The Inheritance Trilogy Omnibus(469)

Oh!

And all he would ever have to do, to claim his true glorious self—

OH! OH! OH!

—was take his power back.

I lifted my hands without quite knowing why. Just felt right. I made cups of my hands. Something filled them now, brimming gold and bright-hot and strange. Where had it come from? Mostly Eino—but there was some of me in there, too, just a little, just enough. A spark of myself. Why had I added that to Eino’s shining power?

Because I had to. Because it was… it was why I was there! Why I was, at all.

All around us the mortal realm seemed to swirl, as if something had set it spinning around an axis that was us. But here, here which had become the center of all things, everything was suddenly still.

“Shill?” Ia’s voice was sharp.

“This is yours,” I whispered to Eino, who squinted up at me, panting. “You took it back from them.”

Eino looked utterly confused. “Mine? ”

I grinned. “Here!”

“Wha—” he began, before I plunged both hands up to the wrists into his body.

Into him! Into the he-that-was-Eino, not the flesh, not just the soul! Oh, there are no words for it, not even in my sophisticated big-girl vocabulary, but it was beautiful and perfect, all the whatness and howness of existence pouring through me, finding all the whoness and whyness of him and filling it up, blowing it open, setting us both on fire like baby stars! And I was all swirly, WE were swirly together, there is nothing to describe it except

YOU

ARE

And also, also:

I

AM

Because I am! Because THAT IS WHAT I AM!


Many things happened.

There was light like morning all around me. In the light, my hair lifted and whipped. I rose—no, I grew, limbs and face getting longer, breasts and hips becoming more than thoughts, hair stretching into a whipping banner. As I grew I pulled the shining, screaming thing that was Eino with me, dragging him by his soul; I was laughing. We were laughing, him through his screams and me through my tears, as all around us gathered a ring of power so vicious and intense that the Raringa’s floor peeled apart in splinters and rubble and its roof shattered and flew outward and most of the mortals screamed and fled.

And high above us the moon moved back into the place that it had held for eons, and the sun gasped and turned to see what was happening, and all the planets, everywhere, suddenly paid attention and got excited. All over existence I could feel all the incomprehensible members of my family perk up, or inhale, or sparkle, or ripple as they perceived the change.

It is the best feeling I have ever had. I wanted to share it! So I sent the light forth in spreading-ring wavelets, seeking, feeling, knowing:

An old woman in a place that does not revere old women the way the Darre do. She has nothing—no home, no family, no money, not even her full mind—but she has stood to scream at the cruel boys who’ve tried to take the little dog she loves, stood to fight them, because even she deserves to have something that loves her back—

Yes.

A young man who is smaller than he should be, visibly weaker; others have smelled his weakness. They hurt him, as they have done over and over, for no reason other than their own pleasure, but in this lone moment he is sick of it, he is done, and he balls his fists and launches himself at them even though he knows it is futile—

Yes, this one, too.

A child, a girl, the least valued of her many siblings, the one who seems like nothing so her parents treat her like nothing, give her nothing that she does not take first, and she demands nothing except the one thing they owe her, which is that they look at her, look at her, LOOK AT ME RIGHT NOW—

Oh, yes, yes, yes!

And more, and more, new fires igniting as the wave of power circled the globe. Nothing special about any of them, nothing unique, just the right confluence of circumstance in the right moment of my maturation, and that was all it took. It hurt every time this happened, took that spark of me that seemed as necessary as their own strength—but I grew, too! Their power made me powerful even as I diminished. It was theirs! I was theirs! They took what they should always have had, and I made it real for them, made it right for me!

“Shill!” Ia came through the light and grabbed me flesh and soul; I laughed wildly, wanting him to laugh with me. “Look at what you’re doing to yourself! Stop this!” But I did not care about his concern. I wanted more: to be more, to give more. This was me, and I had found myself at last, and I would revel in it ’til I no longer could!

So Ia did the only thing possible: he surrounded me with the quintessence of himself so that the nothing of him clashed against the everything of me.

And then, only then, did I stop doing what I was doing—whatever that was—and settle back into myself.