The words struck something in me—old terror, older hope.
This wasn’t the prophecy we feared. It was the one we’d tried to bury. And Aurelia… she wasn’t apart from it anymore. She was its beginning.
Aurelia didn’t move.
“She promised me you would come,” Eryndis whispered. “But it’s been so long. I almost stopped believing.”
“Who?” Aurelia breathed.
Eryndis tilted her head, a tender sorrow in the motion.
“Our mother,” Eryndis said softly.
The beginning before beginnings. Mortals prayed to the daughters she left behind, but she was the one who wrote the first stories into the dark.Our mother.The words echoed like something older than prophecy itself.
A suffocating quiet fell over us, impossible to fill.
Eryndis exhaled and turned her gaze on me. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said softly.
I stepped forward, the words biting out before I could stop them. “Neither should you. You were banished—lost to the Veil. How are you here?”
I caught the flicker in her eyes, the weight of centuries folding behind them. Still, her face gave nothing away.
“I had no choice but to take this path,” I pressed on. “Kaelith heard rumor of a hidden village. We had no choice but to come.”
Her gaze swept over us again, unreadable. Then she turned. Toward nothing. That nothing opened, and she stepped through it.
I followed. The world changed.
The air sharpened, sweet with petrichor and dusk-flowers in bloom. The trees twisted upward into impossible arches, their branches laced with lanterns glowing like captive fireflies. Rope bridges stretched across massive trunks. Homes carved into living wood spiraled high above us. The place itself breathed.
Below us, I caught sight of the horses being led off along a lower path, their tack stripped and movements soothed by hands that knew how to calm frightened animals.
Laughter carried down from the branches. Music threaded between the leaves. The clink of dishes. The spice of slow-cookedfood. A blacksmith’s hammer striking in rhythm with a song I didn’t know.
This wasn’t a forgotten village. This was a kingdom in the trees.
Built into the cliffs that jutted over the mist, connected by suspended paths, its heart was a colossal tree, roots sunk deep into the stone. A waterfall shimmered behind it.
Wonder clawed its way up my throat. I stood there and let the moment wash over me, unsure if my legs would hold. This wasn’t survival. This was something far more dangerous.
Hope. Blooming where it had no right to grow.
I’d built myself from ruins, brick by broken brick. But hope—hope was treachery. Hope was what you handed children and fools before the war broke them.
I’d seen what it did to soldiers. Watched it shatter them when the siege dragged on too long. Held men while they wept for homes already burned.
Promises made in hope had teeth when they broke.
And still… I envied those who could hold it like it wouldn’t betray them.
Yet here we stood. Led by a goddess long thought lost, in a city no one believed existed. We had found the last stronghold of the Keepers.
A sound behind us broke the spell.
Santiago stirred, pale but breathing. His lashes fluttered, and when his gaze found Lysara, the corner of his mouth twitched into the ghost of a grin. His voice came out rough and ragged.
“Remind me,” he rasped, “to never make you mad.”