T he strongest magic, as you must know, is born from the shiny sharp brink of sky and earth. Earth has her roots and geometric crystals; these things are useful for grounding spells, for tempting living beings and bending their fates like a cherry-hot blade to the hammer and forge.
Sky has his planets and orbits and infinite constellations. Sky’s magic is transparent, ungrounded, useful for slipping into thoughts, for whispering a name in an unguarded ear, for suggesting alliances and enemies or revealing venom in a cup by the aqua light of a harvest moon.
But only in that bounded, unspoken space where these two realms scrape edges is the purest magic revealed: violent, churning, sparks and comets and whirlwinds, invisible to the human eye. From that place, eons ago, from diamonds and lava and ruby spinning stars, the drákon were first thrust into light, which is why we are the apex of all things.
We bleed with the mountains. We ponder with the stars.
Our Gifts are plentiful. We speak to stones. We Turn to smoke. We bend metal with our hands and end lives with our talons. We’re clever and subtle like the sky, and feral and potent like the earth.
But dreams are not our natural province. When the Gift of clairvoyance is stirred into the soul of one of our kind, terrible beauties result. Of those few in our history who have grasped this Gift, nearly all sank with it into madness over time. It cannot be an easy thing to know your own future, or that of your kin. It cannot be pleasant to witness the story of the life and death of your tribe before it unfolds.
Under the spell of the mighty Carpathians, with the breath of her creation blowing over her heart, Amalia’s Gift splintered. She was given two futures: one dark, one bright, the same mortal lover pulling her two-handed into each.
Every step she took lured her closer to the dark.