Chapter 2
Dangerous.
This was dangerous.
Reynnar’s vow echoed inside her—hard with ire and promise—and it took all her restraint not to recoil.
Elara knew where that path led. She had seen what followed when vengeance tipped into something indiscriminate, when judgment lost its sight.
Her throat tightened. She reached for his hand, lacing her fingers through his.
Reynnar knew humans only as tormentors. Cruelty was all they had ever shown him, and she couldn’t fault that truth.
But it wasn’t the whole of it. She had known gentler hands, defiance—fragile pockets of resistance that burned against the dark.
To judge an entire world by its worst offenders—he couldn’t. He shouldn’t.
“The king cannot be killed.”
He studied her for a moment before replying evenly, “All things that live can die.”
Elara’s chest constricted, understanding blooming dark and heavy beneath her ribs. He didn’t know. He hadn’t seen her drive the blade into Osin’s heart or watched the blood spill uselessly from a wound that refused to take. Reynnar still believed death was inevitable justice.
She knew better.
There was no escape—for her, for Reynnar, for any of them.
So she told him everything, speaking late into the night, until her throat burned and her voice rasped raw.
From the moment Malak tore him from his cell to the instant they found him again—chained, battered, but alive—Elara gave him every detail, speaking like an academic presenting evidence, because if she dared to feel it all at once, she knew she would shatter.
Reynnar interrupted only when she faltered. “So this Collective,” he said carefully. “They’re trapped Sídhe souls?”
Dread folded in on itself within her. Trapped in rings.
Imprisoned in cells. Tethered beyond death and denied rest. Watching him absorb that truth—watching grief twist and harden inside him—was like witnessing molten iron fracture and reforge itself—solidify again into a familiar rage.
It was both terrifying and comforting in a way she did not understand.
Elara pressed on, to the vision the Collective had shared—one that still burned behind her eyes.
Aine’s voice had been velvet and venom as she stripped the silver from Elara’s hair, bleached the light from her gaze, left her dimmed and lesser.
How easily she had believed the lie. Stardust. Divinity. Hallowed.
But she wasn’t chosen. She wasn’t divine.
She was taken. Shaped like soft clay under capricious hands.
When she confessed her suspicion—that beneath Aine’s enchantments, beneath the rounded ears and dulled senses, she believed herself to be Sídhe—the truth felt both impossible and undeniable.
Especially after what the Collective had shown her.
After what was stirring to life in her blood.
Of everything she told him, it was this revelation that Reynnar accepted without shock.
“I suspected for some time that you were…different. Though I wasn’t certain until the battle.”
Elara didn’t need clarification. The memory tore through her—heat and terror, that impossible, shared pulse roaring between them as if her soul had cracked open. Their joining lived inside her like a bruise she couldn’t stop pressing, just to confirm it had happened.
“Reynnar,” she said carefully, “there’s something I must tell you. And I know it will hurt to hear.”
She owed him the truth.
His brow tightened, but he didn’t pull away.
“I understand why you feel this way,” she said softly. “I know what humans have done—to your people, to you. I know.” Her grip tightened around his hand. “But you speak as though every soul across the veil bears the guilt of those who caused the harm, and I can’t accept that. I won’t.”
The light in his eyes dimmed, leaving only distance. “They tried to kill you.”
“I know.”
“They treated you as a resource—something to be spent.” His teeth flashed, the word bitten off. “They did not care whether you lived or died.”
“And still, that is not the whole of my world.”
His brow creased faintly, eyes narrowing as if she’d spoken in a language he didn’t recognize. “And what,” he asked coldly, “would you call it?”
“The actions of a few. Not the sum of all humanity.”
“Your mercy is misplaced.” He shifted back a fraction, shoulders angling away. “Your world built its comforts on the suffering of mine. This was no accident. It was engineered.”
“And yet,” she said—immovable, “there were those who resisted. Who risked everything to offer kindness where cruelty was expected. People who chose compassion in a place designed to crush it.” She drew a slow breath.
“You judge an entire realm by the hands that caused our suffering. I cannot. And I will not stand beside you if hatred is the road you choose.”
A fracture crossed his face—anger, disbelief, hurt. Perhaps all three. For a long moment neither of them moved. Then Reynnar exhaled, slow and shuddering, and released her hand.
“We will speak no further of this tonight.”
“Reynnar—”
He shook his head once. “Sleep, Eilíara. Before either of us says something we cannot take back.”
His words were like a slammed door, walling her out.
Elara turned onto her side and inched away, the ground cold beneath her, the fading warmth of his touch clinging to her skin.
And though neither spoke another word, the space between them throbbed like a taut, coiled thing, holding its breath long into the night.
Sleep didn’t so much come to Elara in Tír na nóg as arrive in brief fragments—close to rest, but never quite reaching it. Even in dreams, her body remained alert, braced for the next sound, the next loss.
Dawn bled through the canopy like a wound.
Pale light. Chilled air. She woke as she had every morning since crossing into this realm: gasping, tears caught in her throat, her body held tight in Reynnar’s arms. In sleep, there was no holding it back.
No walls. No escape hatch. Her dreams had no patience for the strength she pretended to possess; they dragged everything to the surface anyway.
Ivan’s face came first—always his. That look in his eyes at the end, as though he were trying to memorize her, as though some part of him had known, long before she did, that this was how it would end. The rest followed in pieces. The cold. The sores. The iron. The gnawing bellies.
And then came the fire.
Every morning, without fail, it surged before she even opened her eyes—the bond drawing from Reynnar in a desperate, aching pull, light and heat blooming wild through the trees.
Reynnar was always there to catch it, shield raised.
The ground that didn’t give way. His Draoth wrapped their camp in a protective hush, sheltering the forest from her.
This morning was no different.
The fire broke loose. It poured from her hands in great, shuddering bursts—heat and grief and fury all the same.
The air warped around them, gold bleeding into the first light.
She could taste ash on her tongue, hear the forest screaming beneath it, and then his power rose, a barrier shimmering into being to hold the inferno back.
“Eilíara.” His arms shook as they held her. “You have to feel it. If you keep pushing everything down, it’s only going to get worse.”
“I can’t,” she whispered, and it barely sounded like her at all—just something broken and half-alive. She turned inward, walking the well-worn path in her mind, closing the doors one by one.
The door that held Calista’s final breath, the crack of her neck beneath Osin’s hand.
The door that held the three Sídhe who had given everything so she could open the gate, how she’d betrayed them the instant she stepped through, their blood still staining the threshold.
And the door that held the boy from her memory, Raijin, her brother, his face splintering as the memory broke apart, laughing one moment, gone the next.
A grief she could not bear to leave ajar.
Then—still inside that crumbling corridor—she turned toward the thread of light at the end of the hall. Reynnar’s link. His heartbeat pulsing faintly through the bond, steady and warm and unbearably alive. Reaching for her. Always reaching.
Elara flinched from it. Pulled back like it had bitten her—because it had, in its way.
She didn’t trust it. Not when her heart and mind had become such traitorous things.
The link with Reynnar felt like coming home, yet it was wrong.
Wrong because Ivan had been the first, because he was still there—a ghost beneath her heartbeat, a tether she had never asked for, winding through her ribs like ivy and making a home of her ruin.
It was irrational. Twisted. She knew that. She knew.
Ivan had broken them—torn them apart, even if unwillingly, even if the choice had been stolen from him. She had every reason to let go of him, every reason to believe what bound them had been a lie, replaced by a real connection to Reynnar, who was becoming…her truest friend.
And still—still—the guilt clung like blood beneath her nails.
Opening the Draoth Cara to Reynnar felt like betrayal, like unmaking something sacred, however shattered it had become. Because even now, even after everything, her soul still searched for Ivan in the dark.
The fire ebbed. What had been wild and consuming turned inward, light collapsing on itself until only heat remained beneath her skin. Her breath hitched as smoke drifted through the clearing, curling in the cold air.
Reynnar’s hands trembled as they slipped from around her. When he finally drew back, the barrier fell with him. His amber eyes caught the light as he looked her over.
She hadn’t burned.
Only he.
“I’m sorry,” she managed, blood rushing from her nose.
He shook his head once. As she watched, the angry red burns along his forearms began to fade. Before she could stop herself, Elara reached for him, her fingertips brushing the place where the worst of it had been. He closed his eyes at the touch, a muscle ticking in his jaw.