They'd moved since the attack she'd predicted two months before. The same city, but a different location. As long as the water source remained here and the food kept coming in, there was no reason to leave, no guarantee that anything better awaited them out on the wastes. There was only death there. Aaomi had seen it often enough, had watched people venture out on their own and never come back, and she'd seen people cast out, banished to the merciless desert that dwarfed most of the planet now. Most could scarcely believe it had ever been anything else, but she knew. She'd seen it if only in a waking dream.
She felt she lived in those dreams, those visions far more often than she did in the present lately. Her gift had grown, from sporadic images every few days, few weeks to an full onslaught, an attack almost daily, but such was what happened when a Seer reached their twenty-fourth year. Her kind, few and far between, the rarest of the rare, were not truly useful until they came into their birthright in that year. A wise person kept the Seer safe until that point and then kept them close afterward because they didn't last long after that. Aaomi supposed she could be grateful that her visions would kill her. At least she knew how the end would come and that she wouldn't have to wait too long for it. Perhaps it shouldn't have pleased her so much, the thought of her own death, but in truth, what life did she had to look toward? To forever be trapped here, nothing more than a crystal ball for a warlord who would just as soon as discard her if she didn't prove useful to him?
Death would be freedom.
Such a mindset could have been why she didn't panic when the first spark of violet energy appeared along her peripheral vision. It was night, true darkness over the city and she'd taken advantage of the cooler temperature and the lack of a vision today to enjoy it. Yes, she was followed by at least three men, but they kept their distance and Aaomi could almost pretend she was alone. The darkness just made the spark of power stand out all the more and she turned toward it, feeling a tug of familiarity she could not place....and then she just felt a tug. No, that was too gentle a word for too harsh a sensation.
She felt a tear, as if something were attempting to rip her away from her body and for a moment Aaomi felt panic, that natural inclination to fight, to stop the sensation, to survive but it passed. It passed and a wild curiosity the likes of which she'd not felt since she was a child rose up within her breast and the woman took a step forward, her black eyes flickering from one violet spark to another, noting with abstract fascination that they were growing more numerous and they seemed rather fixed on her, gathering around. The first one to touch her skin left a spark of quick pain, but it didn't deter her from reaching out for the next one like one might a snowflake, catching it in her palm. It burned, just like the first, and more started to gather soon after, swarming in a whirlwind around her small frame.
It was the sting of a thousand fire ants as she disappeared in the cloud, but Aaomi didn't scream, didn't move, didn't fight or run. She accepted because whatever this was, it was like her own power. It was familiar even as it was foreign and it wasn't like anything she'd ever known. That alone guaranteed Aaomi's cooperation. She knew her world, her existence, her fate. Anything that deviated from that....well, it was worth investigating, wasn't it? Such was the last true thought she had before the energy finally seemed to reach completion and Aaomi felt herself drop, a cold, sudden sensation that got a startled sound from her throat as her stomach jumped into her chest, a sound that was lost in the darkness around her as she spun out of control, nothing more than a rag doll in the wind. It all came to a halt rather abruptly and yet not soon enough and the woman found herself truly and really falling from thin air. The briefest of shrieks, reflexive, left her again before she landed on the ground, hard, wind knocked from her lungs.
Aaomi stared at the sky then. The impossibly red, orange, purple and blue streaked sunset sky and she wondered if maybe, finally, she'd actually died.