She curls a finger at me and the square of floor beneath my feet buckles, detaching from the ground and rising in the air. Up it climbs with me on top until I’m above the flames on her level. The platform beneath me halts. Blue flames swarm beneath us, licking the bottom of her stone bed, its edges so jagged, she couldn’t get off there if she wanted to without grave injury to herself.

Our eyes meet, and for a moment she looks as shocked as I am. She stares at my arms.

“Jelani?”

She knows my name. I scoot away from her as much as I can on my island of stone. How does she know my name?

She pulls herself up to a sitting position. Stringy hair is a curtain around her face and a nest in her lap. I squint in the darkness and make out thin lips, a nose that is the same as Taavi’s, pointy. Her watery eyes are swallowed by a million creases.

“Y-you were Totsi’s mother,” I say, the words spilling out before I can hold them in.

She convulses, a wail ripping from her throat in a cry of pain as a single tear runs down her cheek. “Do not speak her name,” she says, her fingernails digging into the stone. She shudders in pain and flicks away the tear.

It hurts her?

Crying… feeling… remembering hurts her?

What an awful way to live. What sort of cursed existence is this? Empathy wells up in me, but I don’t know this woman. Perhaps she’s more sinister than she’s letting on? Why else would Taavi keep her locked away here like this? Pity mixes with my fear; I sit to be eye level with her.

The Seer rolls her neck; her pallid flesh is slick with sweat. The thin shift she’s wearing is tearing at the seams. Questions about her daughter, about how she got this way, about why she’s kept locked up like this, sit on my lips, but I swallow them.

She studies me with a narrowed expression. “Make your request, Jelani.” Her words are raspy.

I snuff out the fireball in my hand and clear my throat. “I need to know if there’s a way for me to talk to my Ancestors.”

Between her curtain of hair, I faintly make out a few broken teeth as her lips split in the faintest hint of a smile. It doesn’t seem to cause her any pain, which is a relief.

She reaches across the thin void between us and sets a cold, bony hand on my forehead. The world goes black. I am heavy. All over. I try to inhale but can’t. What in the…