels like her, and I don’t know whether that helps or not. But I give in to her, let her guide me completely—and it’s a relief because the night is coming fast, darker than I remembered one ever being—darker in the way it climbs inside you. But everything’s changed now. The world has changed. The Dream Land’s gone. Nothing works as it did. Nothing feels right. It is the Last Night, the final stage of the War of Humanity. A night that will encompass many, achieve much.
Above, the sky changes until it’s a swarming mass of moving soot, dust, and black matter. Things that look like little winged creatures flutter, but when I look closely, I see them for what they are: tatters of the old worlds, the barriers, skin, blood. Nothing alive lives up there now. Nothing real.
Even the spirits have gone.
My brother…gone.
The clifftop gets barer, less grass as I run—I’m running. Barren earth scarcely covers the rocks, and the rocks themselves get bigger, flatter, redder. A rock formation stands to the right, clawing up at the sky, holding secrets and darkness and lives.
The wind howls. I shut my eyes, and I see the stone inside the rock formation—it’s just suddenly there, in my head. I jolt, a pulling sensation inside me, and the Sarr lady whispers again that it’s okay. My fingertips buzz with energy as I stare at the rock formation.
Time seems to stop.
“Is that a cave?”
Corin’s voice jolts me, and I turn, find him closer than expected. He’s not looking at me; his gaze hovers above my head. I don’t know why that annoys me, why I feel irritation at his lack of attention on me.
“I think so,” Esther says, stopping, breathing hard. She leans forward ever so slightly, one hand under her pregnant stomach, the other one bracing her lower back as she pants.
I try not to look at her, because she shouldn’t be that pregnant and it makes my own body feel too heavy, slimy, looking at her. I catch her gaze as she lifts her head. Her eyes are haunted.
I look away, at the rocks—the cave.
Go in there.
The voice is a compulsion inside me. The voice is me now—me, long ago—hard and knowing. Safe and beautiful, holding onto the guiding memories.
A safe place.
“Sev, wait—I thought we were following the cliff-edge?” Corin’s voice hovers behind me, follows me.
Were we? I can’t think. My head doesn’t feel right. Everything is slow and distant and numb, but everything happens too quickly.
My feet move mechanically, my stained tennis shoes blurring. Jana’s saying something, but her words are bright colors in a fog that doesn’t make sense—yet hearing her makes me feel safer. Just being around her and Taras makes me calmer. I am finally safe with other Untamed Seers.
The terrier’s shrill barks wrap inside the howling wind, urging on the coming storm.
Energy pounds through me, and I can’t contain it. I sprint the final distance to the cave, a thrumming sensation inside me, around me, everywhere. And then I’m inside and—
My breath catches in my throat as I see it. A giant rock face, marbled stone, with drawings on. Memories etched into permanence.
The Living Rock, the power inside me says.
I step closer and my fingers dance over its rough face, and I feel the life within each etching, the pathways, the futures people had, long ago. The people who lived here made these designs. But infusing my life through touch makes them my pathways snaking across the fabric of time in circles that should not exist. A network of possible futures, interconnected, a journey transferred to a new line, a new place, by a simple decision.
If I drag my hand across the rock, it’ll ripple more. New possibilities. Always new directions, new lives.
I don’t drag my hand across it. Some things are not supposed to be disturbed.
The wall holds more images than just the lives, and I step to my left, focus on a new image. It’s only a few darkened lines on the rock, but they come alive in my mind, growing and growing, flashing: an army of spirits, of Lost Souls.
Below them, Untamed call, lifting their arms. The spirits drop, and high-pitched whistling fills the air. There is a badness settling in, but the spirits and Untamed work together, and new, wonderful lives emerge, protected, safe.
The message is clear. It’s what we’ve got to do. Work with the Lost Souls. A way to get our numbers up, battle the Enhanced. That’s why the Sarr lady led me here—so we could know.
“Cave art,” Corin says.
“Like the Zharat’s.”
I turn on Esther, heat filling my blood. “No. It’s nothing like the Zharat’s drawings.”
And it isn’t, not in the slightest. Theirs was about power and the Gods, sacred places, keeping women in their place. This art isn’t. This is pure and forgotten, life embedded inside it.
Corin frowns. The light somehow accentuates the faint scars on the left side of his face, the ones he got from a wildcat attack when he was younger. “Sev, are you okay? You’re acting a little…strange.”
I ignore him, don’t know how to answer that question. What does he expect? My mother just died, the Dream Land was destroyed, fire has overtaken much of this world, and I’m being guided forward by power—by my ancestors—inside me.
All the loss, the death, the destruction is my fault, and it’s changing me. I can feel it. Or maybe it’s the power in me, all the Sarrs. Change is inevitable.
“The Living Rock.”
Taras’s voice makes me jump. He’s in here too. Jana and the dog are the only ones still outside.
“Empyrean twins. Look.” Taras steps closer, points at one of the other drawings: two babies, deftly drawn with minimal lines, lives interconnected, dependent. “They are rare births—dangerous—but their births are fixed at certain points in time. They cannot be changed or avoided. But the twins themselves: two lives that cannot be unconnected. One of fire, one of ash.” He looks at me. “Do you feel it?”
“Feel what?”
“The danger.”
Corin looks at Taras, then me. “It’s not safe here?”
“This is an Origin Cave, a birthplace of a Divine One. Each Origin Cave holds a Living Rock that embodies the lives and journeys of previous Untamed. The power in here means it is now one of the only safe places,” Taras says. He rubs at the skin around his mouth. It looks sore, raw. “I have only been to one before, and I recognize the energies. The danger is outside. The danger is the world, unsettled.”
Unsettled, yes. That’s the word. I taste it, feel it bloom on my tongue. That’s what everything is. That’s why everything feels strange, unreal.
I look back at the drawing—the empyrean twins—but all I feel is a strange sense of distance. I’m not drawn to it like I was with the depiction of the Untamed and spirits working together. It doesn’t feel real, yet it obviously speaks to Taras.
“Then we have to stay here,” Corin says, “in this cave. Esther needs to rest.”
“We cannot stay long,” Taras warns. “We cannot tread heavily on a Divine One’s hospitality.”
But the Gods and Goddesses are not here. I stare at him, feel my face tighten and my fingers twitch as Taras continues talking. My knuckles crack. He’s not the special Seer. I am. Me. Power fizzes through me, and I pull my hands into fists. This new energy is growing inside me, getting bigger still, more and more layers wrapping around it.
Corin steps farther into the cave, and Taras follows.
I stay where I am and touch the stone wall again, feel the depictions of the spirits, feel the way the energy speaks to me, how it calms me.
Esther gives me what I suppose is a sympathetic look, then perches on a low rock at the side of the cave’s entrance just as Jana and the dog appear, their forms silhouetted against the murky light. My terrier sniffs the air before he trots inside, gives me a wide berth. The usual, now.
“We must do a Seer cleansing,” Taras says a few minutes later, returning with Corin. He looks at Jana and me. “The change in the physical world and the destruction of the Dream Land will have disrupted our Seer powers, changed their frequencies, their claws. There is bad energy wrapping around us, particularly you, child.” His eyes bore holes in me. “Without the Gods and Goddesses, our powers will be weaker. You will already be able to feel how much weaker they are. If we do nothing, they will weaken until they are nothing, placing us at risk of great danger, and there will only be darkness inside us—nothing we can use to protect ourselves. We need to find the new forms of our powers, ones this world can sustain. We must cleanse and embrace their energies, learn how Seer gifts operate in this world of destruction in order to maximize their use before they drain away completely, following their creators to death.”
I stare at him, wonder if he needs to be so melodramatic. Following their creators to death. Anyway, I have no idea what he’s on about—my powers aren’t weak in the slightest. They’re stronger than ever. I can feel them pushing inside my soul. A hair’s breadth away from my mind, ready for the moment I call them.
“What?” Jana takes a step backward, then pushes her hair behind her ears. In the dim light, her hair looks grayer, not reddish-blond. “They’re going to drain away completely? We’re going to lose our powers?”
“Yes,” Taras says. “The Divine Ones—the Gods and Goddesses—give us gifts of their own powers, powers from the spectrum beyond. Our powers are connected to us, but also to them.” He wheezes a little. “Our powers are weakened now, and they will continue to weaken, seeping away to join their creators. This will leave us more and more vulnerable to the powers of the Dark Void, and the Dark Void is always hungry for Seers it can control, can trap, and feed upon.”
“The Dark Void?” I ask.
“It is a spiritual realm, a bad one. There were tunnels to it from the Dream Land.” He points at my pendant. “It is a common belief that a Seer pendant protects its wearer from being trapped in the Dream Land during a vision. Many believe the Seer pendant provides an anchor to the mortal world, even though such an anchor may interfere with smaller aspects of a vision. But Marta’s Lore taught me that a pendant, which can exist in both the mortal and spiritual planes, actually protects you from finding an entrance to the Dark Void from the Dream Land. It is not the Dream Land itself that you get trapped in. Your pendant protects you from being sucked into an entrance to the Dark Void —for when people land there, they never escape.”
Jana’s eyes widen, and she shudders. “So the pendants are still important?”
Taras shakes his head. “Seer pendants only prevent their Seers being sucked into the Dark Void, when in the Dream Land. They will not work without it. And now, it is gone, but the Dark Void is not. We are more vulnerable to it now, and thus it is imperative we cleanse and strengthen our powers, help them live longer without their makers, so they can hold the darkness at bay and prevent the Dark Void from claiming us.” Taras’s eyes darken for a moment. “But without the Divine Ones’ protection, Seer powers cannot live forever. They will dim. Powers will be temporary—some more so than others. But all will disappear in the end.”
“And then the Dark Void will take us anyway?” Jana’s blue eyes seem to get brighter.
My mother. My eyes widen.
“The Dark Void will likely try, and it will get more Seers than it has had in hundreds of years, for it has clear access to the mortal world with no Dream Land in between. But strong Seers will still make it to the New World, and those who die before their powers have gone, will likely have enough power to fight the Dark Void—if they’ve cleansed their powers now.”
I breathe a little deeper. My mother died and she was still a Seer, still had powers, though she couldn’t fight death. We sent her off. She’ll reach the New World, won’t she, just like the other Sarrs in the legacy who are both there and in me?
Taras locks eyes with me. “This is why the Last Night has started. Your powers end the war, child, but they will not last forever. It must happen soon. It has to, else it will never end at all.”
“So it’s definitely going to be soon?” Esther asks. “The end of the war?”
“It has to be,” I say, resist the urge to roll my eyes. Wasn’t she listening?
Then I feel strange—because I don’t agree with Taras. It doesn’t feel like my powers can get weaker. It feels like they can only get stronger.
Taras looks to Corin and Esther. “Only Seers may be present during a cleansing.”
Corin’s gaze flits to me.
I shrug. He takes it as affirmation of Taras’s words, and, a moment later, he and Esther leave.
Taras indicates for Jana and I to follow him to the back of the cave. There, in the semi-darkness, a stone bowl is sitting on a plinth, a pale, milky liquid in it.
“Where the hell did that come from?” Jana steps backward.
The terrier’s lurking behind her, and he only just moves in time to prevent a squashed paw. Something dark fills me, seeing that, how easily he could’ve been hurt, and the dark thing inside me wants to scream at Jana.
I frown. That’s not right, it’s not me. Maybe Taras is right about the darkness, about some of it.
“It is Jympalah’s Silk,” Taras says. “An old, old drink. Marta’s stories state it will await Seers when changing times arise.”
“That sounds like a load of crap,” Jana mutters, flexing her fingers. She glances at me, and her blue eyes seem to glow in the dim light.
I don’t say anything to her because if I start to, the dark thing might take over, and now I’m aware of it, its claws seem even bigger, sharper.
Taras scoops the bowl up with one hand and gives it to me. “You must drink first. We drink in order of power.”
I take it, stare at the milkiness, how the whiter swirls in it are growing, taking over more and more of the watery part. A heavy pressure closes around me, and Taras tells me again that I must drink it first.
The air is hot, made up of a thousand needles that pierce my skin, as I raise the bowl to my lips.
Yes, drink it.
The voice—me? I don’t know—commands me, and I take a gulp. Then another, and another, feel the liquid pulsing down my veins.
It is sweet, and I swallow more hastily, feel some trickle down the wrong way, and choke a little, eyes spluttering. My dog’s eyes are on me, and I wonder what kind of monster he sees in me.
Taras takes the bowl and drinks for a long moment. When he passes the bowl to Jana, he has a white mustache.
“Do all Seers need this?” Jana’s eyes narrow. She clicks her tongue. “What about the others, out there? If there are any left.”
She looks at me again. I wish she wouldn’t. We all know it’s my fault. I didn’t throw my Seers out before the Dream Land exploded, not like Raleigh did.
My chest tightens.
“Yes, they do, and all Seers will find Jympalah’s silk.”
It takes several minutes for Jana to lift the bowl to her lips, as if she is considering it, before she takes her sip and hands the bowl back to Taras; she’s barely touched it. Sensible. I don’t know why I drank so much. The even sweeter aftertaste is still in my mouth, wrapping around my tongue. I don’t like it.
Outside, I can hear the waves crashing. Louder now. The wind too, howling, shrieking.
Taras places the bowl at the side of the cave and makes a one-handed thank you gesture above it, his face tilted up to the cave’s rough, jagged stone roof.
“Don’t think he’s all there,” Jana mutters to me. But she smiles innocently at Taras as he rejoins us.
“Now, draw on your powers, display them,” he instructs. “But with care. Feel them, find the differences, the new forms, how they’ve changed. Jympalah’s Silk will allow quicker access to your powers and will cleanse them as it fights the growing weakness, allowing you to draw them out in a time when they’d ordinarily be feeble or even locked away.”
I resist the urge to snort or laugh. Mine are neither feeble nor locked away. Mine are fire inside me, just waiting to be freed.
I draw flames to me, watch them bud from my fingertips. Nothing different about my murderous power.
Jana struggles with whatever power she’s trying to access—I don’t know how I know of her struggle, I just do—and Taras sits still, his face smooth with no expression, unreadable, as he presumably accesses his.
I pool white light into my hand. Nothing different there either. When my mother died, when my powers awoke and the gateway activated, I felt the full strength of the Sarr bank inside me. Immense power only I can guide.
I still feel it. It’s still there. All the Sarrs are there—not just the one who guided us here.
Maybe my Seer powers work differently, because of the legacy inside me. Drinking that milky drink was pointless. My powers haven’t changed, because mine are held within me. I have the Sarr strength to hold onto them. They’re not like Taras’s and Jana’s powers—can’t be. Theirs are directly from the outside, the Gods and Goddesses. They have nothing extra to hold onto them. But I’ve got help, protection.
I reach out for my body-sharing power, remember how it feels to slip into someone else’s body, the little nuances that filled me and—
Nothing.
An empty space. A desert, sand blowing across.
I inhale sharply, make a choking sound. Taras and Jana look at me.
“It’s gone.” My voice is a whisper that’s breaking. “The body-sharing.”
Taras nods. “Of course. That’s not the power that will save us all now. You’d need an anchor to body-share with all the Untamed.”
An anchor. That’s what Raleigh said.
My mother.
But I’m the last live Sarr.
The gale outside deepens.
“So what power will save us?” I ask, force myself to say the words, to be strong, to not get sucked into the sinkhole beneath me.
“Child, I do not know. The knowledge is inside you. Only—”
A loud screech.
I jolt, turn and—
Corin rushes into the cave, face red, chest heaving. He looks around, panic in his eyes, counts us. “Drones!”
“The Enhanced!” Esther appears behind him, her arms over her stomach, cradling the life within. “They’re going to detect us, going to—”
“Quiet!” Taras yells.
“But there are no spirits here!” Esther cries. “Nothing to mask us!”
“Unless they’re invisible,” Jana suggests.
“But they’re weaker when invisible,” Taras replies. “And we’d need strong ones. No. We need to think.”
I move to the cave’s entrance. My heart pounds, energy inside me, my powers stirring. I stumble, reach out, catch myself on a sharp part of the Living Rock. Blood seeps across my knuckles. Nearly a ripple in time, but not quite.
“Where are you going?” Jana asks, but I don’t listen to her, don’t answer. I step outside.
Cold air buffets against me, and the wind picks up, howling. The air’s thick, gritty—grittier than before. I peer into the darkness as I walk behind the cave, the rock formation, look into the sky. A frown tugs across my face as I see the flashing red light. It’s some distance away, high up.
“Sev, come back!” Corin’s voice.
A high-pitched squeal fills the air.
A siren? On a drone?
A—
Something drops from the sky.
A second later, the horizon explodes.
