Chapter 29
Elara had spent nearly her entire childhood under the watchful eyes of Druids who believed the mind must be nurtured the way a garden is tended—patiently, season after season, until it learns how to grow in difficult soil.
Hours of her life had been spent hunched over brittle vellum and knotwork diagrams, parsing arguments written in three languages at once, copying passages until the ink blurred and the candles burned down to stubs.
Patience, they had called it. Discipline of the mind.
The ability to sit inside a difficult thought without fleeing from it.
None of those lessons had prepared her for reading while a body cooled on the floor behind her.
The smell made the letters swim. Copper-thick and suffocating, it crept through the chamber and coated the back of her throat.
She tried to read, but her hands wouldn’t stop trembling.
Closing her eyes, she drew a slow breath and forced her thoughts into the narrow calm the Druids had once demanded of her.
Though the body behind her felt alive with accusation.
When her eyes opened again, she began once more—each word a step she forced herself to take.
Across the room, Eamon moved along the shelves, lifting ledgers, flipping pages, replacing them without hurry.
His motions carried an ease that bordered on casual.
If the smell of blood troubled him, he gave no sign.
The report in Elara’s hands crackled as she turned the page. Columns of names marched across the parchment—dates, districts, notes in different hands. A collapsed seawall. Repair crews dispatched. Spoiled grain from the southern wharf. A petition over netting rights along the eastern shoals.
Ordinary things.
Elara sifted through the reports, scanning dates and marginal notes as a cold realization crept in despite her best effort to suppress it: the entire night might have been for nothing. And someone had died because she couldn’t wait.
Reaching for the last stack, her sleeve brushed the table, and a fan of loose pages slid to the floor with a whisper. Several skated farther than the rest, slipping beneath the table and striking the limestone wall beyond.
The wall rippled.
Elara froze with one hand still outstretched. The limestone wavered where the pages had touched it, its surface moving like water disturbed by rain before settling back into dull, unremarkable stone.
“Eamon,” she said sharply.
He came over at once. She stood, pressed her palm flat to the stone. The surface was cold—unnaturally cold—and a faint vibration thrummed beneath her skin.
“It isn’t a wall,” she whispered, the words quick and sure. “It’s an distortion.”
Eamon placed his hand beside hers. For a moment, the stone held firm—then his fingers slipped through its surface. His eyebrows shot up. “Well, that’s a rather elegant bit of Draoth.” He glanced at her, amused, and strode straight through the wall.
Elara stuttered—only for a breath—then followed.
The room beyond was small enough that her shoulders drew in.
A hearth stood in the far wall, long cold but still carrying the faint scent of cedar ash.
Shelves filled the space, crammed with scrolls.
Some were tied with ribbon, others left open as though abandoned mid-read. The parchment was old—thick, yellowed.
Eamon had already crossed the small room to the round table at its center. He ran his hand lightly along the edge of the nearest tome, his earlier ease now focused. Elara joined him and leaned over his arm.
“Tharan Vess,” Eamon murmured, tracing the list. “Maelon Currath. The Tydwells.” His mouth tightened. “Every name we found today—and dozens more.”
Elara slipped the page from his grasp and turned through the reports.
At first, they read like routine civic records—complaints, witness notes, official annotations.
But beneath the bureaucracy, a design began to emerge.
Tiny location numbers marked each entry, aligning with districts across the city.
One sequence repeated again and again.
“Look at this,” she swhispered, tracing the numbers with her finger. “Every single one connects to the canal.”
“Wait.” Eamon stepped through the false wall and returned moments later with two older ledgers under his arm.
He dropped them on the table and opened one.
“Here,” he said, sliding it toward her. “The ward drains follow the canal network—the oldest sections, the ones that still go dark during maintenance.” He tapped the margin. “Look at the complaints.”
They bent over the pages together: merchant disputes along the bridges, reports of flickering wardlights, residents describing strange movements in the water during inspection nights.
And threaded through it all—
Disappearances.
Clusters of them.
The trail spiraled outward from a single district: the canal quarter, the oldest part of Luirigh, built on the city’s first foundations. Each time the wards powered down for inspection, someone vanished.
Elara’s fingers trembled as she traced the columns again.
“The timing repeats,” she said, her voice tightening as the numbers aligned in her mind.
“Every thirty-three days—the same interval as the tide shifts.” She looked up at Eamon.
“It’s a gate. That’s how he does it. The wards weaken when they’re redrawn, and Osin’s spell strikes when the city blinks. ”
Eamon leaned back, brow furrowing. “I thought your king needed that dagger to cross the Veil into our world.”
“So did I.” She frowned at the parchment. “I must be missing something.” Her gaze flicked quickly over the lines. “The next maintenance is scheduled for two days from now.”
“Where are the investigative reports?”
She pushed the ledger aside and flipped backward through the stack. Beside her, Eamon pulled a loose sheet from another book and began jotting names across the back.
Her focus returned to the hundreds listed before them. Each entry carried a notation—house lineage, guild record, fragments of family history written in neat clerk’s script. Most bore a seal pressed in dark red wax. “Resolved,” she murmured. “As if they’ve been accounted for.”
Eamon spread the final page across the table. It showed a hand-drawn district map marked with ward boundaries and maintenance stations. At its center, faint but clear, was a single notation:
Collapsed Temple—Canal Substructure Nine.
“There,” he said softly. “That’s where the gate opens.”
Elara’s eyes dropped to the last column of names yet unmarked:
Tieran of the House Caelith.
Twenty years old.
Luirigh.
Registered distant Tuatha lineage.
“They’re selecting them,” she whispered.
Eamon looked up. “Selecting who?”
She opened her mouth to respond, but—faint at first—a voice rose from somewhere beyond the room.
It sounded submerged, blurred by distance and water, a shout warped into a single, hollow note.
Her head snapped toward it, and Eamon followed her gaze to the illusion.
The light there wavered, throwing pale shapes across the floor.
He turned back to her, watching, but Elara kept her eyes on the enchantment. The surface had gone still again, but she searched it anyway, willing some trace of that voice to return.
Nothing. Just a blank shimmer.
Eamon’s questioning look pulled her back. She drew a slow breath, tamping down the tremor in her voice. “They’re selecting the Sídhe before they take them,” she said briskly. Her hand hovered over the list. “Look at the lineage marks—they’re not random.”
He leaned closer, scanning over her shoulder as Aoife’s voice echoed in Elara’s memory: They weren’t harvesting blindly. They selected for bloodlines. For gifts. Draoth was the prize, yes—but they wanted more than bodies.
Elara’s gaze fixed on the final name again.
Tieran of the House Caelith.
“He’s next.”
Eamon folded the record shut and slipped a scrap of parchment into his cloak. “We have what we need,” he said quietly. “Now we know when—and where.” He met her eyes for a heartbeat, then looked away. “Let’s go.”
She didn’t move.
Her gaze lingered on the hand disappearing into his cloak.
“What was that?”
Eamon paused mid-step. For a long moment, he said nothing. Then he withdrew his hand from the pocket—now empty—and glanced down at the pages spread before them.
“Names.” His chin tipped toward the ledgers.
“Every magistrate who signed these reports. Every warden who approved the inspections. Every overseer who stamped their seal beneath the lies.” Pages stirred on the table, a faint current rippling through the loose parchment.
Pressure pricked against her skin. His hand clenched at his side.
“When this is finished, and I have them all, I won’t give the courts the luxury of collecting evidence.
” His gaze lifted, Draoth radiating from him in a crushing wave. “I’ll kill them myself.”
He turned toward the door. Only then did Elara realize her breath had stopped; it came rushing back as the tension eased enough for her to speak.
“Wait.”
He halted, one hand raised toward the stone, shoulders still rigid from the anger that had filled the room.
“You said I could go through the other records.”
Now he looked at her.
“The noble house. Bloodlines. Birth registries.”
His gaze flicked toward the shelves, then back. “We have what we came for. The longer we stay, the greater the chance someone notices.”
“That wasn’t the agreement.” Her voice cut through the space. “You said if I brought you here, I could look.”
A flicker of irritation crossed his face before he buried it. For a moment, she thought he might refuse—but then he exhaled, slow with resignation. “Five minutes.” His eyes shifted to the far side of the chamber. “I expect they’ll be in here.”
Elara turned, following his gaze. The room seemed to contract around the row of oak cases along the back wall. On the middle shelf rested three massive tomes, bindings dark with age, the leather ridged and swelling under faded gilt letters.
Her skin prickled beneath Eamon’s silent watchfulness, an invisible pressure pressing between her shoulders. And with a hollow certainty, she knew he’d seen them the entire time.
Ignoring him, she crossed the room and gripped the nearest book. The binding yielded softly to her touch, the surface stamped with a triple spiral—three unfurling branches, the ancient sigil of the Tuatha.
It opened to long Naidiryn genealogical lists—columns of names linked by slender lines and curling notes in old Sídhe script.
Who begot whom. Who wed. Who was born under what moon.
The ink ran steady and unbroken down the centuries.
It wasn’t a census; it was a map of blood.
Every line a thread leading back to the Concord of the Fir Dé.
Across the pages, banners marked the territories—Naidiryn, Ellylldan, Sylph, Turlaith.
Elara turned another page.
Ellylldan.
She traced the most recent decade—and froze.
Reynnar Brannoc.
Aoife Brannoc.
Her breath faltered. Gathering the great volume in both arms, she carried it to the table and laid it beside the investigative reports, parchment whispering against parchment.
Her hand shook as she began cross-checking the names, following each line until the truth surfaced—terrible in its simplicity.
“Eamon.” Her voice barely carried. “They’re taking siblings.” She pointed, eyes wide. “Here—and here. Every time, they take them together.” Finally his boots scraped softly across the floor, and a moment later, he stood beside her. She looked up; his face had gone pale.
“They’re taking Sídhe with Tuatha bloodlines,” she whispered. “Pure or distant—it doesn’t matter. And always siblings, even if years apart.”
Eamon was speaking, but she barely heard him. Her fingers were already turning pages, flipping to the next banner. Sylph. Her eyes climbed the columns—thousands of names swimming before her. “So many,” she breathed. “Why so many Sylph?”
Her thoughts snagged. A flicker of memory—herself at eleven, small and shivering in Mordenhall, twelve years ago. Her pulse quickened as she scanned downward, tracing each generation, each moon and month, until her hand stilled.
She brushed her finger over the names:
Raijin Selvaris.
Eilíara Selvaris.
The letters blurred, then steadied. She swallowed, following the lines, dread and wonder twisting together.
Cairen Selvaris begot Raijin, firstborn beneath the Frost Moon. He took Siomha Varin to wife, daughter of the western winds, and from their union came Eilíara, Maeve, and Taren. House Selvaris of Ailltir—of the Sylph, keepers of the air and the drifting isles, sworn by breath and light.
Her mouth parted.
No sound came out.
The Collective had shown her the kingdom of air—the realm of the Sylph, where islands drifted like slow stars, joined by silver bridges and wind-lit paths. But this was proof: weight and texture and truth pressed into parchment. Something she could touch, point to, whisper over.
Look. It exists. I belong to this.
A father. A mother. A brother. Two sisters. A family drawn in looping script across centuries.
Her hands shook. She pressed her palm against her mouth, but it did nothing to stop the rush behind her eyes.
Something in her chest gave way—not with sound, but with force, a deep tidal ache filling every hollow space inside her.
Heat stung her eyes. Her fingers trembled as she traced the names again, wanting to feel a pulse beneath the ink. And she knew. She knew.
“He has him.” The words came unevenly, almost a whisper.
When she lifted her head, Eamon was watching her, expression unreadable as the sound of parchment moving marked the moment he closed the genealogy book in front of her.
“Who?”
His voice carried none of the surprise she’d expected, only care in the asking. She glanced at the closed book between his hands, then met his gaze.
“Osin.” A breath. “He has my brother.”