Page 75 of Season Warriors & Wolves

“Does the original vision change from time to time?”

“Slightly.”

“Then it is easy.” He dragged the chalk without interruption over the black board, creating swirls and twirls all over. “Unpredictability. Do what Snowlin at that point in time would have never thought of doing. Do the opposite of what was your most intense desire at the point your vision was shown.”

I laughed despite the uneasy feeling poisoning my blood. “You both are mad.”

The two turned to me, confused.

“I saw Aurora bleeding and breathless. That is the only end result I want. Why would I want to change it?”

I couldn't grasp the horror and fear in their faces. Wasn’t that what we wanted? To defeat Aurora and therefore my father?

Visha touched a hand to my arm, wincing and pulling back like I burned. “You cannot decide on this just like that.”

Decide? It looked like it had been decided for me. Like everything else. “Why not?”

Her mouth parted open to speak, but no words came out. She touched me again, her hand tightly warped around my wrist, more to hold herself upright than me. “Sometimes, we accept the fate we think we deserve. Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

There was no emotion at all in her face, but the single tear slipping out of her left eye felt like it bore all the emotions this world could possibly bear. “Don’t accept it. Whatever you think you deserve, Snow, you’re wrong. Look around you. Just a little. Outside of the shadows you see and what those shadows say.”

“I am. And every time I look around, I know that what awaits out there if Aurora wins is not the fate my loved ones deserve.”

“Snow—”

“Tell a word to anyone,” I said, picking up my jacket. “And I slay you both like cattle and let crows feast on you for days.”

Not one step I took out of Visha’s chambers had registered in my mind until I stood inside the musky dark dungeon room. “Shut the door,” I said to the guard, backing against a wet far wall and dropping to the ground.

The metal door slammed shut, robbing the room out of the very little light it had left until I was in absolute grey darkness—the sort that made you hazy, the sort where you could still somewhat distinguish if something stood before you yet not entirely grasp whether it was real or made up by your mind.

There was this hollowness in me I had not expected. Death had always been walking along my footsteps. I’d learnt to get along with it. I’d learnt to make it fear me. Why was I feeling so weak now that I would confront it?

Strange. I felt so strange.

Like a part of me was missing.

What was missing?

Sometimes, we accept the fate we think we deserve.

Visha was right, in a sense. But I hadn't yet come to accept the fate I’d seen. Not entirely.

I lifted up the dagger I held, watching my reflection. “Shouldn’t you be laughing?”

Cai hit me with a hazelnut in my forehead, looking around the open Myrdur ruins as he reached me. “Who were you just talking to?”

Don’t know why I bothered, no one was replying to me anymore. The further inside my head I searched, the emptier I found it. “No one.”

He settled across from me, against a massive rock that had fallen from a statue of our god. Through the distance, he looked even angrier. “He left you alone.”

I’ll be your shadow. Be your own light, he’d said and let me go through this day alone. “Kilian is not my keeper.”

“He should be. It is not smart leaving you alone. The second he left you alone you subjected yourself to madness.”

“What happened was not his fault. I will not let you say that, even if you think so. I went to—”