Chapter 44 Malachi
Malachi
It couldn’t be.
The breath caught in my throat as the trees gave way to a sliver of something I wasn’t ready to name. A shape I hadn’t seen in centuries.
“Stay here,” I said quietly, without turning.
Lysara already had Santiago propped upright, her hands steady on the bandage I’d wrapped. Santiago’s breath rasped, thin but there.
“I’ve got him,” Lysara whispered without looking up.
“Absolutely not,” Aurelia replied, already stepping closer. I didn’t argue. There wasn’t time, and even if there had been, I knew better than to mistake her strength for recklessness. Still, it wasn’t about keeping her behind me. It wasn’t about control.
It was that I didn’t yet know the shape of what lived inside Aurelia now. And neither did she.
So I stayed close.
I could still see him. Gabriel, drifting toward Eryndis as if something unseen had fastened him to her.
She didn’t move like a creature of flesh.
Light fractured around her in glints and glimmers that didn’t belong to sun or star.
The forest didn’t rustle. Even the mist recoiled from the goddess’s path.
Gabriel’s hand trembled as he reached forward.
That tremor wasn’t fear. It was recognition—the kind that grew over years.
I wanted to speak. But there was no language for this.
Aurelia stood beside me, silent, her breath shallow. Her grip tightened around mine. A soundless chord pulled taut between us.
Across the clearing, Gabriel’s voice cracked. “Are you real?” His eyes were wide, glassy with disbelief. “Are you real?”
The goddess tilted her head. “As real as you are, my love,” Eryndis replied.
Her voice carried the kind of certainty that rewrites truths and unravels lies. Gabriel stepped closer, though his knees buckled with the weight of it.
Lysara didn’t breathe. Santiago blinked, dazed, but alive. The others kept silent.
But in me, a thousand memories rose unbidden: Eryndis’s laughter in courtyards long since crumbled to dust, her hand against Gabriel’s chest before a battle, the way she whispered his name like a benediction and a goodbye.
And then—gone. Into the night. Into the Veil.
Now she stood before us, more myth than flesh. And Gabriel... he was breaking just looking at her.
Eryndis stepped forward. Her gaze swept across us. “Lysara,” she said with a faint smile. “Still steady. Still sure.”
Lysara didn’t flinch. If the rest of us were adrift, she remained the anchor. The one who remembered how to stay—even with Santiago’s blood still drying on her hands.
“Santiago,” Eryndis said, her eyes warming. “Favored of Kaerani. You chose healing when others demanded conquest. You could have stayed in Synnex, followed your father’s path. But you left in search of more. Of mercy. Of answers.”
Santiago lay propped weakly against Lysara, lids heavy, breath ragged. His throat worked but no sound came. Still, I saw it—the way her words hit him. They struck deeper than the arrow had, because she wasn’t speaking to his wound. She was speaking to the man he had chosen to be.
Then her gaze turned to Aurelia.
The air shifted.
“And you.” Her voice thinned. “I have waited a very long time for you.”
Light rippled through her pupils, as though she were looking through time instead of at it.
“You’ve already begun,” Eryndis said, almost in awe. “The fracture was always meant to start with you. The threads have loosened. The veil thins. The imbalance trembles. You walk both past and future, and the world bends.”
“What fracture?” Aurelia whispered.
Eryndis’s reply was soft, but immovable. “They will rise to tear open the seams between realms and stitch them new—with blood, with mercy, with ruin. It was always going to happen. The only question was the cost… and how much of yourself you’re willing to give before the world takes the rest.”
The words struck something in me—old terror, older hope.
This wasn’t the prophecy we feared. It was the one we’d tried to bury. And Aurelia… she wasn’t apart from it anymore. She was its beginning.
Aurelia didn’t move.
“She promised me you would come,” Eryndis whispered. “But it’s been so long. I almost stopped believing.”
“Who?” Aurelia breathed.
Eryndis tilted her head, a tender sorrow in the motion.
“Our mother,” Eryndis said softly.
The beginning before beginnings. Mortals prayed to the daughters she left behind, but she was the one who wrote the first stories into the dark. Our mother. The words echoed like something older than prophecy itself.
A suffocating quiet fell over us, impossible to fill.
Eryndis exhaled and turned her gaze on me. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said softly.
I stepped forward, the words biting out before I could stop them. “Neither should you. You were banished—lost to the Veil. How are you here?”
I caught the flicker in her eyes, the weight of centuries folding behind them. Still, her face gave nothing away.
“I had no choice but to take this path,” I pressed on. “Kaelith heard rumor of a hidden village. We had no choice but to come.”
Her gaze swept over us again, unreadable. Then she turned. Toward nothing. That nothing opened, and she stepped through it.
I followed. The world changed.
The air sharpened, sweet with petrichor and dusk-flowers in bloom.
The trees twisted upward into impossible arches, their branches laced with lanterns glowing like captive fireflies.
Rope bridges stretched across massive trunks.
Homes carved into living wood spiraled high above us. The place itself breathed.
Below us, I caught sight of the horses being led off along a lower path, their tack stripped and movements soothed by hands that knew how to calm frightened animals.
Laughter carried down from the branches. Music threaded between the leaves. The clink of dishes. The spice of slow-cooked food. A blacksmith’s hammer striking in rhythm with a song I didn’t know.
This wasn’t a forgotten village. This was a kingdom in the trees.
Built into the cliffs that jutted over the mist, connected by suspended paths, its heart was a colossal tree, roots sunk deep into the stone. A waterfall shimmered behind it.
Wonder clawed its way up my throat. I stood there and let the moment wash over me, unsure if my legs would hold. This wasn’t survival. This was something far more dangerous.
Hope. Blooming where it had no right to grow.
I’d built myself from ruins, brick by broken brick. But hope—hope was treachery. Hope was what you handed children and fools before the war broke them.
I’d seen what it did to soldiers. Watched it shatter them when the siege dragged on too long. Held men while they wept for homes already burned.
Promises made in hope had teeth when they broke.
And still… I envied those who could hold it like it wouldn’t betray them.
Yet here we stood. Led by a goddess long thought lost, in a city no one believed existed. We had found the last stronghold of the Keepers.
A sound behind us broke the spell.
Santiago stirred, pale but breathing. His lashes fluttered, and when his gaze found Lysara, the corner of his mouth twitched into the ghost of a grin. His voice came out rough and ragged.
“Remind me,” he rasped, “to never make you mad.”
A broken laugh escaped Lysara as she bent to him, gathering him against her with a fierceness that left no room for hesitation. His blood still stained her, but her tears stained him in turn.
“You scared me,” she whispered, voice splintering.
He cupped her face with shaking fingers, tender despite the strain. “I’m all right,” he said, eyes soft, steady in a way his body wasn’t. “I swear it. I’m here.”
The way she clung to him—the way he let himself be held—it ached in me. For all the centuries she carried, for all the shadows he bore, here they were. Choosing each other anyway.