Chapter 38
Thirty-Eight
Adelasia
My heart lurches at the sight of the Blackwood.
I swore to myself I’d never return here after what it took from me. After the blood and the screaming and the agony it brought me.
I shouldn’t be here. I can feel the Well and Eternity’s influence like invisible tendrils wrapping around my limbs, but where else can I go?
I won’t bring suffering to Saddiq and his people. My mother rejected me the moment she realized I was no longer human, and my two lovers are dead. I have no one…
Perhaps this is what Eternity wanted for me, to realize hers are the only arms I have left to run to. The only arms that will take something as broken as I am.
The deeper I go, the denser the trees become, and the quieter the air is. It swallows the sound of my bare feet on the dirt and roots, replacing it with sounds that eerily resemble bones scraping together. I clutch the edges of my cloak tighter as I walk aimlessly through the forest.
It feels wrong to be here alone. Every instinct is telling me to hide, or to run, or even to simply let the darkness take me. Every few steps, I look to my left and right, expecting to find Rowan’s smirk or Kaius’ steady presence.
But they’re not there. They never are.
All I have left of them is the last time I saw their faces. The silence where their voices used to be is unbearable.
I whisper aloud, just to hear something: “I can’t do this.”
The trees give no answer, but the magic inside me does.
It shifts like a beast under my ribs, pressing upward, curling sharp claws against the back of my throat. I stagger, gripping a trunk to steady myself. My fingertips leave black streaks across the bark, rot seeping outward from the touch until the wood hisses and splits.
“Stop,” I beg. “Please.”
But the Well is calling, and the deeper I go, the stronger it becomes.
It’s in the air, in the soil, in the faint vibration humming through my boots as I step over roots slick with rain. Every breath feels borrowed, like I am breathing in someone else’s lungs. Someone else’s will.
Return to me.
The whisper is not sound but sensation, sinking into my bones. I grit my teeth against it.
My voice cracks like broken glass. “You can’t have me.”
But the truth is more complicated. Because even as I fight it, part of me wants to surrender. Wants to sink back into that black water, let it close over my head, let the darkness take me so I no longer have to keep walking alone.
The thought makes my knees buckle. I catch myself on another tree, pressing my forehead against its damp bark, sucking in ragged breaths. My reflection flashes in my mind: the girl who danced, the girl who begged to die, the girl who clawed herself back from the grave.
Which one am I now?
None of them. All of them. A hollow vessel walking deeper into a forest that wants to devour me.
The rot creeps higher. It stains my fingers past the knuckles now, winding into my palms. I curl them into fists to hide it, but the shame burns worse than the pain.
By nightfall, I am too exhausted to keep walking. I collapse beneath the bent arm of an old oak, curling into the folds of my cloak. The forest breathes around me, restless but indifferent, as though testing whether I belong here or not.
Sleep drags me under, cruel and quick.
In my dreams, Rowan laughs, the sound rich and dangerous, his wings glinting with iridescent light. Kaius looks at me with those impossible crimson eyes, steady and eternal, as though nothing could break him.
I reach for them both.
But when my fingers graze theirs, they crumble into ash.
I wake choking on a sob, the taste of smoke in my throat. My hands claw at the earth beneath me, pulling up handfuls of wet leaves until my nails split.
“I can’t do this,” I whisper again, hoarse.
The days begin to blur together.
I walk. I stumble. I curse the sky and the roots that trip me.
I drink from demons I have no name for, their blood bitter and sickly.
My body grows thinner and weaker, but the magic inside me swells, pressing harder, hungrier, until every step feels like a negotiation for mercy with the evil beneath my ribs.
Sometimes, I hear voices in the wind. Kaius calling my name, Rowan laughing, Saddiq’s steady warning. Each time, I whip my head around, heart hammering, only to find the forest empty.
Loneliness gnaws sharper than hunger.
I start speaking aloud just to keep the silence from consuming me. I tell my boys how much I miss them. I confess secrets of my human life I never got to share. I sing them songs I learned in the desert.
The trees absorb it all, and I never get an answer back.
But the Well hears me, too.
Its growl grows clearer, coaxing: Stop fighting. Stop grieving. You will never be alone if you surrender.
Sometimes, in the heavy hours just before dawn, I almost listen.
It happens on the seventh night.
The air grows thick, clinging to my skin as though I’ve stepped into a river of shadow. The trees crowd closer, their branches curling inward like hands desperate to cage me.
I stop walking. My heart hammers.
Because I hear something.
Not the Well’s whisper this time, but real. A crunch of leaves, a shift of weight on the forest floor. Someone—something—moving through the trees.
I conjure a dagger in my hands, my body coiling tight with the kind of terror that leaves no room for thought.
“Show yourself,” I snarl, though my voice shakes.
The sound comes again, closer now, too deliberate to be an animal. I lift my hand, summoning what little control I have over the storm in my veins. Dark light sears against my skin, ready to spill outward.
And then—
My bond burns. It burns like it’s been lit on fire.
It flares to life across my forearm, sudden and searing, like molten iron pressed to skin long gone numb. I gasp, nearly dropping the dagger. The pain is sharp, but beneath it pulses something else.
Recognition. Familiarity. Relief.
A tether snapping tight after too long stretched thin.
The line bursts into a shade of precious gold. My knees buckle. My lungs seize. I clutch the line with my free hand as if I can hold onto it, as if gripping it will keep it from slipping away again.
“It can’t be…”