Celestara Veylin's Arc

Chapter 6 of 9

Celestara stood by the sealed gate with her changed hand raised. The link to the horde still hummed in her skull. She had opened it to hunt them. Now it hunted her instead. Their thoughts poured in without warning. Hunger. Cold. The urge to run and tear. She could not tell which thoughts were hers. She pressed her palm to the purple stone and tried to think one clear thought. A face. Her mother's face. But a hundred foreign minds answered, and her mother's face dissolved into the blank pull of the plain. Her feet moved toward the gate on their own. She wanted to open it. She wanted to join them. She caught herself and dug her claws into the stone. "Stone," she said. "Their minds are in me. I cannot find my own." The presence stirred in the walls. "You opened the door. Now build the wall. A mind is not a fortress by wishing. You must lay each stone." She did not know how. Then her eyes found it in the corner of the hall. A dead cluster of thorns, dry and twisted, curled against the base of the wall. Sharp points jutted out in every direction. Nothing soft could pass through. The shape gave her the idea. Celestara knelt by the thorns and gripped a hard stem. A barb sank into her gray palm. Pain flared, and the pain was hers alone. No foreign mind could claim it. She held that fact and used it. She pictured her own thoughts as the wood at the center, safe and hers. Around them she raised the thorns. Every barb pointed out. Every alien voice hit the points and stopped. The horde pushed. She felt them press the wall of thorns. One thought slipped through, a raw urge to hunt, and she seized it before it spread. "Not mine," she said, and pushed it back onto the barbs. Another came. She pushed that back too. Slower now. Weaker. She worked until sweat ran cold on her neck. One by one she pinned the foreign thoughts outside the thorns. Behind them, in the quiet wood, her own mind sat clear. She thought of her mother's face again. It held. The face stayed. Hers. Celestara opened her eyes. The link was still there. She could feel the horde scattered on the plain, small and far. But now a wall of thorns stood between their minds and hers. She could reach through it when she chose. She could close it when she chose. She stood and flexed her clawed hand. The blood on her palm had dried. "I can filter them now," she told the stone. "I know which thoughts are mine." "Then use the link," the presence said. "Follow it to their heart. Find where the scattered ones gather." Celestara turned her mind outward along the thread. Far across the plain, the horde was drawing together again. Something was calling them home.