Chapter 19
Sage
“W here are we going?” I asked the vuleerie, unsure if I had made the right decision as I peered down at the sprawling hills.
We were very, very high, and if she dropped me, I’d be flatter than roadkill.
Scratch that. I’d be microscopic Sage splatter.
I squinted. How did that work with immortality, especially when I couldn’t heal myself?
Would I spend an eternity like that, misted upon the ground?
I swallowed uncomfortably. No. Nope. I didn’t like that thought.
“To the Moriel Forest,” she answered, voice as disturbing as ever. Loved that for me.
“What’s there?” I inquired curiously.
“Not what, but who ,” she replied.
I decided to bite. “ Who is there?”
“You’ll see,” the spectral creature said, then her beak snapped open and she let out an eerie sound. I realized with a degree of horror she was . . . chuckling.
Fuck me.
What had I gotten myself into?
I took a breath, forcing it inside my frozen-stiff lungs, and tried not to lose my shit. Which, all things considered, I think I had a right to lose.
I was in an unfamiliar land, ruled over by an evil empress who wanted me dead-dead for reasons I didn’t fully understand—reasons, I surmised, attached to yet another past life I’d clearly had.
Not to mention I’d lit an entire arena on fire, burned a giant alive, and now, I was being flown to an unknown location by a shadow-ghost-skull-faced-bird who laughed like a homicidal lunatic.
I repeated— fuck me .
It was all so much to process— too much to process.
Forcing an exhale, I focused on my breathing and tried not to think about everything . Instead, I lied to myself. I was just enjoying a leisurely flight to a cottage in the woods. Nothing more. Nothing less. I breathed again. Repeated the lie. Another breath.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
In truth, the only thing that kept me going was Von’s promise—
I’m going to get you back, his words repeated inside my mind.
In the arena, when he had knelt before me, I had struggled to decide if he was real or not, but something within me told me that he was. So I leaned into his words, letting them be the spark that ignited the fire within me—to fight, to make it out alive.
Deep down, I believed we would be together again.
I believed we would find our way to one another.
I just had to stay alive long enough for that to happen, which meant I needed to keep my wits about me.
I needed to stay alert. Track my surroundings.
Form a mental map and learn the geography of this foreign world.
It probably wouldn’t hurt if I tried to recover some of the memories from my past life too.
Down below, the great expanse of rolling hills gave way to a lush, densely packed forest. Towering trees, unfathomably large, shot up hundreds of feet into the air.
Their branches were full of so much foliage it was impossible to see through them.
It was almost like a blanket of green clouds, covering that part of the world and keeping it closed off to outsiders.
When we reached the tallest one, the vuleerie left the current she had been riding, and we dropped like a lead weight, plunging toward the dense canopy below.
“Wait!” I shouted, my eyes widening as I braced for impact.
As if the tree had spotted us coming, dozens of branches moved like stiff, creaky arms. They swayed apart, allowing us a small section to pass through. In some ways, it felt maternal, like a mother welcoming a child into her embrace.
. . . A child.
Sadness brimmed, dragging me down into its dark depths .
But I had little time to sit in the feeling because thousands of eyeless sockets were fixed on us.
Vuleeries upon vuleeries perched in the giant tree.
I could not even begin to guess how many there were.
If they all were to take to the sky, it would look like a sea of black.
They watched us as we descended past them, their heads lowering as we made our way further down through the never-ending branches.
While the leaves of the tree were lush and green, the bark was smooth and completely black.
“This is Hollow Tree, and it is our home,” the vuleerie told me.
“It’s huge,” I marveled. “How many of you live here?”
“There are about ten thousand of us,” she replied.
I swallowed at that, digesting the information.
That was a lot of vuleeries.
It took us a while just to fly through the branches, and we weren’t going at a slow speed.
When we finally reached the last of them, we continued to descend beside the trunk, which was so large, there was no way I could see around it.
It was a mountain in itself. I imagined it would take quite a while to walk around the entire thing.
I looked down at the mossy forest floor, my brows knitting together—
Below, two females stood, peering up at us.
The one had dark-brown hair falling in lush, sultry waves.
Her features were strong, her eyes wise and kind.
She was beautiful. Her nose was a bit prominent, curving downward ever so slightly at the end, but it suited her face.
She wore a white, gauzy chiton fastened with a gold brooch on her shoulder, the color complementing her light-brown skin tone.
Standing beside her was another female.
A female who looked a bit like . . .
Me.
Her eyes were as blue as a winter sky, crisp and bright.
Her hair, the color of white moonlight, was styled in braids, falling well past her waist. On her skin, there were intricate blue markings that glowed with a constant, steady thrum.
She stood proud, a warrior. Strong. Her clothing looked to be crafted from boiled leather, formed perfectly to her body, portraying the same message.
My feet contacted the ground.
“This is where I leave you,” the vuleerie said, her talons lifting from my shoulders.
I was too stunned by the female standing across from me to say anything. Too stunned to thank the vuleerie for rescuing me as she began her ascent. Too stunned to speak a single word. All I could do was stare.
Slowly, the rusty cogs of my mind started to turn before they supplied a name. One I knew I had not spoken in my past lifetime, nor the one that came before it, which meant that it had been known to me a very long, long time ago.
“Artemesia?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
“Hello, sister,” she answered softly, tears forming on her lower lash line.
One second, we were standing there, and by the next, we were both running toward each other. Crashing together, we embraced in a desperate hug, full of so much longing it made my heart ache. My fingers curled into her clothing as I held her tightly to me.
The voices from our past began to speak, circling around us like swirls of magic—the late-night laughter that made our bellies hurt and the sisterly fights where both of us were too stubborn to back down.
Although I could not match them to a memory, I could hear the same message repeated strongly throughout—
Of how much we loved one another.
The same feeling I could feel right now.
“I knew this day would come, but I did not expect it to take so long,” Artemesia choked out, her words ragged with emotion.
Mine was no different as I replied, “I have no memories of us, but I can hear the voices of our past, and I can feel how much love my heart holds for you. How long has it been?”
“Thousands of years,” Artemesia sobbed.
Her words and the guttural sadness in her voice were like a dagger to my heart.
I held her tighter, an old instinct waking within me. It was covered in dust, but I knew it well—the need to be a protective big sister and reassure her. “It’s alright. I’m here now.”
She nodded, and we remained like that for a while, just holding on to one another.
“How did you know where to find me?” I asked softly.
“Two vuleeries showed up at my camp, telling me they had received a scroll with a white hair wrapped around it. They said it belonged to you, then told me what the scroll said. I wanted to go with them to the arena to rescue you, even though it would have put my people at great risk, but the vuleeries assured me they would retrieve you and told me to wait here instead. That decision was not an easy one. However, now, here you are.” Slowly, she pulled back from me, her eyes puffy and red.
I imagined I looked much the same. Gently, she clasped my cheeks.
“Creator below, it’s so damn good to see your face. ”
“As it is yours.” Then, we were hugging again, a mess of bubbly, happy laughs and heart-wrenching sobs.
When we finally got it together, Artemesia stepped back and gestured to the other female. “Sage, this is Vatara. Vatara, Sage.”
“A pleasure,” Vatara greeted me, the words rolling off her tongue with a mystical quality.
“It’s good to meet you,” I said, reaching out to shake her hand as she did mine.
The second our skin touched, an image flashed before my eyes. It was of an exceptionally large . . . egg. A memory, perhaps? It was gone faster than it appeared.
Weird.
“We should probably get out of here—we have a bit of a long flight to get back home,” Artemesia pointed out.
“Where is home?” I asked.
“I’ll show you,” she said with a grin before she turned to Vatara. “Ready?”
“More than ever. You know I can’t stand being in my human form,” she answered. A flash of light emitted around her. One second, a woman was standing before me, and in the next—
A mighty gryphon.
She had the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion.
Her front legs were bird-like, her talons, sharp and deadly, digging into the ground beneath her.
Her long, glossy brown feathers sparkled with bits of gold.
They were her crowning glory. She was magnificent.
Mythical. Like a creature from a fairy tale brought to life, right before my very eyes.
The vuleeries began to revolt, hissing and snarling, flapping their wings. Together, they crafted a haunting song, full of warning— you are not welcome here !
“Come on,” Artemesia spoke to me, before she turned and mounted Vatara. “The vuleeries don’t take kindly to other birds being near Hollow Tree so we best take our leave.”
I nodded then followed after her, eager to escape their haunting melody.