Chapter 22 - Elle #2
My reflection stared back at me, but it was wrong in ways that made my skin crawl.
My marks glowed brighter in the reflection than they did on my actual skin, pulsing with a rhythm that didn’t match my heartbeat.
My eyes held knowledge I didn’t possess, older and sadder than they should be.
And there was something about my expression—a resignation that didn’t belong on my face.
Then the surface rippled, though no wind touched it. The ripples moved in perfect concentric circles, originating from nowhere and everywhere at once.
The reflection changed.
Not me anymore—or not just me. I saw the Hunt behind my reflected self, tall figures in armor curated from my worst nightmare, their edges blurring where they met regular air.
They stood motionless, patient, waiting with the terrible patience of predators who knew their prey had nowhere to run.
Their mounts stamped feet that might have been hooves or claws or something worse.
But that wasn’t what made my breath catch, what made my heart stutter in my chest.
It was what appeared next.
Grandma Jo’s garden materialized in the water, as real as if I was looking through a window into Earth.
Every detail was perfect—the heritage tomatoes hanging heavy on their vines, so ripe they seemed about to burst. The roses climbing their careful trellises, each bloom exactly as I remembered.
The herb spiral with its mysterious plants that had never quite seemed to belong.
Even the greenhouse was there, its glass panels catching late afternoon sunlight in a way that made them gleam like burnished metal.
And there—there by the greenhouse door—stood a figure I knew too well.
“Julian?” The name escaped before I could stop it, scraped raw from my throat.
My ex-fiancé stood in Jo’s garden, but not as a memory. This was current Julian, wearing the blue button-down I’d bought him for his birthday last year. There was a fresh cut on his cheek—had he been in an accident? He looked lost, confused, searching as he called out.
“Elle? Elle, where are you? Your dad’s worried sick. We all are. The police said you just vanished, but I know you wouldn’t just leave. Please, just come home. We can work this out. I know I messed up with Melissa, but—”
It was impossible. There was no connection between Earth and this realm.
But the water showed him turning, searching, and I could see the engagement ring he still wore on a chain around his neck—the one I’d thrown at him when I’d found him with Melissa in our bed, in our apartment, on what was supposed to be our anniversary.
“That’s not real,” Peeble said urgently, their voice sharper than usual. “Elle, you know that’s not real. The lake shows what you want to see, what you fear to see. It’s a trap.”
“I don’t want to see Julian,” I said, but my voice came out wrong, uncertain.
“Don’t you? Some part of you that wishes you could go back? Pretend none of this happened?” Peeble’s words stung, but they were trying to break through whatever hold the lake had on me.
Before I could answer—before I could even process the truth in their words—the image shifted again.
Now it was Jo herself, but young Jo from the locket, standing in the water-garden. She wore a dress that seemed to be made of flower petals and morning dew, still wearing the crown of roses. Her eyes were the same warm brown I remembered, but there was power in them that made my marks burn.
She pressed her hand against the surface from below, and I could see her lips moving, forming words I couldn’t hear but somehow understood.
“Come home,” she seemed to say. “Come back where you belong. This isn’t your fight. This isn’t your world.”
“My grandma died weeks ago,” I said, but my hand was already reaching for the water, moving without my conscious control.
“Elle, don’t—”
My fingers touched the surface.
The contact triggered an avalanche of sensation.
Not pain—something stranger. Like every memory and feeling I’d ever had was trying to surface at the exact same moment.
I saw myself at seven, planting seeds with Jo, her weathered hands guiding mine as we tucked tomato seedlings into the earth.
At fifteen, screaming at my dad that he didn’t understand me, that I was meant for something more than his suburban dreams. At twenty-six, saying yes to Julian’s proposal in that restaurant where he’d hidden the ring in the tiramisu, feeling like I was settling even as the word left my mouth.
At twenty-eight, about a year ago, watching him with Melissa, seeing them tangled together in sheets I’d picked out, and feeling more relief than heartbreak.
The water gripped my wrist, but it felt nothing like water.
Warm and dense, it moved with purpose—pulling with a strength no liquid should possess.
Steady as a tide, patient as stone. I tried to pull free, but I was already in past my forearm.
Through the surface, I could sense the other side.
Warmth. Real warmth, not the strange temperatures of Wynmire.
The warmth of grass in sunlight and houses with central heating. The warmth of the world I’d lost.
I could smell it through the water—freshly cut grass and barbecue smoke from the neighbors. Could hear distantly familiar sounds—cars passing on the street, a dog barking, someone’s music playing too loud. All the mundane symphony of the life I’d left behind.
“Elle, no! Hold on!” Peeble’s voice was pure panic now. “He’s coming—I can see him running—just hold on!”
But the lake was stronger, older, hungrier. It pulled me through the surface up to my shoulders, and now I could see both worlds—the realm above, Earth below, and me suspended between like I’d always been.
Through the bond, I felt Kaelren’s awareness snap to attention—felt the exact moment he realized something was wrong. Felt his terror spike like lightning through my chest.
“Find me,” I managed to say to Peeble, to the air, to whoever might hear. The words felt important, necessary, like a key being fitted to a lock. “Tell him—in this lifetime or any other. Tell him to find me.”
The water surged, and suddenly I was through, pulled into depths that couldn’t exist in a lake so shallow.
But through the water, through the crushing weight of it, I saw him—Kaelren, running full speed from the camp, his mouth open in what must have been a scream of my name though I couldn’t hear it underwater.
His corruption spread like wings of darkness behind him, beautiful and terrible, as he dove for the lake without hesitation.
The last clear thing I saw before the darkness took me was his hand reaching through the water toward mine, fingertips almost touching, the thread of our bond stretching between us like it could defy physics itself.
Almost.
But almost had never been enough.
Through the muffling water, I heard Peeble’s voice, not sarcastic for once, laden with a grief that suggested this wasn’t the first time they’d witnessed this:
“Not again. Please, not again.”
Then there was nothing but water and memory and the sensation of drowning.
The water was every temperature at once—burning, freezing, body-warm, nonexistent. I couldn’t tell if I was breathing it or if it was breathing me. Images flashed behind my eyes like a film reel running too fast:
Jo young and beautiful, choosing love over duty.
Jo old and dying, pressing a locket into my hand.
My mother as a child, golden marks spreading up her small arms before Jo took her away.
My mother dying when I was young, the marks having turned to cancer on Earth.
Kaelren as a child, hope bright in his eyes.
Kaelren screaming, corruption spreading from that first wound.
Myself in a crown of living wood, power radiating from me like heat from a star. Myself dead, nothing but a failure.
When I finally surfaced I was somewhere else entirely.
The Hunt was waiting on the other side.
They stood in a perfect semicircle, tall and terrible and patient. Their armor caught light, reflecting it back in sharp flashes that made my eyes water.
“Prophet,” one of them said, and their voice majestic and horrifying all at once. “You’re exactly on time.”
I tried to speak, to make some sarcastic comment that would make this feel less like a nightmare, but lake water poured from my mouth instead—silver water that evaporated before it hit the ground, leaving only the ghost of moisture.
“The convergence approaches,” another Hunt rider said. “The wheel turns.”
“I just want to go home,” I managed, though the words came out waterlogged and wrong.
“Home,” the first rider mused, tilting their helmed head. “Such a simple word for such a complex concept. Is home the Earth you left? The Thornwood where you danced? Or perhaps…” They gestured, and I felt the weight of their attention like pressure in my skull. “Perhaps home is wherever he is.”
Through the bond, thin as spider silk now but still there, I felt Kaelren’s rage like a distant wildfire. He was coming. Of course he was coming. He would tear apart the world to reach me.
“I’m sorry,” I thought through the bond, not knowing if he could hear me. “I’m sorry we don’t get more time.”
“Take her,” the lead rider commanded. “Auradelle awaits.”
Hands lifted me onto a mount that smelled of old leather. Restraints that might have been rope or might have been living vines wrapped around my wrists, burning with a cold that went deeper than skin.
As we rode—flew? —I caught glimpses of what we passed.
The realm was dying, sick, corrupted. Not just in patches but systematically, spreading out from the Heartspire like infection from a wound.
Trees stood as blackened skeletons. Rivers ran backwards, their water thick and dark as old blood.
The very air seemed to rot, leaving tears in reality that showed nothing but void.
And somewhere behind us, following the pull of our bond, Kaelren was coming—bringing his own corruption, his obsession, his determination.
The Hunt rode on, and I closed my eyes, trying not to see how each hoofbeat left another piece of the realm a little more broken.
Trying not to think about how we’d had three days together, and I’d wasted at least half of them in strategy meetings.
Trying not to count the hours we’d lost that we could never get back.