Free The Voice by Anne Bishop

stumbled into the Merry Makers’ landscape usually ended up being dinner.
    She didn’t give him a disapproving smile or an elbow jab.
    His sister would have. Before she split her heart to save the world, she would have.
    “So where is this landscape?” Lee asked.
    “I don’t know. That’s why it’s so puzzling. It doesn’t resonate with me yet, but Ephemera seems to think it wants to. It’s like only one part of it has begun resonating with me, but that’s not enough to—”
    “You’re not crossing over!” he shouted as he shot to his feet. “You don’t know anything about that place except it’s a dark landscape.”
    “That’s right. I don’t,” Belladonna said. She turned her head away from him. “You should leave now.”
    “Glorianna . . .”
    “ Please , Lee. Get out of the garden. Now. ”
    He took a step away from her. Took another. It hurt him to ask, but he asked because she was his sister and he still loved her. “Do you want Michael? Or Sebastian?”
    “No. I don’t want anyone in this garden right now.”
    His own heart had soured this time together. His own hurt at what she had done to save them all and how she came back kept getting in the way. Would it get in the way one time too many?
    “I’m sorry, Glorianna,” he said.
    “So am I.”
    As he walked away from his sister and her dark landscapes, he heard her say, “Ephemera, hear me.”
    He wasn’t sure who had summoned the world—the Guide who belonged to the Light or the monster who ruled the Dark.
     
She had walked those landscapes, folding them into each other, turning them into mazes that celebrated her Dark purity, altering them into labyrinths that offered no peace, no comfort. Those things did not exist in her world. She created out of the brutal beauty that came from the undiluted feelings that lived in the dark side of the human heart. She was sublime madness, magnificent rage, divine indifference.
In that place, she had been Belladonna.
Only Belladonna.
     
    Setting her feet on the bench, Glorianna dropped her forehead to her knees and trembled with the effort not to give Ephemera a command as the world’s currents of Dark and Light swirled around her, waiting to resonate with whatever her heart wanted.
    Unfortunately, when she wasn’t vigilant, she craved the undiluted power she had wielded in the dark landscape she had made for the Eater of the World. She wasn’t supposed to leave that landscape. The Warrior of Light must drink from the Dark Cup and cast out the Light from her own heart. Once she had done that, she became the greatest danger to the people around her.
    But Michael, Sebastian, and Ephemera had found a way to reach her, made her remember who she had been, and hearing the music in Michael’s heart, she had used the access point Ephemera had created and taken the step between here and there.
    And in taking that step, she had taken back the Light she had cast out of her heart. But she wasn’t whole. She wasn’t Glorianna Belladonna anymore. She was Glorianna and she was Belladonna. Separate. Opposite. Much like her dark landscapes and Sanctuary. The problem was that the middle ground was missing inside her, and she didn’t know how to fix that. Didn’t know if anyone could fix that.
    Now she had this mysterious landscape that wasn’t yet hers. She thought its resonance might be enough for her to cross over and find out what the place was—and where it was. Only it didn’t feel like a dark landscape, despite Ephemera thinking it should connect with the Den, and it didn’t feel like a landscape that belonged to the Light.
    And she wasn’t sure if that piece of the world called to Glorianna or to Belladonna.
    Something rippled through Ephemera’s currents of power. Then it washed through her. Both parts of her.
    “Maybe it’s not the landscape that’s calling to me,” she whispered as she raised her head to study the triangle of grass.
    Someone from that landscape wanted something so