Kingdoms of Ether by Ryan Muree

Author:Ryan Muree [Muree, Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-01-25T22:00:00+00:00

Defeated by every grimoire open around her on the path, she groaned.

It didn’t matter the kind of grimoire or the page. She’d chosen the hardest and the easiest of them all, from training grimoires to the specialty books Adalai had stolen from the drawing room. Every single one had ended in the same result—tickling, tingling, a pressure building in her chest so great it nearly knocked her out, and then a pain in the center of her palm until she couldn’t take it.

She’d even checked her wrist for something to appear. Nothing.

She wiped the sweat from her neck and adjusted her grandmother’s silver hair-clip. She was tired, thirsty, hungry… over it. She was over it.

And to make it worse, they were all standing there staring at her, waiting for what was slowly feeling impossible. Her eyes watered.

Grier knelt beside her and handed her a small square piece of white cloth. “Why don’t we take a break?”

She took it and wiped her forehead free of her damp waves. “I can’t do it,” she whispered.

“Well, in all fairness,” he announced, standing back, “when I was learning how to be a Keeper, I had actual trainers. Not observers.”

Adalai made a face at him. “We had to see what she could do. We had to find anything and everything that was possible, first.”

“And you’ve seen that,” he bit.

Emeryss turned to Urla looking down at her from the bench. “What am I doing wrong?”

Urla hobbled up and scooted the fire grimoire back in front of her. “I told you. It’s your thinking. You’re fighting something we can’t see,” she said.

Fighting what, though? Fighting the ether? She was begging for it to comply. It was like she was missing something, some sort of connection.

“Urla.” She pointed to Urla’s walking stick. “Do you need that to cast?”

Urla shook her head. “No, because I am the tool.”

A tool? “Why in the world would you want to be a tool?”

“I’m an instrument for ether to flow through. I don’t need the stick; it and I are one, and it is an extension of me. Grier would understand this best. His weapons are not just things; they’re extensions of him.”

Emeryss looked at the center of her palm. She hadn’t needed the quill to scribe for that boy in Delour, either. The quill wasn’t special. It was just an extension of her.

Vaughn twirled a leaf between his fingers. “Are you thinking like a Scribe?”

“No, Vaughn, that defeats the purpose.”

Adalai stretched and turned her face toward the sky. “It goes back to my Sigilist idea—half-Scribe, half-Caster. Scribing has been part of you your whole life, right?”

No.

Maybe…

“But I had to be trained to use it,” she said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Adalai said. “All Caster children have to be trained, too. Before that, we know ether, how it feels, it’s absence. Did you?”

Before she’d left Neeria, she’d known ether. Her world had only become empty of ether after the sea oracle. Before then, she’d seen the strands swirling in the depths of the oceans on fishing trips with her father.

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