She rolled onto her back, flopping her hands out from beneath her blankets.
She, Emane, and Drustan had all collapsed in their rooms still wearing the dirty clothes they had worn for two days. Seeing it as a needed release, Kiora summoned all the things they had brought with them. All Emane’s armor, the books, the clothes, the bedrolls, and anything else she could remember from the cave under the falls. It all piled up at the foot of her bed. She then summoned a comfortable pair of pants from her pack and a loose cotton shirt to sleep in. Sitting up, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed to change. She pulled the clean shirt over her head before pulling the pendant and the dragon scale out. Sighing, she ran her thumb and finger across Morcant’s scale. It responded to her touch, light and dark browns rippling across it, almost feeling alive. A tear slid down her cheek. Almost alive. He was gone, and a scale couldn’t make her laugh, or bring her back from the depths of despair, or talk sense into her when nothing else could. With a quick movement she dropped the pendant and scale back under her shirt, swiping at a tear before jerking her grimy pants off and shoving her legs into the new ones.
Flopping back onto the bed she groaned, running her hands through her hair. Still too much magic. She began flicking fire from her fingertips, on and off, on and off. After a bit of that she decided to try shaping it into a ball, as Lomay had done. The first few times the fire sputtered and died under the attempt. But on the fifth try it responded, rolling under her fingertips into a ball of light. Smiling, Kiora poured as much magic as she could into it.
Kiora could feel Drustan’s thread getting closer until his frame filled the doorway.
“Can’t sleep?” He scrubbed his hands through his hair.
“No. You?”
“I am sure I could,” he smiled, “if I wasn’t distracted by the flashing lights in the next room.”
She looked sheepishly at the ball of light still resting above her fingertips. “Sorry.”
“Is this what you normally do when you can’t sleep?”
“No,” she said, extinguishing the ball. “I have never tried this before. I just needed to release some magic.”
Emane stuck his head in the doorway. “I thought we were going to bed.” He took one look at Kiora before shoving past Drustan, “Clean clothes, where did you get clean clothes?”
Grinning, Kiora summoned his drawstring cotton pants and the blue shirt he preferred to sleep in out of the bags and into his hands. “I brought everything here.”
Emane pulled the clothes up to his face, breathing them in like a long lost friend. “Thank you!” He practically ran out of the room, pulling his dirty shirt over his head as he left.
Drustan shook his head. “It is getting that bad?” he asked Kiora.
Emane was already hopping back into the room as he straightened out the legs of his pants. “Is what getting that bad?”
“My magic. Yes,” Kiora answered Drustan. “I don’t know what to do with all of it, and I can feel it buzzing under my skin.”
“Hmm,” Drustan mused. “Hopefully it will get better as you get used to it.”
Emane’s head popped up. “Is that likely? That she will get to used to it?”
Drustan looked to Emane with a devious look in his eyes, “Yes,” he drawled. “I think she will. It will not, however, stop it from hurting the next time she blows you into a wall.”
Emane’s hope deflated, as did Kiora’s. She didn’t like the situation any better than he did. Creating another small ball of light, about the strength of a candle, Kiora set it on the windowsill. “I don’t know how to get used to anything when everything is always changing. A new vision, more magic, a new set of Wings.” She sighed. “I can’t keep up. Like the Creators—I’ve never heard of them until today.”
“I can’t help you with your magic problem, but I can help you with history lessons,” Drustan said.
“I was never very good at listening to history lessons,” Emane mumbled.
Ignoring Emane, Drustan began. “There were six Creators,” he said, leaning against the doorway as Emane made his way to the bed to sit next to Kiora. “As Lomay said, after they had created everything they noticed that the people, being so far separated from the light that had created them, were living in