Burning Eyes

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 Aelina could not get relief from the image she had seen. When she got back to her living quarters she tried to look at the floor, at her own hands, at the grain of the wooden table—anything to anchor herself to the present. But the vision was a parasite. Every time she blinked, the white object over the two people's faces returned, larger than before.

She fled back to her spire, her breath coming in ragged hitches.  She slammed the door and threw herself toward Archimedes. "Take it back," she sobbed, reaching for the owl. "Blot it out. I cannot see it anymore." The owl did not blink. It merely tilted its head, its amber eyes reflecting the very nightmare Aelina sought to escape.

Over the following months, the Duchess visited the spire often, growing increasingly concerned. The Wise Woman had become a phantom. Aelina stopped feeding Archimedes; they together lost all  sense of time. She stopped sleeping, for the moment her eyelids closed, a thousand silent lights began to scream from the desert.

"It is coming, Ebrada," Aelina would mutter, huddling in the corner of her room, her hair a matted nest of grey. "The spell has not broken. The black glass is at hand."

"You are unwell, sweet friend," the Duchess said one evening, laying a cool hand on Aelina’s forehead. "The visions have burned you through." Ironically the Duchess' use of the word burned became part of her vision with the word Burning Man appearing across the room. 

Aelina looked up, and for a brief second, her mind cleared. She saw the Duchess—truly saw her—and realized the woman had no idea. Ebrada didn't know that every prophecy Aelina had ever uttered, every secret she had whispered, had been stolen from the amber depths of the creature on the perch. Aelina felt the last cord of her sanity snap. If she could not stop the vision, she would become part of it. She began to laugh, a dry, rattling sound that turned into a shriek. She clawed at the air, trying to pull down the white mask that only she could see.

When the royal physicians finally declared the Wise Woman "shattered beyond repair," Aelina was moved to a quiet cell in the lower gardens where she could watch the birds and babble to the stones. She left nothing behind in the spire but a stack of ruined parchment and Archimedes.

The Duchess, moved by a strange, lingering affection for her fallen seer, decided to give the bird a home with Charron. "A pity," Ebrada remarked, standing in the spire as a servant prepared the travel cage for the owl. "She was so brilliant before the vision took her. I shall never forget her service to me.” She thought perhaps Charron’s owl,( Rufus) and Archimedes would become allies of the forest. It had just dawned on her for the first time. that she no longer has a key to the future, which saddened her.

She reached out a gloved hand to stroke the owl’s feathers. Archimedes leaned into the touch, his talons clicking softly against the oak. As the Duchess looked into the bird's amber eyes, she felt a strange, sudden warmth—a shimmering at the edge of her vision, like a golden haze that smelled of wet earth and old copper. "How curious," Ebrada whispered, her head tilting just as the owl's did. "The light in here... it’s almost violet." She didn't notice the bird's pupils dilate, swallowing the amber until only the darkness remained.


Source- Photo Scarborough Fair in Waxahachie, Tx.