All rights reserved. Copyright © 2023 by LA Magill. All distribution rights reserved for the exclusive use of Wicked Women LLC.
The following excerpt is adapted from a working manuscript by LA Magill in the Harmony Ends universe.
I grew up looking over her shoulder even after she stopped carrying me on her back. I thought that’s why I had to grow so tall, so I never had to leave until she made me.
I loved her even before I knew what love between adults looked like. I wanted her to touch me, wanted her to take care of me, and wanted her to only look at me. I touched her, took care of her, and only looked at her, so I didn’t think it would be fair to say that I should have expected something different.
I didn’t realize we were walking back toward home until I could smell the salt in the air. Island air always smelled good, like ocean air, but there was no mistaking the brine in my nose the closer and closer we got to the coastline.
It would take days to cross the sea because we had to detour around Zenadh Kes. We spent days collecting all the water, pipe vine, and milk we could get so that the baby wouldn’t starve.
Stealing a canoe from humans was literally child’s play then, especially in the dead of night. I swam up to the dock, shifted back to human to untie the boat, then towed it behind me by the same rope that had moored it.
We set out at night. Towing the full canoe, I couldn’t swim fast, but Tadhana would tell me stories through the night to help me push through the strain. Sometimes she spoke of how Earth magic drew her spirit toward distant lands and different mana. Other nights, it was fragments of memories of other shifters that roamed the oceans I loved. On a rare few, it was haunting lamentations of what Tadhana saw lurking within Earth magic. No matter whether her tales thrilled or chilled me, her voice encouraged me to keep swimming when my back grew sore and my teeth ached and my tail slowed.
I hunted at dawn and dusk to feed us. During the day, Tadhana would erect the sunshade and a fishing pole, and we would all sleep under the guise of hopeful anglers that had drifted out to sea. Tadhana always worried shifters or humans might find us. I didn’t understand why she always felt she had to be so secretive around others, even our own kin, but I would just give her a hug and tell her it would be okay.
That trip, at least, it always was.
When we got to the shiver’s waters, we beached on a secluded stretch of sandy dunes a way off from the main shoreline closest to the reef. We had one night left, just the two of us.
For one night, she didn’t distract me with stories. She listened to me as I relished in the mana that knew my true spirit, all my strengths, all my weaknesses, and all my desires. She told me how Earth magic loved me and how she did, too.
But she did not tell me that night that she wanted me to stay behind.
Tadhana let me celebrate with my kin for two whole days until I was exhausted from the talking, swimming, fishing, and sunbathing. I had never in my life been surrounded by so many people before, and all those kin wanted to know me, hunt with me, and eat with me.
It was the longest I’d ever gone in my life without Tadhana by my side. Whenever I wasn’t below the surface of the swells, she was watching. From afar, but she was always watching.
She waited until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore, then led me out to the beach where we had first arrived. A light breeze tugged at her clothes as she told me she was leaving.
Those three days since we’d arrived, I’d learned loneliness because I couldn’t be with her under the waves. My head, my heart, and my spirit couldn’t fathom being ever further from her.
I pleaded. Begged her. I swore loyalty and service and anything else she could’ve asked for under the sun and the surf as long as she stayed. Or took me, too. I did not care which.
I remember she told me that the only thing she needed was for me to remain among my kin. She needed to know that I would learn how to fight so I could grow into the spear she aimed at Rot itself. She wanted me to have any chance of knowing the life I could have had and the family who’d given me my name. She wanted me to know all that she never did, so that I could be everything she wasn’t.
“I’ll learn all that with you,” I had said. “Please don’t make me stay.”
“Hush,” she said.
“Don’t go! Don’t leave me here!”
“You are with your kin. Your Alpha. Your family. This is where you belong.”
Smoke leaked from every orifice, but tears came from my eyes. “Don’t go.”
She put her hand on top of my head and smoothed my hair back. She stretched her hand down and cupped my cheek before lifting my chin. I’d spent so long looking over her shoulder that staring into her eyes made me blush.
But I was so angry. Too angry to look her in the eyes.
I turned my face away.
“Tau,” she said. “Look at me.”
I could not disobey her. I turned my crying face up to hers. Sadness filled her eyes, but not with tears. Kindness stretched her smile, but not with warmth.
I remembered feeling so confused. She didn’t cry like me.
I did not understand why.
“Forgive me, Tau,” she said.
Jealousy replaced my confusion. “What about me?”
“You will be the strongest of us. I knew it when I chose you,” she said. “I would not leave you here if I didn’t know in my spirit that you are meant to stay. To learn to live from your kin.”
“No!” I screamed. “I can learn just as much with you as I could here. Don’t make me stay!”
She held her hands stiffly at her sides. “You are a shark. Your spirit will always crave the ocean, just like I will always seek the trees or the sky. You need to stay.”
“I don’t want to,” I whined.
“Maybe not today, but someday you will like it. Someday you’ll see.”
“I won’t!” I shouted at her. “I won’t! I’ll run away if you leave me here.”
“Would you?” she asked.
I cried. I would not disobey her, and she knew.
“It won’t be forever,” she said. “Earth magic will bring us back together again. I know it.”
“When?” I asked. “Tell me when.”
She hesitated, then used her thumb to wipe away the tears from my cheeks. “In a few years. A decade, maybe.”
“No. Tell me when,” I repeated.
In response, she simply pulled out one of the small shards of black stone she always kept in the pouch at her side. She tucked it into my pocket and pressed it against my leg.
“Goodbye, my fierce flame,” she said. “Think of me. When the mana fills you up, when you embrace your third skin, when you grow into the wildfire I see in your spirit, think of me.”
I sobbed. “Don’t go.”
She lifted her hand to squeeze my shoulder and stood. I scooted forward in the sand and wrapped my arms around her ankle, crying.
“Let go, Tau,” she said.
“No! No! No!”
I heard her sigh, then crackling static built in my ears. I yanked my head up, confused and hurt. She had never struck me before. Never threatened to. Not once… Though she hadn’t used her magecraft on me yet.
The burden Earth magic laid on her spirit deepened her voice. “Let go,” she said again.
I squeezed her ankle tight. She sighed. Suddenly, her skin tingled against mine as a static charge leapt from her body to mine. I scrambled backward, scared of the tiny jolt that had zapped me.
The moment I let go, Tadhana’s face broke into a heartbroken smile.
She turned her back to me, lifted her left leg…
Before she took that step, she looked over her shoulder. Our eyes connected.
And then she took the step that carried her leagues away, her supernatural movement spurred on by some magnet somewhere that I didn’t know about.
I carried the look in her eyes from that moment in my heart ever after.
In the space of a breath, she’d held my gaze with the passion that would ignite my lifelong purpose. The next, she was gone.