Chapter 20 Skye
Skye
The room is exactly as I remember it. Walls lined with books that stretch beyond what the space should hold, spines in languages I can't read and a few I almost can, and at the center of it all the tree.
It's different now.
The last time I stood here, the tree was beautiful but restrained, its branches reaching through the ceiling into somewhere I couldn't see, its bark pulsing with a faint pink light that matched the essence flowing through my veins.
Now it blazes. Every branch, every root, every twist of bark radiates with a light so vivid it makes me squint, and the colors flowing through it aren't just pink anymore.
Gold and green and deep blue and silver and red and colors I don't have names for, all of them moving through the tree's structure in currents that remind me of blood through veins.
The tree looks more alive than the last time I saw it, as though something that had been choking it has been removed and it can finally breathe.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?"
Mother Nature stands beside the tree with her hand resting against the bark, the light responding to her touch by brightening.
She’s completely formed, almost as if she’s just a human like me but there’s an ethereal beauty to her, carrying a weight that I'm only now beginning to understand the scale of.
"What happened to it?" I ask.
"The essence that always was has returned.
" She traces a line of gold through the bark.
"Pure now, flowing as it should. The corruption Dmitri spread through the world was choking this for three centuries.
Every essence he consumed, every type he eliminated, every person he stripped and devoured, it starved the tree.
Starved the world. What you see now is what it looks like when essence moves freely again, every type, every manifestation, light and dark and everything between. "
I watch the colors flow and I think about the students at Phoenix Sanctuary who spent years being told their essence was wrong. The shadow-types and the death-touched and the hunger-born, all the manifestations that Dmitri's system marked for elimination. They're free now. The tree proves it.
"So that's it?" I ask. "We won. The system is broken. Essence flows freely. Dmitri is gone… that feels too easy. That can’t be it, right?"
Mother Nature's hand stills on the bark. "You’re right, Skye. That's not it."
The warmth in the room drops by a degree. Not much, but enough that I notice, enough that the sweat cooling on my skin turns cold.
"The entity," I say, because I've been carrying the question since the valley sanctuary and this might be the only time I get to ask. "The presence in the network that helped us, that showed Harlow what Dmitri used to be, that fed us strength when we were traveling. What was it?"
Mother Nature smiles, though there’s a sadness to it.
"Balance," she says. "That's the simplest word for it.
The force that exists between all things, the equilibrium that makes essence possible.
It should have been everywhere, all the time, woven through every living thing.
But the moment Dmitri became what he became, the moment he began consuming and hoarding and disrupting the flow of essence, balance withdrew.
It couldn't exist in a world that tilted that far toward darkness. "
Some part of me wonders why she didn’t explain all this before but there was so much information to consume over the last several weeks, I’m not sure I would have been able to handle it. "But it came back."
"It's coming back. Slowly. You can feel it if you reach for it, the way the network hums differently now, the way the bonds between you and your mates vibrate at a frequency that didn't exist before the battle. Balance is returning to the world because you removed the thing that drove it away."
She steps away from the tree and faces me, and the warmth returns but it carries something heavier underneath, a gravity that makes my chest tight.
"However, the darkness has not faded, Skye."
"I know. I can feel it. We all can."
"It is inside you now. Inside all six of you.
Three centuries of accumulated corruption, absorbed into your essences, woven through your bonds.
It will be part of you for the rest of your lives.
It will feed into your thoughts and your actions and your everyday choices.
It will press against your balance and test your control and whisper to you in quiet moments. "
"And eventually?"
"Eventually it will consume you."
The words land in my chest like a stone dropping into still water.
I knew, somewhere beneath the exhaustion and the relief, that the absorption couldn't be free.
That taking Dmitri's darkness into ourselves would carry a price beyond what we could calculate in the moment.
But hearing it spoken aloud by the force that set all of this in motion makes it real in a way that feeling the dark threads in my aura never did.
"When that happens," Mother Nature continues, her voice softening, "the darkness will finally ebb away.
Your essences will process it over the course of your lives, breaking it down, transforming it, and balancing it against the light you carry.
When you die, you will release a balance of your own essence and the darkness you absorbed, and it will disperse into the world without disrupting what's been restored.
The tree will hold. The flow will continue.
The freedom you gave to every Magila who comes after you will remain. "
"So we just die and it goes away?"
"No. You live with it. You carry it. You balance it every day through the choices you make and the bonds you maintain and the love you hold for each other.
The darkness ebbs and flows through you, and your essence counters it.
That is the cost, Skye. Not a single payment but a lifetime of carrying something that will never stop pressing against you. "
"And what happens if it consumes us? If we lose control of it?"
"Then we are right back where we started. The darkness concentrates, the balance tips, and someone else has to do what you did. Or no one does, and the world falls back into the system Dmitri built."
I stare at the tree and its impossible colors and I think about my mates exhausted in a courtyard, carrying dark threads through their auras, celebrating a victory that is also a sentence.
"Can't you just take it?" I ask, the desperation clear in my own voice but I don't care. "Absorb it yourself? You're Mother Nature. You're the source of all of this."
"I am not balance," she says. "Nor do I have the essence to counteract what Dmitri became.
He spent three centuries building something so vast and so corrupted that no single force could contain it.
It needed all six of you. Six different types of essence working in combination, each one processing a different aspect of the darkness.
Fire to burn it. Hunger to transform it.
Death to filter it. Balance to stabilize it.
Contracts to contain it. And connection to hold all of it together.
" She touches my arm where the six symbols glow faintly beneath my skin.
"You were built for this. All six of you.
From the moment your essences manifested, you were the answer to a question the world has been asking for three hundred years. "
"That's a hell of a thing to tell someone after the fact."
"Would you have done it differently if I'd told you before?"
I think about Jade's hunger and Stellan's fire and Harlow's cold hands and Rumi's steady balance and Ambrose's contracts and the way all of them reached for each other in the dark without hesitation.
"No," I say. "I wouldn't have."
"I know." She presses her hand against my chest, over my heart, and the warmth that flows through me is so profound that my eyes burn.
"You and your mates have given a gift to every Magila who will ever live.
Every child who manifests an essence that doesn't fit, every person who would have been consumed or suppressed or eliminated under the old system, they exist freely because of what you chose to carry.
The darkness inside you is the price of their freedom.
It is a cost greater than anyone has ever absorbed, and you will carry it for the rest of your lives, and I am so sorry that it fell to you. "
"But you're not sorry enough to find another way."
"There is no other way. There never was."
I stand in the room full of books with the tree blazing beside me and I let myself feel the weight of it.
The darkness in my bonds, the cold threads that hum with Dmitri's absorbed power, the knowledge that every day for the rest of my life will be a negotiation between the light I carry and the darkness I chose to take in.
My mates will feel it too. Every one of them, every day, balancing the cost of a freedom they bought for people they'll never meet.
"How long do we have?" I ask.
"A lifetime," Mother Nature says. "Your lifetime. However long that turns out to be."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have."
The room begins to fade and the tree's light dims as my consciousness returns to the courtyard and the body lying limp in Jade's lap with pink light blazing behind my eyelids.
"Skye," Mother Nature says as the room dissolves around me. "The darkness is a burden. But you don't carry it alone. Remember that."
I open my eyes to five faces looking down at me, Jade running his fingers through my hair. "Hey," he murmurs, the relief in his voice so thick it cracks. "Welcome back."
I sit up slowly, Rumi steadying me with a hand on my back.
The courtyard is quieter now. The celebration has dimmed to clusters of students talking softly, the afternoon light stretching long across the flagstones.
It takes me a moment to find my voice before I spill everything Mother Nature just told me.
I thought after Dmitri was gone, we’d be free and safe and able to live our lives as we please. In a way, we still can. It’ll just be… different. Heaving out a small breath, I tell my mates everything. Nobody speaks for a long time after I finish.
Each of them reach forward, placing a hand along my arms or the back of neck, Harlow moving to sit behind me in Jade’s arms so that he can press a kiss to the top of my head.
"So we carry it," Jade says finally. "Every day. And we don't let it win."
"Every day," I say.
Stellan holds up his hand, looking at the dark veins in his fire, then closes his fist and extinguishes the flame. "I guess we have a lot of work to do," he says.
He's not talking about the darkness, though. His gaze moves to the sanctuary behind us, my eyes following as it lingers on the students who need teachers and the system that needs rebuilding and the world that's waiting for someone to show it what comes next.
"Yeah," I say as I let Jade pull me to my feet. "We do."