Aisling Blackwood's Arc

Chapter 6 of 10

Aisling climbed the mountain stairs again the next day, and the next. Each lesson taught her more, and each one pulled her chest tighter toward Zamir. She caught herself watching his hands instead of his work. She lost the thread of his words when he looked at her. A shaman needed a clear mind to walk between worlds. Hers had stopped being clear. She could not trust his teaching while her heart betrayed her focus. That night her dream changed. The old nightmares were gone. Instead she saw a little girl made of shadow, with ruby eyes and a wide, cracked smile. Aisling knew her at once. Nyx. Her own buried grief, the child she had once refused. But now Nyx only stood in a snowstorm, small and shivering, saying nothing. At the shrine, Aisling told Zamir. His ears went flat. "I dreamed of her too," he said quietly. "Last night. A girl in a storm." He sat down on the top step and stared at the trees below. "I know that girl. I know this story." Aisling sat beside him. "Tell me." "When you were very small, there was a terrible storm on this mountain." His voice dropped. "Someone left you here alone. You were dying in the snow. I found you." He looked at her at last. "I could not pull you fully into my world. I could not keep you in mine either. So I took a piece of your soul and held it safe. And I gave you a little piece of me in return." Aisling's breath caught. She had known he held a fragment of her soul. She had not known why. "You saved me," she said. "That is why the fragment exists." "Yes." He did not look away. "I have carried part of you since you were a child. That is why my compulsion never held you. Part of you was already mine, freely." The warmth in her chest stopped feeling dangerous. It settled. Her feelings were not a weakness dropped on her by chance. They came from a bond older than her memory. She did not have to fight them. She only had to understand them. "I felt the pull and thought I was losing myself," Aisling said. "But I was only remembering." She met his eyes without flinching. "I can care for you and still serve my people. The two are not enemies." Zamir's ears rose. "No," he agreed. "They are not." Her mind cleared like still water. When he taught her to sense the border between worlds that day, she followed every word. Nothing clouded her now. But a new weight arrived with the calm. The shadow girl in the snowstorm was not only a memory. Nyx had not spoken. She had shivered, waiting. Some part of Aisling's grief still stood unfinished in the cold, and now Zamir had seen it too. Whatever the child needed, it would call them both back to the mountain.