Chapter 51
MERYN
So they were two halves that needed to be brought together. My smug satisfaction at being right lasts for only an instant before all my attention is on the visuals before me.
It’s different from the others I’ve experienced. It’s far less clear and far more… fractured. It’s like pieces of memories, rather than something coherent.
The first thing I see is a beautiful woman, but beautiful might not be a powerful enough word to describe her.
She’s radiant.
Her skin is gold and seems to glow from within. Her fine-featured face is framed by shoulder-length emerald-green hair. She exudes indescribable energy. In beauty, yes. But she has an air of peace, too. Gentleness brushes my skin as she cradles her pregnant belly.
I instantly know she isn’t human.
Part of it is her strange eyes, which are the color of sunlight through springtime leaves and have strange not-quite-black pupils that reflect the warm light around her oddly. But it’s just an instinct, also.
There’s a quiet knowing in my chest when I look at her that informs me she’s more than I am.
A fissure forms, breaking me away from her. Another scene comes into focus as I whirl through the past.
The same woman—being?—stands over a child. The infant looks entirely human, not sharing the woman’s ethereal glow. The woman drifts her fingertips over the child’s stomach as it sleeps, gazing at the baby with warmth in her eyes.
A man materializes beside her, appearing as if the space he occupies was a mirror someone abruptly tilted toward me to catch his reflection.
He’s tall and otherworldly, with black-blue hair the color of the night sky and skin pale as moonlight. His eyes glint as hers do, and shadows swirl around him, following the curve of his arm as he moves to rest it on the edge of the child’s crib.
His voice is deep and instantly makes my hair stand on end. “Our daughter can be the link to my wolves and rule over your humans, but you know you cannot stay with the child. She is of us but not one of us.”
There’s something familiar in his voice, something that rattles in my bones.
The golden woman’s face crumples with grief.
She weeps softly. As she does, she lifts her hands, palms up, and cups the air before her. She catches her tears as though she’s catching the shattered pieces of her heart.
I watch in fascination as her tears start to pool together and warble. They gradually crystallize, taking on a familiar glow. An opal.
The woman leans forward and places the stone on the baby’s chest with shaking hands. Through her sobs, she whispers promises that it will keep her child and her kin safe. That it will protect them across generations.
The man’s voice is colder than Mount Wolfsbane. His face doesn’t strain in the slightest as he watches her cry. “Say goodbye now, Lumina.”
My breath leaves my body. Lumina?
The vision shifts again. I can’t make out anything but a handful of figures. Above us all is the same man from before, with the dark hair and the shadows curling around his fingers. He stares down with the same unmoving expression.
Below him is a Bonded woman with a direwolf at her side. They’re both bowing before the dark-haired man. The Bonded woman has the child cradled in her arms, the opal now strung around the child’s neck.
“I do not trust the unbonded humans to do right by her. You will raise her, and you will protect her,” the man orders.
The Bonded woman bows her head farther, so far that she’s touching the ground. “As you command,” she says.
I gasp back to reality.
There’s a sudden sensation of falling, then I’m vividly aware of my feet in my boots and the deck under me. I stagger slightly and hit the railing, grunting in pain.
The doubled necklace chains yank tight around my neck, and I gasp and step back until I’m close enough to slip out of their bind. I pull the necklace that belongs to me up and over Lucien’s neck, hoping he’s gotten whatever he needs from his vision.
I have to blink rapidly to convince my eyes that I’m capable of seeing more than three feet in front of me, but when everything clears up, I feel almost normal.
Or, not normal.
There’s a deep, bone-rattling shock.
That name—Lumina—is the one from my mother’s delusions.
The one I’ve heard whispered in my own mind during vulnerable moments. I still remember a dark voice calling out the name on my first night as a Rawbond.
Is Lumina the true name of the Faceless Goddess?
And that baby, gifted with a Goddess Tear for protection, meant to serve as the link to the wolves, destined to rule over humans…
If that was my ancestor, the first of the Sturmfrost line, then I’m not just of royal blood.
Lucien is staring at his own opal necklace, face unreadable.
“Are you going to tell me what you saw?” I ask him, narrowing my eyes. Would he have seen the same vision as me? Or something completely different?
He presses his lips together, and then they curl up in a mockery of a smile. “Are you?”
We gaze at each other for a long moment.
Reaching into my pocket, I draw out the Tear from the tower.
“Perhaps this one also has something to show us?”
Lucien studies it. “It hasn’t given up its secrets to you?”
“Not yet,” I admit. Maybe this one also takes two of us, for whatever reason?
I hold up my hand with the Tear outstretched. Lucien reaches out to take it, and I clench my fingers down. “I’m not giving it to you. I just think… maybe we should both touch it?”
Lucien agrees without making any lewd statements this time. We both take a deep breath, and then his hand closes down over mine.
I’m yanked from the deck of the ship and into the sky, swirling, body tossed upside down and then righted again. I’m intensely nauseated for a moment and then light and tingly like I’ve left my body behind and I’m nothing but a memory.
I don’t see Lucien, but I sense his presence. We’re together, then, witnessing this vision as a pair.
The same woman from the other vision—Lumina—materializes out of the blinding sunlight. At first, she’s pacing on air, her dress flowing behind her. Then the room takes shape around us, board by board and stone by stone until I’m back in the tower room we just left.
It’s set up the same, except it shows no signs of age.
Lumina looks pained. She’s moving back and forth, rounding the room in circles like a trapped animal. Her fingers rake through her verdant hair repeatedly, and her eyes glint as she turns and turns again.
Suddenly, the space darkens. The shadows coalesce and knot together like writhing snakes. The man from the previous vision appears—though, like Lumina, it seems not quite right to call him a man. I know in my heart he’s something more. He’s just as handsome and cold as he was earlier.
“Nocturn!” Lumina screams instantly, storming toward him, skirts flying. “What have you done?! How did you manage this? You’ve weakened me!”
Nocturn. The name sends chills through me. Another name so often on my mother’s lips.
Nocturn’s children, written in the riddle on the altar. I read it as meaning the children of Nocturna, but maybe that was entirely wrong.
An echo of the name resonates through me, like a haunting chord.
I know I’ve never seen his likeness before.
But his voice…
It hits me: the voice in that shadow realm. The voice of my dreams that has plagued me since I first bonded with Anassa and set this all in motion.
Could it have been Nocturn all along?
In the vision, the corners of Nocturn’s mouth dip downward. His eyes are uninterested, though. Like he’s just discovered he has a nuisance to deal with.
“You’ve weakened yourself. I had nothing to do with it.”
“Myself?” Lumina exclaims.
“You were always so giving. It’s not my fault that your selflessness harmed you,” he says plainly. His frown deepens. “It’s ungodly of you.”
Ungodly. I knew in my heart, but even still, this confirmation sends a riot of shock straight into my bones. I start to tremble.
Gods. They’re both gods.
Lumina’s eyes shimmer. Her hands are in fists on her skirts. But she takes a deep breath and, somewhat more calmly, says, “Why are you doing this?”
Nocturn steps close enough to her that his boots pin the hem of her skirt. “You belong to me and me alone, and you will stay here until you accept that.”
Did she accept that? Is that why she’s no longer in the tower, why we didn’t find her there? She became his, and he let her out? Or did she refuse him and fight to free herself?
Lumina opens her mouth to scream again, but Nocturn dissipates into darkness in the space of a second. He dissolves and then dispels into the dark corners of the room. The darkness flares as he joins with the waiting shadows, then eases away slowly, letting the light back in.
Lumina falls to her knees, weeping, and my heart breaks for her. The rest of the room fades away because she’s all that matters. Her and this pain that I recognize so intimately.
He might be a far distant ancestor, but I hate him.
Her tears condense into another opal just as they did before.
She stares at the jewel where it rests in the ruffles of her skirts, and her horror is a cold mist in the air.
Shakily, she takes hold of it and lifts it to the light.
It’s beautiful and yet hard to look at, the power in it searing in its strength.
“Weakened myself…” she whispers. Her face contorts with sorrow. “You know nothing of what it is to be a god, Nocturn.”
I snap back into my body and let out a strangled sound. I’ve fallen to the deck, and Anassa stands over me protectively. She nudges me with her snout, and I focus on her touch because it helps convince me that I’m not still drowning in Lumina’s suffering.
Lucien is on his knees, next to me. “You saw that?” he asks, seeking confirmation, looking at me intently.
“Yes.”
Nocturn. He trapped Lumina in that tower.
His voice is the one I’ve been hearing, I’m certain of it now. Nocturn must have been the one to set up that twisted test for us and the one who brought me back after I plunged that knife into my chest.
All along, it’s been him—his shadows haunting my dreams, making me think I was going mad back in Sturmfrost.
“It was never madness,” I breathe out. “Not for me, and not for my mother. It was always history. She was telling us our history.”
Lucien looks at me, nonplussed.
“I thought it was nothing. Just… mindless scribbling. But now… wait here.” I scramble to my feet and race down to my bunk belowdecks to grab my mother’s journals. Saela, wise Saela; she was right that I would need them with me.
I flip to the page I was thinking of, the one that shows those three names again and again.
Lumina, Nocturn, Astreon. The line joins instances of the three names.
It moves through Lumina’s name, Nocturn’s, Astreon’s and back again.
An eternal joining. It looks chaotic because there are so many recurrences of their names, but it’s no accident.
“But who is Astreon?” I say slowly.
Lucien purses his lips and gazes up toward the sky. “Fine! Fine, I’ll tell you about the first vision I saw. If you’ll do the same.”
I roll my eyes. “I take it that means you saw someone named Astreon in yours?”
“Yes,” Lucien admits. “I think he may have been an ancestor. And… possibly Lumina, too. But then”—his voice grows in confidence—“I always knew I had the looks of a god.”
“Get over yourself for a single minute and focus,” I retort. “I saw a god in my vision, too. Nocturn. I think he may have been my ancestor. So Lumina was in romantic relationships with both Nocturn and Astreon. And that’s why Nocturn locked her away. For being unfaithful?”
I leave out the part where Nocturn’s been speaking to me in my dreams. I don’t need to share all my secrets.
Turning back to my mother’s journal, I scan it for any other clues that might lead us to the final Tear.
I skip through pages and pages of writing, Nocturn and Lumina and Astreon written over and over in tiny script.
Some of the pages are illegible, her handwriting too shaky to decipher. Some of them are wrinkled and washed out, maybe waterlogged at some point so that the ink ran in every direction.
I flip to a faded sketch that dominates the entire page.
The journal is full of sketches of this unearthly woman: the goddess Lumina, as I now know it to be. But something about this drawing feels more specific. More real.
“Stark.” I beckon him over. “Does this remind you of anything?”
He gazes down at the page, then up at me.
“The statue of the Faceless Goddess in Linsfall.”
Exactly. The one I saw when I traveled with Stark, when an inexplicable pull drew me to her likeness.
The one with the mysteriously warm hands. As if she were alive and holding me.
I snap the book shut. “I know where we’ll find the final Tear.”