“I’m sorry, Aeryn. I’m so sorry it took me so long. Nyxarra is so much more than stories.”
“That’s where I’ve been all this time.” I whispered, sinking to my knees. My arms wrapped around him instinctively, and my fingers threaded through his curls, sun-warmed and longer than I remembered.
“You didn’t hear it,” he rasped suddenly, voice thinned with fear. “When the nights stretched too long, when even silence screamed. It’s still in my head, Elli—it hums under everything. Like the sea inside my skull.”
He clung to me like something drowning, breath hitching in uneven gasps.
And he was little again. Not this tall, sun-bronzed boy with callused hands and a man’s gravity in his eyes, but the child I used to carry through storm-dark hallways. The little boy who named the stars above our window. The boy who cried when he crushed a beetle and spent an hour trying to bury it.
I pressed my forehead to his. “I came back. I’m here. I’m real.”
We stayed like that until the sobs eased. Then he pulled back, swiping at his face with the heel of his hand.
“You missed my eighteenth birthday,” he said, half-laugh, half-sob.
“I know.” My tears caught in my smile. “And gods, look at you. You’ve grown.”
For a heartbeat, shadow crawled under his skin, rippling like something alive. It vanished just as fast, but the wrongness of it lingered in my gut.
We stood. He looked down on me easily, a head taller, shoulders a bit broader than when I left.
He grinned, shy and real. “Who’s the little sibling now?”
His eyes lingered, as if trying to reconcile the sister he knew with the one before him. “You look stronger. Different.”
My throat closed. “I’ve had… a transformative few weeks.”
But even as the words left me, Kaelith’s shadow lingered—his bond in my veins, the memory of silk spun like a noose. I shoved the thought down, just for this moment.
“Aeryn… about the patron ceremony. About Draven—I spoke to him in town. What did you promise him?”
He looked past me at the sea, jaw working. His skin was browned from days outside, shoulders marked by sun—but it was only surface. Up close I saw the truth: the hollows beneath his eyes, the way his gaze dimmed at the edges, like something inside was already blackening. He blinked, slow, like a man surfacing from deep water.
“We thought you were dead, Elli,” Aeryn said finally. His voice was flat, but the words landed heavy. “Hayat… he started to lose it. He wouldn’t sleep. He stayed here all the time, kept checking the roads, swore he’d see you coming back any second. I couldn’t stand it—watching him unravel like that. So I made him go look for you. Better than watching him tear himself apart.”
“He made it to the Nyxarran market,” Aeryn murmured, rubbing at his eyes. “That’s as far as anyone goes. The traders toldhim the same story over and over—that those taken into the city never return. He came back sure he’d lost you.”
“Youmadehim?” The question came out sharper than I intended. Heat flared in my chest—because I’d yelled at Hayat for leaving Aeryn, when it had been Aeryn who sent him.
“Yes.” Aeryn’s hands tightened into fists until his knuckles whitened. He relaxed his hands, like even that small act cost him. “And then Draven found me.”
My pulse skipped. “Found you?”
Aeryn looked at me, eyes rimmed raw. “I was heading to Colette’s. Needed more of those herbs you gave me.” He paused. “It’s like my mind keeps reaching for somewhere else. Like I’m standing in two worlds, and both are burning.”
Aeryn continued.
“He said he could make it quiet.” Aeryn’s voice dropped to a whisper. “He told me there’s a way to still the noise forever. No dreams. No voices. Just peace.” His laugh was brittle. “You’d do anything for peace after this long, wouldn’t you?”
My mouth went dry.
“He said if I went to the patron ceremony, the goddesses could quiet it. That they could make the noise stop.” Aeryn’s voice dropped, almost hoarse. “Told me it was the best way forward.”
“And you believed him?” My voice was barely a thread.
He let out a short, humorless laugh. “I want to believe him. I’m tired, Elli. Every hour feels like scraping myself against stone, trying to hold pieces together that don’t fit anymore. What harm is there in silence? At least it’d be mine.”
Something flickered behind his eyes then—a strange calm, the kind that wasn’t peace so much as absence. “For once, I’d get to choose something myself.”