>>6327858Willow squints, trying to associate that face to any she has seen before.
Which is a silly thing to do (but she’s an expert in doing silly things by now). This is the deep past, or at at least how one of the Seven remembers it, so how could she find this face familiar?
And yet there is something about this new girl. She is so much shorter than the Kiengir groupies surrounding this guy—her white robe fastened around her hips, displaying the tanned expanse of her slender body. Frail, harmless—
And yet…
The youngest of the Seven regards her with open sneer.
<span class="mu-s">You dare show up, after what happened last time? Dare ask this of us?</span>, she asks, her voice cutting through the room like a bout of wind.
Willow’s head rattles as she tries to withstand their impact. The brown-haired girl instead does not even wince. If anything, the fire in her green eyes burns hotter—like tossing a handful of copper into a bonfire.
“I was not asking.”
Celaeno’s head snaps towards her, she is about to take a step towards the door, when the oldest of the group, the one called <span class="mu-s">Nisaag</span> raises a hand, and her sisters freeze like statues.
Willow darts her eyes away from her. The same instinct as before screaming at her not to look.
For whatever reason.
She knows it is not due to some horror waiting for her, no—it reminds her of that time in middle school teachers tried to explain class not to drugs not because they felt bad but because they felt good.
Too good.
They would rob them of any other pleasure—
And Willow knew that looking the First of the Seven in the face would be like that.
[cont.]
