Fate and Destiny (The Fated Series, #2)

Chapter 32 - Rohana - Lost

I should be downstairs listening to Mak explain why the healer is getting better, but I don't want to leave yet. As much as Willa gets on my nerves, she's the only person I'd want to be sitting at the top of Hollis Mountain with right now. Today is harder than most to get through.

It's the day my best friend's sister died. The day Willa lost her youngest daughter.

Cleménce couldn't be described as anything but an angel. She was sweet and kind and everyone who met her wanted to be her friend, and she'd want to be theirs. She walked around town saying hi to everyone, stopping every few minutes to have an hour-long conversation with a single person. You could imagine how annoying it would get when we tried to simply walk one block to the pastry shop. She'd stop about ten to fifteen times before Branka - Cleménce's older sister - and I slid a bag around her head, threw her over our shoulders, and ran back to her house.

Willa was a sunbeam then. She always had fruits out on the table for us to snack on, always gossiped, and conversed with us as if she were just another one of the girls. It's hard to imagine her as so carefree as she once was. Even with her title as the Resolute Protector, the one person in Thralia with more powers than anyone to keep the elementals safe, she still found time to spend with us. She loved her daughters deeply, and her husband more so.

He's the one no one ever mentions unless they have a death wish. Four hundred and ninety-three years they were married and happy. Four hundred and fifty-three years lay in the past of smiles and rainbows, all before demons and clouds came to kill her daughter. I remember every moment of that day I found out Cleménce was gone.

My sisters and I were all training in Faewin Castle, the capital of Thralia. It was more of a fool around training, as we all had just gotten news that Queen Lira and King Hart were to have twins. We had just finished being deemed ready for field combat with our powers, and to get the news that there would now be twins to make our new purpose that much more meaningful, we were practically on a sugar high without having eaten any sugar.

We were laughing and fooling around like the middle-aged women we were despite our bodily age. In fact, our parents and siblings hated each of us for our teen bodies that were slim and "perfectly shaped." We tried telling them that the body was due to us keeping in shape, but they kept pinning it on our Awakening. The moment when the seed of power is nurtured and, well, awakened, by the elementals, elongating our lifespans from a few hundred to potentially ten times that. The process is painless, just tiring for the first cycle or so until our bodies have had time to readjust to the slower aging process and enhanced body features to better suit the powers we inherit.

Just as I managed to pin Branka while we wrestled like two toddlers, her whole face went slack, and then she was tossing me aside like I was nothing but air. I ended up crashing into Serephina and Vanya who were giving each other piggyback rides. We all started to scorn Branka, but then we all felt it. A shift in the world. None of us knew what it meant, but Branka having been blood bonded to her mother since her birth knew exactly what happened.

She had the distant look on her face that she only got when she was using that bond to see through her mother's eyes. I approached her carefully, knowing all too well that snapping her out of the connection could have her consciousness getting stuck in Willa's and send her into a coma. The longer she looked on, the larger the pit in my stomach grew. She was never in communication with her mother long, and this was dragging on for five minutes until she finally threw me off and came back into her own body. Relief didn't even get a chance to rise. She fell to her knees, screaming so loudly and so painfully that I couldn't do more than stand there and look at her for a few seconds in shock.

Never has Branka done such a thing, and for me to have to hear that...I didn't hesitate and sent the rest of my sisters to mist to Lira and Hart's side out of fear that it was their lives Willa was guarding - or was, the possibility of Willa's death was strong with the way Branka reacted, and I feared everything and the worst.