He came to me in my dream, the soft eyes I remember so well, his broad smile. He was wreathed in the power pulsing in shocking beauty around him, and a great multitude of figures trailed in his wake. He stepped toward me and a sound like a drop in a still pond echoed through me and a pulse of the power rippled through the dreamworld. A shielding surrounded me interposing itself between myself and an encroaching dark. A soft light spoke in senses outside of sound. Why fight on?

I tried to speak, but the phrases would not come. Baba, my heart screamed, but my tongue was mute. He took another step toward me and reached – his hand hovering over my shoulder. I looked away from his eyes, still soft and firm, yet filled with a warning and an encouragement.

He turned back as if hearing something behind him and the retinue of figures in the flame behind him winked out like stars in a distant sky. He looked back and turned his hand, touching my cheek.

I shot awake, the power flowing over me in coruscating waves of blooming energy and held my palm to my cheek as tears filled my eyes. The darkness of my room warred feebly against the radiance of the power. I gave myself over to it in a weeping maelstrom of mixed longing, fear, and rage.

I dream of Sephina almost every night. She pleads with me not to go, or to take me with her on the mission. Sometimes she simply stares at me in hollow-eyed accusation. She has become a myriad memory – layers of faces morphing through my mind – every sister lost under my leadership. Those dreams have not half the potency of what just was. Still the power burns, and I cannot think to sleep.

I’ve lost count of how many missions I have been on. I’ve lost count of the number of brothers and sisters I have lost and who I have saved. I have lost all sense of what I am doing and why, and yet this power – it still blooms unbidden in the presence of need, restoring life with strange impunity. Why fight on?

How can I trust this power?

I hold my hand to my cheek again, and the lingering sense of my father’s hand is there – the power linking us across the cosmos. If he lives, why does he not come for me? My grown mind knows he had no choice in going, not really, but the little girl in me still feels abandoned. She wins more than she loses.

Arianas Meffin. His name fills me with gall, as it is he who led those who killed Sephina, who survived by the fickle flash of the power, and who now lay begging in a cell surrounded by the living flame itself. It does not consume him, and yet he screams as though consumed. His age and weakness is fading away, and still he fights as though he were what he once was. Whatever else the power represents, it cannot lie, he is a son of the flame and no cry of his will may release him from it. And his eyes are so like my father’s.

We call it the power. It is not ours – it never has been. None who I have met can control it – though we have all tried. Even the twisted luminaries who sought to use it in varied ways could not quite understand why it would save some and not others – or why the Sons’ flames would erase some and protect others.

Arianas’ voice too still lingers, “Mercy.”

I hate him, but I know I should go to him. He has no sense of it, not really. Flame of life, my love, my light – how quickly the old forms are remembered – grant me the courage of kindness for one chosen.