I shook my head. Words failed me.
He stepped forward, laying a hand heavy on my shoulder. “We held on,” he said simply. “Even when the forest tried to take us.”
Behind him, another figure moved. Younger, though not as young as I remembered. My stomach tightened.
I knew that face.
“Ryn.”
The soldier I had dragged half-dead from the breach at Nyxarra’s wall. I remembered the shaft of the arrow buried deep in his side, the blood running too fast to stop. I’d stitched him up myself and left him holding on to hope.
“You saved me,” Ryn said.
My mouth went dry. “I left you to die.”
He shook his head. “You carried me far enough.” His eyes softened, but his words cut clean. “When Eryndis came, I was nearly gone. We all were. The forest had started to eat us. Piece by piece.”
The memory of the creatures we’d faced outside the clearing—their twisted forms, their hollow eyes—flashed sharp in my mind.
“How?” I asked, sharper than I meant. “How is she here if she was banished?”
Darren’s lined face softened, but his pause was long. “That… may not be mine to tell. What matters is this—when the forest had nearly claimed us, she came. She carved wards no one else remembered, sealed this place against the rot, pulled us back from the brink. Whatever bound her away before… it didn’t keep her from us.” His voice lowered. “But the how of it? That answer lies with her.”
Ryn added quietly, “There is a price. Once you choose to remain, you cannot leave. We were mortal once. You age here, but slower. Not like those marked by the goddesses, and not like the bloodbound. The wards anchor us. They keep the rot out, but theykeep us in. Step beyond them, and the forest will finish what it started.”
The air thickened in my lungs. I thought of the soldiers who’d died believing they fought for freedom and wondered if this was what freedom had bought them.
“She built a cage,” I muttered.
“No,” Darren corrected gently. “She built a haven. She gave us a place tolive.”
We stood in silence for a long moment. I couldn’t stop looking at them—at the proof of lives I thought ended, of people I thought erased. The world outside told me they were dead. And yet here they stood, still breathing.
“Go on,” Darren said finally. “There’s more who’ll want to see you. Some who never stopped waiting.”
I turned away before grief could hollow me out entirely.
The path wound upward, the bridges narrowing. Families leaned into the glow of braziers. Children darted across rope planks, beads clacking in their hair as they chased one another, laughter cutting sharp through the cold.
A little girl slept between her mother’s knees. Her mouth hung slack, half of her hair in braids already finished, lying glossy and orderly down her back while the rest—thick, unbroken curls—rose in a halo, a crown made to meet the sun. The mother’s pick slid precise, parting a line through the dense coils. She hummed low as she worked gel between her palms and smoothed it along the strands, fingers weaving them into another sleek row. The scent hung in the air—herbal, faintly sweet—andfor a breath it was like the past breathing at me, like the nights my mother’s hum carried through our kitchen walls. The girl didn’t stir.
Dice cracked farther on. Cards slapped against planks, elders laughing hoarse as the game turned. Then the square broke open. Music pounded from hollow gourds and taut skins. Children stomped to its rhythm while families roared them on, voices so loud they shook the cold from the air. Hugs crashed through the noise, loud and unashamed, joy wielded like defiance.
They didn’t look like survivors. They looked like people who had carved a life out of exile.
And still, I couldn’t shake the bitterness.Why here? Why not Nyxarra? Why weren’t they beside the rest of us when the city fell? Why were we left?
“Malachi.”
I froze.
The woman who stepped from the doorway was gaunt, but her eyes—brown, steady—pulled me back across decades. Yira. My mother’s dearest friend.
“You’re still alive,” I said, the words strange in my mouth.
Her lips curved. “So are you.”
I couldn’t find the words. Finally, as if reading my mind, she said, “We didn’t choose this exile. The forest pulled us here. Eryndis found us. She gave us a choice.Stay, and live, or leave, and be unmade.” Her gaze hardened. “I stayed. Because living meant something, even if it wasn’t where I thought I belonged.”