Empire Island, Exile the First

Chapter 15

I stayed in the in-between, the space before coming back to the cave, until I heard Mara and her friend leave the area. I ended up staggering out of the cave with the necklace in my hand and a wild, fiery feeling in my chest. I panted lightly as I walked blindly into the trees where I'd come from. My head was filled with images of the girls in the well source darkness, combined with the kiss in another country, I couldn't think straight.

And it angered me.

It was exactly why I never wanted to find a bond mate in the first place. It distracted a person from doing the things that mattered. Family, bonding, marriage, whatever you wanted to call it. All of them made for a weaker spell caster. All of them made you vulnerable to outside forces.

I'd been fine back in Vancouver accepting the slow drip of magic from Empire to keep me lucky, healthy and young. But now that I'd been called to protect it, I was beyond angry. I was enraged that my peaceful existence had been interrupted and I'd been forced into action.

It annoyed me that a few idiotic hippies showed up and destroyed the thing I loved. That they threatened Empire and the people I loved here, along with the well source, the portals, the spirits of the land, trees and ocean. Their ignorance wasn't bliss in this case, it was destructive to the very thing I'd been born to protect.

It angered me on a deeper level because it was a microcosm of the things I'd seen from all across the planet, but had chosen to ignore so far. Climate change, environmental destruction, mass extinctions of species. It wasn't even humanity that was at fault, and that was the kicker.

It was greed. It was driven by the darkness humanity had always fought to drive back. From the first one of our ancestors picking up a stone tool and killing another, across all cultures and sites that had shown signs of interpersonal violence, to today. Here and now. That darkness had driven us away from our true path as the protectors and caretakers of the planet.

It was from before our recorded time, the fight between nurture and destroy. We all carried it on a personal level. That spark of jealousy when a friend gets good news, that surge of anger when you hear of somebody you irrationally despise winning the lottery. We've all had those petty, nagging, nasty thoughts but we've all been good enough to drive them back. To call on the creation energy to nurture our souls and do what we were created for.

Peace, love and caring for one another.

But now it seemed as if the darkness took hold of too many human hearts, pitching us into this breakneck madness of self-destruction and inevitable collapse.

So I was mad, on a personal level and a global level.

And although my default setting was general, constant irritation, I didn't get that angry often. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been so pissed off about something.

And people usually didn't like me when I was angry.

Which is part of the reason I fled Empire Island in the first place.

I clutched Phoenix's necklace in my hand and tread softly back through the woods. The sun was going down and I realized I must've been inside the cave somewhere in Sweden for at least a couple hours, if not more.

I didn't know if anyone would look for me, but I decided to forgo the growling in my stomach and head straight to the yurt to sort out my thoughts.

It was quiet by the row of yurts along the ocean bluff and I paused for a moment to look out and watch the last sliver of burning gold disappear behind the mountains on Vancouver Island. I felt the wind carry the salt scent of the water up to my nose and heard the waves hitting the rocks below. Their ever constant promise that life would carry on. Even if I didn't find my sister, and even if my mom was long dead, and even if I was an irritable denier of magical abilities...life would go on.