The Crumpled Mirror Elizabeth Loea (best historical biographies txt) 📖

leave Indigo alone, bleeding ash into the darkness. Maybe it was wrong of me to seek revenge against someone who had already been electrocuted. Maybe Oberon was so far gone that he wouldn’t even feel what I was about to do.

But I raced for Oberon without even thinking about it. Blood pooled across the ground.

“You—” he started.

I grabbed him as my magic tore a hole in the world.

XXXIII

We tumbled through the sand into a foreign sky. Hundreds of feet above the ground, Oberon screamed and bled. I clutched him and tried to ignore the pressure as my ears popped.

We hurtled for the ground. Beneath us, meadows spread out as far as the eye can see, red grass dotted with white flowers. A cabin puffed smoke in the distance. My stomach tried to climb out of my body.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Oberon shouted over the roiling winds. He curled in around himself, trying to hug his wound to himself.

I’d be dead soon anyway. My friends would be dead, too. My sister had already died. I had no home to return to. Even the tests had been a lie.

“I’m fixing this,” I shouted over the wind. We barrelled for the ground. Clouds reached for us but we slammed through them.

Oberon didn’t try to kick me away; he didn’t have the energy. He just stared up at the sky—at the sun behind me—and tried to suppress the scream that threatened to rip itself from his mouth.

“It doesn’t matter,” he called. “It doesn’t matter!” He could barely manage words through the pain, but he mustered his strength to string them together.

Sure. I’d still be dead. My friends would still be dead. We’d all still die. But, as we slammed into the ground and slid into a different sky, this one dotted with stars, I knew in my heart that this mattered to me.

“You don’t get your happily ever after,” I hissed. “And I don’t get mine, either.”

It seemed like a pretty good deal.

Two vengeful, hateful people, tumbling through the nighttime. Crags opened below us, thick swaths of granite dotted with a few hardy weeds barely clinging to life. Dry brush reached for the sky across the clifftops, bushes crowded together. Oberon still didn’t struggle, but he twisted a little so that I was the one with my back to the ground.

I closed my eyes against the calm light of the moon, braced for impact...and didn’t feel it.

Sunlight broke across my eyelids as I twisted to face the ground again. Oberon tried to kick at me now, but he was losing too much blood to do more than idly smack my leg with his foot.

The chill bit at my ears as we hurtled toward familiar treetops: burned all over, charcoal down to their roots, this was Indigo’s forest. And there, a couple miles off, was the towering silhouette of his parents’ library. Farther off was a city I hadn’t been able to see from the ground.

I had never met Indigo’s father, but the poor man had lost everything now: his daughter, his wife, his son. I almost didn’t want to meet him, for fear I’d break down.

Of course, I never would.

This time, I hoped we’d hit the ground. This endless limbo, clinging with all my strength to Oberon, was worse than death.

The blue forest greeted us. This was Ginger’s world, the horizon dotted with unidentifiable buildings. The treetops veered toward us, as blue as the sky.

I closed my eyes and wished for a quick death.

Unfortunately, it was Oberon who granted that quick death to me. I didn’t see the knife as it flashed—I only felt it as he buried it in my chest. It wasn’t my heart; this was too far to the right.

I didn’t feel the pain. The shock staved it off.

I did see my blood, though. Oberon tossed the knife away before I could grab it, but I saw the red blow away on the breeze.

I rasped a curse, gasped for air, coughed, and watched my heartsblood as it began to flow from the wound.

“Why kill me now?” I coughed. “Why not earlier?”

Oberon smiled. It was a dead man’s smile. We hit the ground before he could answer.

It wasn’t the right ground, though. Finally, finally, the sky opened up above the clearing of burned trees. Somehow, I knew this would be the end. There was nowhere else to run. Nowhere else to go. Even if there was, I’d be dead first.

I didn’t close my eyes this time. We were a hundred feet above the ground, high enough that we’d probably be dead on impact. There was no use closing my eyes.

Oberon grabbed my collar with the last of his strength to get me to look him in the eye. I didn’t have the strength to push him away.

He took a deep breath to say something.

We hit the ground again. And this time, it was for real.

I couldn’t feel the pain by then. It was too much. My body, kind as it was, took away the feeling. Shock had taken over. I just knew that there was no way I’d ever stand up again.

The moss was so green and so soft, I almost didn’t bother looking over to see if Oberon had died. I did, though, just to check. You never know with magicians; they’re tricky creatures. Evasive.

There was no mistaking him for a living person, though.

His head had struck Mint’s makeshift headstone. His eyes were open, unseeing, far paler than the deep green of the moss. His chest was still, empty,  broken. His heartbeat was gone.

My vision tunnelled. I’d accomplished my purpose. I was ready for death, once it came to take me. I’d been stabbed, dropped through five skies. There was no coming back from this one alive.

Orange bloomed in front of me. At first, I thought it was some kind of afterlife opening its door for me, but it was fire that licked the horizon. Between the trees, the forest of Half Moon Bay burned.

Panic couldn’t reach