Page 89 of Earthbound

She opens her eyes and I see through them. Magical threads, like fallen sunlight, wrap around her hands and ankles. The floor is cold at her back. She is in pain.

What happened?

The fae have taken me ransom, Afa. They wish to discuss our terms of surrender.

I stop seeing through her eyes. I stop seeing through mine. All I can truly see is red, and it is like a film of blood.

I weave the spell I said I wouldn’t. I bind the earth to me, to us; I feel its soul, like the spark of a god, settle into my marrow.

I press my hands into the dirt and feel the pulse of the plants and the animals. I laugh and the ground shakes with me. I smile and the flowers burst into bloom.

This is power that no one will ever understand. No one except Hady.

My love, use your power, free yourself. Then come hither, I whisper in her mind. The war ends today.

I clench my fists and send my magic to the Fae Lands. I want the fae to feel what the humans have. I want their histories to disappear. I want them to be forgotten.

First, I destroy their libraries with a hurricane. Then I crush the bones of their courtyards with an earthquake. Next, I send a flood to wash away everything, and anyone who is left. Finally I cover the land with grass and plants, as though their lands never existed at all.

Gone, all gone, Hady, I say.

But she is silent.

All of this has happened in the time it takes for a moth to flutter its wings. I walk through Kaa’pah’lie with triumph in my heart.

The city is quiet.

‘How can you sleep in times like these? A victory has been had, you should be jubilant!’ I say to my citizens.

But they do not sleep.

I go from door to door but every human I come across has slumped to the ground.

What have the fae done? I think.

I do not understand it. I call the obeah to me and ride forthwith to the village I was raised in.

‘Mother, sister!’ I cry. I have not seen them in many years. A regret I will think of daily.

My sister is not there, I will find her body later by the river. But my mother, she is slumped at the kitchen table, her eyes unseeing. I shake her shoulders. But she does not hear me.

I cry, calling down sleet and snow. She is dead.

But I feel her soul still in the air, for the breeze is now my breath. I look to the sky and it is alight with fire. Not fire. Souls.

Finally, I understand what I have done. Hady had predicted the sacrifice would be great. But how could I have known it would have taken so much?

The souls are dispersing so I try to grasp them, pull them to me, but souls are not of this earth. I cannot twist and turn them to my intent.

But where does a soul taken too early go?

I watch as my people fall like stardust into the only soulless beings in the world: the obeah.

But there are not enough, not enough obeah for all the lost. The rest of the souls are destined to roam until more obeah are born. Trapped in a stasis between life and death.

I call the wind to keep their lights with me, but they will not be caught. Hundreds, thousands of souls are cast adrift without a home.

I fall to the earth. It is my skin now, and I tear at it, clawing the dirt apart.