Blackfeather Woods someone to rely on as lightning comes a-staring in again

astara focused, but little came. whether it was through hours of hard practice or natural inclination to decipher the torment of the void, it had been relmyna who was gifted — not astara.  

her brow creased in a rumpled frown. under her eyelids her eyes moved rapidly, and her ears strained — but all she could manage to grasp was was an untenable void, as indecipherable as the murky sheen of a mud-frothed river. 

she sighed and broke her connection by pulling away in frustration. she was too tethered to the waking world, and too dismayed by her own failures to have much faith in what maegi so easily had mastered.