19
If I wasn’t Airelle, who was I? I felt infinitely expansive and yet also minutely small – as though I had lived for eons smashed inside an instant.
“Ilylle,” Zaan said, looking up at us with concern.
“Shhhh,” we advised from our three throats, as everything began to loosen. Seams shifted, skin parted, organs, muscles, bones moved. I condensed, folding in pieces of my sisters from all around me, shrinking in and focused, until I resembled myself again, settling on the two legs and arms that were my own, stepping out of the sloughed skin of my sisters like a newborn.
Zaan’s eyes widened, watching me transform. “You are more powerful than you know.”
“No,” I told him. “I know exactly how powerful I am now.” Pieces of me had been waiting for this moment for twenty thousand years, and I
