Chapter 33
Sabine
Iremember.
That’s the first thought that enters my mind when I rise from the glass-strewn rubble, in a shredded and mud-stained gown, with the still-steaming body of a monoceros at my feet.
I remember…everything. Meeting Tòrr in another life, when he was nothing but a knock-kneed colt with a horn too heavy for his head.
I met him a thousand years ago, and a thousand years before that.
In fact, I remember all the monoceroses of old.
Saph. Sunflare. Aurora. Hailstrom. Cloudveil. Stormwatch.
I remember the monoceroses because I remember every day of my former lives. The human bodies I’ve inhabited before, stretching back to the very first, a wizened woman with a beautiful lattice of wrinkles, wild white hair untamed and knotted around her shoulders.
I remember the First Awakening—the hot kiss of Vale’s knife blade against my throat.
The Second Awakening, too, when his same damn knife slashed my belly.
I remember my nine fae brethren in painstaking detail, all the debauched midnight reveries, the games of fate with human lives in the balance, the long line of drained and discarded acolytes they’ve left behind without a care in the world.
Maybe, though, what I remember most isn’t a memory at all—but a feeling.
Love. It hits me like a gut punch. Love for the eastern wind. For the first snow of December. For the tiny yawn of a mouse.
For Tòrr.
It’s a love that is stained with his loss, that weighs me down like a boulder in my stomach. The kind of love that can tear down kingdoms with its bittersweet pain, that will live in me like a splinter for the rest of my life.
I understand now why my father tried so hard to hide the truth of my identity from me when I first arrived in Norhelm.
In every single Return, I’ve chosen the side of nature over the fae.
In some cases, it’s taken me longer to arrive to that conclusion.
Once, centuries passed before I realized the fae’s rotten core and picked the wilderness instead of their gilded court.
And this Return? The Third?
It must be a record, because I’ve barely been awake as fae for weeks, and I already understand exactly what they are.
“Basten,” I rasp, my voice somehow here and not here, like it rides the wind. I run to him, still choking on my sobs. “Tòrr…”
He holds me fiercely, and I swear I can hear a hitch of a sob in his own throat. “He was a legend. Too fierce for this world. He burned too bright, too hot—and he didn’t want you to do the same. To be ruled by his fury.”
“He gave me everything. Blood. Memories. Power. I—I don’t know how to break it to Myst,” I choke out. “I’m afraid she isn’t strong enough to take it. She’s old, Basten. Tòrr was her final mate.”
Basten pulls back to gaze into my eyes. “You tell Myst that we’ll honor him. We’ll make the most of everything he sacrificed to save the city, and we’ll mourn his loss with all the respect due to a monoceros of his strength.”
I nod, swallowing back sobs. I can feel Tòrr, deep in my veins. Urging me to stop crying. To make his sacrifice worth it—before it’s too late.
I take a deep breath. “Get Folke to safety—there’s still some life in him.”
Basten cups his palms at my elbows, supporting me. “I will.”
“I—I have to get to Hekkelveld Castle.” I force myself to keep my eyes on Basten, to not look at Tòrr’s broken body.
“That’s where Woudix went—that’s where they all will gather.
They’re drawn to it. It’s an ancient structure, built for them thousands of years ago.
” I pause, sucking in air, leaning my forehead against his chest. Then, I continue, “I’ll face them there—but first, I have to stop their plague on the city. ”
“Let me help you,” he says.
I swallow, touching my hand to his beautiful face. “Tell them—Suri, Ferra, Rian—to spread word through as much of the city as you can. Tell the citizens to climb to the highest floors of their houses. Rooftops, bridges. And to wait.”
He nods. He can see the change in me. I know it. His eyes are reverent as he looks over me, like I’m a living star. “I’ll tell the others. But I’m not leaving your side.”
“You have to.” I rest a hand on his shirt, fingers twisting in the fabric. “I need you to get something for me.”
I lean in close, whispering in his ear.
He pulls back, hesitant to agree because it means leaving my side, but he nods.
As he turns to give our friends the orders, my heart clenches—I love him so fiercely it feels like it might kill me.
Not in any of my past lives, not once, have I known a love like this. Basten is the only person who ever touched my soul and left his mark.
I’m fae, yes. But I’m also human. Somehow, that’s the conclusion I always come back to in every Return. It’s what my brother and sister fae forget:
That we’re of them, not above them.
Suri and Ferra dig a broken door out of the rubble, and cart it over to where Folke lies. Together, Basten and Rian lift Folke’s bleeding body onto it. Basten exchanges a few words with them, and then Ferra and Rian grip the door’s edges, ready to carry the makeshift stretcher toward help.
But Suri spares a second to look over her shoulder at me.
Quickly, so fast I almost don’t see it, she makes the Winged Lady gesture with her hands.
Then Ferra calls to her, and she reaches down to help lift the stretcher.
Tears flow harder down my face as I smile.
Friends. In thousands of years, I never had those, either.
The animated corpse of a fisherman, fish knife still dangling from his belt, stumbles over broken glass toward me.
Basten catches sight of him and peels off to move toward him confidently, sword raised. With one clean swipe, he severs the man’s head, then disappears around the corner.
I push to my feet, slowly becoming aware of how many of Woudix’s dead are flooding into the Glassmarket.
It unnerves me, how I can’t control them. How, when I reach into their souls, only a hollow chill answers.
There’s only one god they answer to, and it isn’t me.
Hunting for my breath, I press a hand against my chest, forcing myself to assess the situation.
All around me, the swelling tide of the dead terrorize any citizens who haven’t managed to take shelter. They climb through broken storefront windows. Claw at locked doors. Screams of the living echo throughout the city in a deafening chorus.
I move instead toward the tallest heap of broken stone and splintered timber, and climb up the rubble until I stand above the chaos, above the screams, above the stench of death and blood and rot.
The air around me crackles, alive.
I draw in a slow breath, and with it I pull in everything they have given me—Basten’s raw, stubborn devotion, Rian’s cunning and strength, Tòrr’s sacred sacrifice—until my heart feels too full for my body to contain.
Their blood burns like starlight in my veins.
I lift my hands to the sky.
My fingers knit gracefully through the air, each motion deliberate. My fey lines ignite like constellations across my skin, silver blazing outward, pulsing with a power that finally feels right.
The earth shudders underfoot.
Beyond the southern gate, the lake answers my call, rising from its bed in a slow, majestic swell.
I can feel its movements almost like it’s a part of me.
Water coils upward, shimmering and translucent, before surging forward in a roaring wall of force, pouring over hills, through valleys, straight to the city gate.
It blasts through, flooding the streets with unyielding power.
The wall of water crashes into the undead horde, sweeping them from their feet, dragging them under, breaking their brittle bodies apart, and carrying their now powerless corpses back to a final resting place at the lake’s bottom.
And I stand there, hair whipping around my face, the floodwaters rising to my ankles. I slowly lift my hands skyward, reveling in the wind on my face, and feel it again—the sense that far from succumbing to the rising waters, I could simply take wing and soar away.
Eventually, the floodwaters drain. The water level sinks, revealing the broken city again, yet now, the flood has carried most of the broken boards, stone dust, and blood stains with it.
There’s rebuilding to be done, yes. But it feels like a starting point.
The public peers apprehensively out of upper windows, too fearful to leave their hiding places. So, I summon the animals of the city and surrounding forests to enter first, to show them that all is safe now.
A herd of deer gracefully sweeps through the Glassmarket. A pair of hawks fly down to land on Valor Belltower. Cats by the hundreds prowl through the streets, hunting any flopping fish the lake might have left behind.
Slowly, people emerge from their safe spots. Ladders are lowered. Helpers come in to assist those down from broken upper windows. Once they’re back on the ground, people fall to their knees, sobbing out both their devastation for what was lost at the same time as their prayers for my salvation.
Every prayer, every bent knee—it builds strength in my bones.
Though I didn’t call her, Myst races across the Glassmarket—drawn to me, to my need, even without my summons.
Her dainty hooves are still painted sunset colors from yesterday’s Ride of Sun and Moon show, though her pink-and-orange dyed mane is tangled now.
She skids to a halt before me.
She takes me in at once—my trembling hands, my bent back, the absence beside me where Tòrr should be. His body is gone, now. Swept away by the receding lake waters, carried to rest somewhere beyond the city walls, in nature—where he belongs.
But his broken-off horn remains lodged between two fallen bricks.
Slowly, I bend down to pick it up—what’s left of it. I cradle the beautiful, deadly solarium spire in my arm as I approach Myst.
Her ears flatten. A broken whinny tears from her nostrils.
She knows what it means.
A living monoceros would never leave its horn behind.
Myst, I say. My brave girl. My fierce friend. We…we lost him.