She walked toward me with the certainty only children carried, head tilted as she studied my face. “You’re so pretty,” she said simply.
I blinked, taken off guard.
The little girl’s eyes were the softest shade of twilight, her curls a tangled crown of rich brown spun through with gold. A constellation of flour freckles dusted her nose, and when she smiled, it was wide and toothy and entirely disarming.
I crouched down in an effort to meet her gaze. “And what is your name?”
“I’m Nara,” she beamed. “And that’s Kylo. He’s my big brother.”
Kylo gave a shy half-wave from the table, cheeks flushed with flour and mischief.
“Well,” I said softly, “it is a pleasure to meet you both.”
Nara tilted her head, gaze lingering on me with a strange intensity, little hands hovering to reach my face.
“You’re so pretty,” she repeated, voice soft as snowfall. “Like the Shadow Queen from our stories… ”
Then—her breath hitched. Her pupils blew wide, swallowing the color of her irises before her eyes rolled back into her skull, showing only white.
Her body went slack. The flour-streaked smile still lingered on her lips, but it was wrong now—unsettling in its stillness. Her limbs hung like a marionette cut from its strings.
“Nara?” I reached out, but before my hand could touch her?—
Her head snapped up. Her voice came low, distant, like it didn’t belong to her at all.
“When roots drink from stolen wells,
And thorned crowns bloom in blood,
The veil will tear in silence?—
And the Dark will seek what belongs to him.”
Then she blinked. Once. Twice. The color returned to her eyes. Her shoulders lifted, as though nothing had happened.
“Do you like honey cakes?” she asked brightly, as if she hadn’t just been a vessel for something ancient and uncanny.
I stood frozen, my heartbeat a drum in my throat. The way her voice had changed—flat, distant, like something speaking through her—it clawed at a memory.
Aeryn’s voice, low and wrong, whispering words that weren’t his. The same stillness after. The same eerie calm, like the storm had passed but left the air wrong in its wake.
Even Lysara had gone still, her expression unreadable. “The old shadows are restless again…” Lysara whispered, almost to herself.
Santiago let out a nervous laugh, brushing a hand through his hair. “Well… I do love honey cakes, yes,” he offered, voice a shade too high to sound casual.
Kylo echoed the laugh—sharp, shaky—like it had climbed out of his throat just to chase away the silence.
“I also love them,” I said softly, rising to my feet.
We ate in the warmth of the kitchen, soft-spiced sweetness melting across our tongues, the hum of mundane comfort stretching over the strangeness that we all just witnessed. Lysaraand Santiago stood near the hearth at the center of the kitchen, close enough that their shoulders brushed as they shared a quiet laugh between bites, heads tilted inward in some soft reprieve.
When I slipped away, neither of them noticed.
For days, they’d shadowed me wherever I went—softly, politely, but always there. Even when they pretended not to, I could feel it.
Freedom here was an illusion—measured, permitted, timed. Which meant anything allowed to grow had been allowed on purpose.
If there were gardens hidden somewhere in this twilight fortress, that was where the Etherblooms would be.