22. Lucina #2
“Is irrelevant.” Her tone is sharp and violent, slicing through the room. “You shouldn’t have come here, Lune Sylra. You need to leave.”
“I’m not ready to leave,” I fire back. “I don’t have what I came here for.”
“You came here for answers, did you not?” Sable moves forward, iridescent robes rippling in her wake. “Ask me something else you seek. If I can answer, I will, but then you must leave.”
“Is my mother a traitor?” I blurt, as if the question was loaded on my tongue before Sable had even prompted it.
“No. Not my Esme.”
Goosebumps break out over my skin. “What happened to her?”
The shimmer in Sable’s skin blanches, her lips flattening out, and her brown eyes dimming.
“Is she dead?” My voice comes out strained.
Sable nods, and that tiny part of me, the smallest little glimmer of fool’s hope…shatters.
“So, she’s here?” I breathe, whipping around to study the shadow-soaked walls, my heart heavy as I look for her. “Don’t all souls go—”
When I turn back, Sable has gone rigid. “Her soul doesn’t exist anymore, Lucina, not as it was.
Esme chose a death that would destroy her completely.
It ripped apart the fabric of her being until she was unrecognizable—something else entirely.
In doing so, she forfeited her place in the afterlife.
She’s never stepped foot in the Twilight Passage.
” Her voice gets quiet then, and tears prick the backs of my eyes. “I begged her not to do it.”
A lump forms in my throat. It feels a lot like grief. Grief for someone I don’t remember knowing, but there was a time when I did. There was a time, however fleeting, when my mother was all that I knew.
“What do you mean she became something else entirely?” I ask, and Sable’s eyes sharpen.
“She became what you needed. Protection. The iron-clad kind.” My brows knit.
“Esme knew it would cost her. She knew she’d never visit you in dreams. She’d never get the chance to tell you herself everything she had planned for you, but…
even when a soul is ripped apart, the essence remains.
” Sable smiles, though it’s grief-ridden; sad and broken, yet prideful.
“The only thing she couldn’t sacrifice was watching you grow up. ”
My face pales as I begin rummaging through everything; my childhood, the people around me, all the places I went… She was there? How could she have been there?
“I don’t understand,” I stutter, “she…”
Had she been remade into a star? Is that why I’m so fond of the night sky? Maybe she’d been remade into something I couldn’t see…
She became what you needed. Protection.
She was remade into something that would protect me… and she was there all along. She watched me grow up… but not in the way that Merrill did or Catherine. Not in the way that Jude was there or Ivy, she’d become something else entirely. Something unsuspecting and—
Where had I spent most of my time? I loved that little creek by the cottage, but it had no means to protect me. I used to stay out in the woods until the sun set, but there was nothing out there, just trees and the—
Oh, gods.
The way it called to me, the way I’d run through the forest after it.
The way it would lure me right to the edge, a smile on my face and a song in my heart.
It’s a fight to draw my next breath and an even greater struggle to form the words. “She’s the Barrier, isn’t she?”
Sable’s reply hits like a bullet to the heart. “Yes.”
My head spins, everything slipping out from underneath me as I stare back at her. Unblinking.
I was never drawn to what lay beyond the Barrier; that’s not why I chased it.
It called me because it knew me, and deep, deep down, I knew it too.
I knew the way it would make my little legs pump faster, dodging the trunks of trees like they would snatch me up before I could make it there. To the Barrier. To her.
Back when I thought I had no one.
Back when I used to wave to the Barrier as if it were a living, breathing—
I sob into the hand I clasp over my mouth. I had known her; I’d known her all my life.
“Everything that’s left of her went into that ward,” Sable tells me. “It kept you safe from the evil in the south—oh, Lune Sylra, don’t cry.”
I hadn’t even seen her move, but when I blink away my tears, Sable is right in front of me. Up close, she’s…beautiful. Regal. The type of beauty that demands an audience, weathered and worn but stunningly aged.
“You are all that matters,” she whispers.
“I became your Velkan because of a vow I made to your mother; to follow you where she couldn’t.
To protect you when you leave the bounds of her protection.
” A phantom finger wipes a fallen tear off my cheek.
“You weren’t meant to stay in that place forever, Lune Sylra, but she will.
And she’ll always be there waiting for you. ”
It was Draycott’s greatest mystery, who put up the Barrier, and what it was protecting us from.
It was my mother, and she was protecting me.
“An evil in the south?” I croak out. “Do you mean Rogues? Is that what she’s protecting Draycott from?”
Sable nods. “They would have obliterated the whole city. They would have ransacked every house, dug up every unmarked grave, and murdered anyone who tried to stop them. They’d have searched the entire continent for—”
“You,” a deep voice rumbles behind me.
The voice I hear in nightmares.
“GO!” Sable shouts at me, and I stumble, the click, click, click of his footsteps booming from every direction, beating through my skull. “Now!” she bellows, erupting into a mass of starlight.
I reach deep within me, extending a phantom hand to my physical body—
Sable roars when darkness snakes across my chest, and I’m thrown from the circle of Sol Marks.