Dinner is always elaborate in my parent’s home. Soup, two kinds of cooked vegetable, salad, rice, meat curry, fish curry, dessert. After living on canned food and pills, I am ravenous.

“You’re not eating properly in the city,” mother says. “Eat more. Here, eat more, take this.” She ladles curry onto my plate, steaming rice. Wine flows around the table. The candles burn high.

Alezan is voluble as always. “Sedimentary stone comes from organic elements such as glaciers, rivers, wind, oceans, and plants. The pieces are tiny and they bond over millennia. This rock does not seem to be made of tiny pieces. Limestone is calcite, smooth, can be polished. This is not smooth. Sandstone is durable sand. Quartz grains. Soapstone is soft and made of talc. Clearly, this is neither. Then there’s the stone made of sea-shells and plants. Travertine contains holes and…,” And so on. I indulge him. I have never known my real father; mother refused to speak of him, said he did not matter. Alezan is all the father I’ve known.

Our talk turns to the Celadion Underworld, a grotto rumored to lead into past worlds. Runes. Secrets. Nothing has ever been found down there. Alezan tells me stories about the many explorers who have vanished in their quest to find what lies beneath that ground.

In all the excitement, I almost forget my problems until dessert when my mother sets her fork down. “Zaria, you must go back to your old position, you must find a way to convince them that you were innocent.”

“I don’t know what to do,” I mumble. The respite was short-lived.

“The force is where you belong.”

“I hate being there. I was going to do the tests. Now they won’t let me.”

“That’s the only good thing to come of this.” Mother pushes her chair back, looking stricken, and leaves the room.

“Zaria, leave it please,” Alezan says, shaking his head when I rise to follow. “She’s been worried about you, that’s all. She thinks you’re safer as long you work for the force.”

“Safer? How? I have to put myself in danger all the time.”

He shakes his head, looking as baffled as I feel, and I force myself to continue spooning flan into my mouth. For all his knowledge, Alezan is clumsy and innocent when it comes to mother. I get it. Even I have never been able to tell what my mother is thinking or feeling. Or control it, for that matter. My powers have no effect on her.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

At night, I dream of a maze of rooms and wake at dawn, three steps from burning. A fever. Egg-yolk dawn outside the window and the view is endless fields, rolling hills in the distance, prairie grass.

Mother appears at the door, already dressed for the day in black robes and shawl. The fog of illness overcomes me. I close my eyes against the spasms. The bed is hot. Ants crawl on the inside of my skin. The past and present become a mix in my head.

Once my mother bit a tree in anger.

Once she cooked and served perfect yellow marigolds like egg yolks.

Often, she walked into the street, barefoot and looked up at the sky as if searching for something.

I have never questioned these things, merely accepted them as part of her. Like her height or the shape of her nose.

Children will forgive their parents anything. It's the biological need to survive. I don’t remember ever being angry with her. Only her voice in the night, whispering to Alezan when she thought I was out of earshot. “But she is so ordinary, so very weak, even her powers are so useless. What am I to do?”

I sleep most of the day and wake with a start in the cool dark. A breeze floats through the open window and the fever has passed. A sound drifts up from the lower floor; mother is singing an unfamiliar tune. I find her in the living room, tending to the indoor plants which frond and frolic, green beans shooting out of them.

After dinner, the fire casts a warm light on brick walls in the study where we settle to read. The wind is high outside and the candles flicker, casting long shadows on the walls. Mother dislikes white lights so the house is lit by fires and candles most evenings.

“What were you looking for, in my hands?” I ask. For this is what she did in the morning when she came into the room, examined my hands, then gave me a strong medicine that tasted like ironweed floss.

“Nothing.” She sets down her knitting. “I must go check on the dogs.”

“The dogs are right here.” Alezan points at the white retrievers snoozing at his feet.

“There they are,” she says as if in surprise. “I'll just close the windows in the other room then. It might rain.”

“The new medication…,” he says as she leaves the room. “It makes her less sad but she is so distracted.”

Outside the window, the backyard is lit by soft lanterns. Red geranium blooms in oak barrels. I wonder why it is always so much cleaner than the front, why she has never liked working in the front yard.

Mother comes back and settles in an armchair, surveys her knitting project which nestles in a basket near her feet. She does not take it out, tucks her hands under her shawl instead as if she is cold.

It strikes me that she’s aging. On impulse, I go to her chair and standing behind it, wrap my arms around her shoulders. Mother sticks her pale arms out of the shawl to clasp my hands for the briefest moment.