Chapter 26 #2
Shapes bloom behind my closed eyelids. Not quite images, not quite memories. Light flickers like reflections on water, fragmenting and reforming. Then the light fractures into multiple paths, each one pulling in a different direction.
Three figures stand in the dark.
Lord Castor, formed from sharp motion and force. He moves even when standing still, energy coiled and ready to explode.
Lord Evander, outlined in measured lines and steady points. Geometry made flesh, logic given form.
Lady Nerida herself, shifting with the rhythm of unseen tides. Her edges blur and reshape with each breath.
The maze flickers behind them, its walls breathing like a creature with lungs. The corridors pulse and contract, expanding and collapsing in rhythm with my heartbeat.
“You fear leading them.” Lady Nerida’s voice echoes through my mind, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. “Not because you doubt their strength. Because you doubt the shape of yours.”
The water cradles me as images rise faster now, surfacing from depths I didn’t know existed. Lady Nerida’s voice cuts through again. “Look.”
A vision starts to form.
A faceless man stands in the centre of the mirror labyrinth, tall and radiant, the Sun sigil burning across his chest like a star given flesh.
His hand lifts and pain flashes through every part of the vision, sharp and sudden.
People scream. Light consumes them. He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t show mercy.
I try to move, but my feet are rooted to ground that doesn’t exist.
The light swallows everything.
“Good. Follow it.”
A new image forms. This one is smaller, more personal.
A glimpse of my hands pressed against Zevran’s chest, healing him in the shadows of the medical chamber.
I can feel it even here, even in this vision – the rush of power leaving my body, the relief of release, the euphoric high that follows. My breath stutters with the memory.
Another image. The same hands shaking in the aftermath, trembling so badly I can barely hold them steady.
The ache of withdrawal curling through my muscles, clawing at my insides.
The memory of needing it. Of almost taking too much.
Of wanting to push deeper, heal more, feel that rush again regardless of the cost.
Then another. And another. The addiction pulls through the visions like a thread, weaving through every memory without mercy. Every time I healed someone in the slums. Every time I felt the high and chased it. Every time I promised myself I’d stop and didn’t.
“No,” I whisper, though my mouth doesn’t move under the water.
“It’s the truth. You carry it even when you try to bury it.”
The visions tilt. My father’s sigil overlaps with my own. The Sun flares bright and terrible. The crescent Moon answers, glowing faintly under my skin, silver against gold. Both lights collide, merging and separating, fighting for dominance.
I can’t breathe. The water presses in, heavy and suffocating despite its warmth.
Then something else rises from underneath everything.
Water.
Silver.
A pulse like a tide, steady and inevitable.
The visions quiet. The light softens. A different image comes forward: a circle of women, robed in midnight cloth, their faces shadowed but their presence familiar.
The Daughters of the Moon.
They stand in formation around a pool similar to this one, their hands raised, moonlight streaming between their fingers.
One of them lifts her hand and touches the air the same way Lady Nerida did to water earlier.
A ripple in the air moves outward, reshaping everything it touches.
Reality bends. Paths appear where none existed before.
The water around my real body stirs, currents pulling in directions that defy physics.
“You’re more than the Sun King’s daughter. Your mother didn’t only give you healing. She gave you sight. It’s fractured now, scattered like light through broken glass, but it’s there.”
The visions blur again. Moonlight presses against the edges of the dark, and for a moment I sense pathways, patterns, shifts beneath the labyrinth’s surface.
Not clear visions. More like instincts sharpening, awareness expanding to include things I shouldn’t be able to perceive.
I can almost see the maze’s structure, the way fear flows through certain corridors, the places where reality thins.
Fear loosens in my chest, replaced by understanding.
Then, a noise in the distance catches my attention.
A woman’s voice, laughing – rich and amused and utterly merciless.
The sound carries the weight of breaking worlds and dying stars, of civilizations collapsed and suns extinguished.
I don’t recognize anything like it, almost as if it’s otherworldly…
Suddenly – as if they sense danger – the visions guide me upward. My face breaks the surface with a rush of air and sound.
I gasp and brace my hands on the pool’s edge. Water drips from my hair, running down my face in cool rivulets. My skin feels too warm, as if the visions lit something under it that’s still burning.
Lady Nerida watches me with a calm I can’t read.
“You saw the root of your fear. Not the maze. Not the team. You fear becoming him. You fear losing yourself to what you need.” She pauses, sea-green eyes holding mine. “But fear isn’t truth. It’s a tide. It washes in. It washes out.”
I steady my breathing, trying to slow my racing heart. The visions still pulse behind my eyes when I blink.
“You saw it all,” I say quietly.
“Yes.”
Her tone doesn’t change. No judgment. No pity. Just knowledge, vast and deep as the ocean her House represents.
She moves closer, water rippling around her legs.
“The addiction you carry – it’s a current, not a chain.
Currents can be navigated. They can even be harnessed.
” She reaches out and touches my wrist, her fingers cool against my overheated skin.
“I won’t pretend to understand what it feels like, but I know what it looks like when someone fights a tide alone. You don’t have to.”
“I’m trying to control it,” I say. The words come out defensive.
“I know. I saw that too.” Her hand stays on my wrist, steady. “But control isn’t the same as understanding. And understanding isn’t the same as acceptance. You fear the power will consume you the way it consumed your father. That fear makes you grip tighter, which only feeds the need.”
She releases my wrist and steps back slightly. “I can’t fix what’s broken in you. No one can. But I can help you learn to move with it instead of against it. If you want.”
The offer sits between us, genuine and without pressure.
“Thank you,” I say, and mean it.
My gaze drops to her collarbone, where a faint blue glow pulses beneath the surface of her skin. A sigil. Not the Sun’s blazing circle or the Moon’s crescent, but a single droplet of water, luminescent and alive, the same one I noticed in the first trial when she was using water magic.
“Lady Nerida,” I say quietly. “Your sigil. I’ve never seen anyone with one … except my mother and me.”
She touches the glowing droplet gently, as if reminding herself it exists.
“Neptune remembers what the rest of the system forgets. Water keeps its history. Some of us are born from very old currents.”
“Does it help you see the future?”
“It helps me sense where truths are drifting. That’s enough.”
She steps out of the pool and offers a hand to help me rise. I take it. Her grip is steady, pulling me up and out of the water that still clings to my clothes.
“You’re almost ready to lead. Go to Saturn next. Lord Evander will show you how to shape what you saw.”
She releases my hand.
“And Lady Cyra,” she adds. “You’re not alone in your rarity. Don’t hide it, least of all from yourself.”
She turns away, moving to the far side of the room where a robe the colour of deep ocean water hangs waiting. She wraps herself in it without looking back, her sea-green hair dripping steady streams of water onto the tiles.
I stand at the edge of the warm pool for another moment, water dripping from my clothes, my heart still racing from the visions. The chamber feels different now. Less like a meditation space and more like a place where truths are dragged to the surface whether you want them or not.
The bioluminescent patterns beneath the water pulse in slow rhythm, indifferent to everything that just happened.
Ren is waiting outside, her expression carefully neutral, though I catch the flicker of concern in her eyes when she sees me dripping and shaken.
“Are you all right?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I admit.
Two down. One to go.