It couldn’t be.
The breath caught in my throat as the trees gave way to a sliver of something I wasn’t ready to name. A shape I hadn’t seen in centuries.
“Stay here,” I said quietly, without turning.
Lysara already had Santiago propped upright, her hands steady on the bandage I’d wrapped. Santiago’s breath rasped, thin but there.
“I’ve got him,” Lysara whispered without looking up.
“Absolutely not,” Aurelia replied, already stepping closer. I didn’t argue. There wasn’t time, and even if there had been, I knew better than to mistake her strength for recklessness. Still, it wasn’t about keeping her behind me. It wasn’t about control.
It was that I didn’t yet know the shape of what lived insideAurelianow. And neither did she.
So I stayed close.
I could still see him. Gabriel, drifting toward Eryndis as if something unseen had fastened him to her.
She didn’t move like a creature of flesh. Light fractured around her in glints and glimmers that didn’t belong to sun or star. The forest didn’t rustle. Even the mist recoiled from the goddess’s path. Gabriel’s hand trembled as he reached forward. That tremor wasn’t fear. It was recognition—the kind that grew over years.
I wanted to speak. But there was no language for this.
Aurelia stood beside me, silent, her breath shallow. Her grip tightened around mine. A soundless chord pulled taut between us.
Across the clearing, Gabriel’s voice cracked. “Are you real?” His eyes were wide, glassy with disbelief. “Are you real?”
The goddess tilted her head. “As real as you are, my love,” Eryndis replied.
Her voice carried the kind of certainty that rewrites truths and unravels lies. Gabriel stepped closer, though his knees buckled with the weight of it.
Lysara didn’t breathe. Santiago blinked, dazed, but alive. The others kept silent.
But in me, a thousand memories rose unbidden: Eryndis’s laughter in courtyards long since crumbled to dust, her hand against Gabriel’s chest before a battle, the way she whispered his name like a benediction and a goodbye.
And then—gone. Into the night. Into the Veil.
Now she stood before us, more myth than flesh. And Gabriel... he was breaking just looking at her.
Eryndis stepped forward. Her gaze swept across us. “Lysara,” she said with a faint smile. “Still steady. Still sure.”
Lysara didn’t flinch. If the rest of us were adrift, she remained the anchor. The one who remembered how to stay—even with Santiago’s blood still drying on her hands.
“Santiago,” Eryndis said, her eyes warming. “Favored ofKaerani. You chose healing when others demanded conquest. You could have stayed in Synnex, followed your father’s path. But you left in search of more. Of mercy. Of answers.”
Santiago lay propped weakly against Lysara, lids heavy, breath ragged. His throat worked but no sound came. Still, I saw it—the way her words hit him. They struck deeper than the arrow had, because she wasn’t speaking to his wound. She was speaking to the man he had chosen to be.
Then her gaze turned to Aurelia.
The air shifted.
“And you.” Her voice thinned. “I have waited a very long time for you.”
Light rippled through her pupils, as though she were lookingthroughtime instead of at it.
“You’ve already begun,” Eryndis said, almost in awe. “The fracture was always meant to start with you. The threads have loosened. The veil thins. The imbalance trembles. You walk both past and future, and the world bends.”
“What fracture?” Aurelia whispered.
Eryndis’s reply was soft, but immovable. “They will rise to tear open the seams between realms and stitch them new—with blood, with mercy, with ruin. It was always going to happen. The only question was the cost… and how much of yourself you’re willing to give before the world takes the rest.”