Chapter 45
The spell ricocheted, a piercing crack ripping through the library as light splintered and rebounded. Elara flinched, hands flying up—but the Hunter was there, arms locking around her as he hauled her down, shielding her with his body against the stone floor.
It should have hurt. It didn’t.
All she felt was the aftershock—energy still shuddering through the room, heat and light flashing like lightning before burning out.
When the last hum of ether faded, the room fell still.
His breath brushed her cheek before he pulled back, muscles taut.
She didn’t flinch. Didn’t tense beneath him.
It was almost second nature now, the proximity.
She swallowed, forcing her thoughts away from it.
From how little she minded his nearness.
From how his presence had become something she could almost rely on.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” he muttered, his eyes darting around the room as though searching for what had gone wrong.
“No.” Elara stood, pacing. “The anchor didn’t hold. The link between the subcurrents and the main current was too unstable.”
He sighed. “We accounted for that. I triple-checked the core parameters before we started. There shouldn’t have been any volatility in the primary flow.”
She shook her head. “The framework works, but the fluctuations are too volatile. The spell overreacted. The subcurrents move faster than we can compensate.”
He rubbed his temples. “We calibrated the tether for rapid shifts. It should have handled that instability. If anything, the issue should have shown up in the feedback loop, not the main stream.”
She stopped pacing and faced him, arms crossed. “But that’s the thing—the feedback loop wasn’t the problem. The tether held, but the connection wasn’t flexible enough to handle the shift. The core pattern changed too fast for the translation to adapt.”
The Hunter pressed his lips into a thin line. “So, we’re dealing with a translation issue?”
Elara sank into the chair at the desk. “I think so. We might have to rewrite the entire response structure. If the mechanism can’t adapt quickly enough, it will just keep rebounding like this, which means recalculating how much ether the spell can pull before it overloads.”
“Which will take time,” he muttered, his eyes drifting over the scattered notes on the table.
Time they didn’t have. Only two more days until Osin expected her back in the Pit.
They hadn’t been talking about it—both of them pointedly ignoring the looming deadline—but Elara felt every second slipping away, ticking at the back of her mind like a countdown.
If they didn’t figure this out, none of it would work.
No memories, no Thane, no way to send the Sidhe home.
Not that the Hunter knew about that last part.
“I need to head out for something.”
Elara’s head snapped up, her eyes narrowing. He never left this early...
“All right,” she said, suspicion threading her voice as she watched him go. Wherever he was headed, she’d find out later.
For now, with him gone, she could sneak in more practice.
As soon as he was out the door, she moved to the back of the library.
The window seat was her favorite spot—his too, judging by the state of the cushions—and she reached for his journal, flipping it open to the familiar pages where she had been slowly piecing together phrases.
It wasn’t enough to simply read the language; she had to speak it, to feel it on her tongue if she wanted to get anywhere close to having a real conversation with Reynnar.
Her fingers skimmed over the words, searching for phrases and constructing sentences in her mind. “Tell me about the Aelfhenge,” she whispered in broken Tírrísh, her tongue stumbling slightly over the foreign syllables. “What is the Sidhe’s connection to it? How were you taken from your home?”
Her heart tightened at the thought of him—ripped from everything familiar, everything he loved.
This wasn’t idle curiosity or a language exercise.
It was his story. His suffering. And every word she whispered felt like stepping into a wound that might never truly heal—a part of him she wasn’t sure she had the right to touch.
She sighed and leaned back against the window, cold glass pressing into her spine as she whispered the words again and again, coaxing them into something that felt natural.
The language was still clumsy on her tongue.
She adjusted her phrasing, muttered a correction, frowned when it still sounded wrong—then tried again.
And again.
Eyes closing, she focused—
A sound—quiet, but unmistakable. The creak of the library door. Footsteps.
Her stomach dropped. She snapped her eyes open and shoved the journal back into place, fingers clumsy in her haste, nearly sending another book tumbling from the shelf. The steps drew closer, joined by the low murmur of a voice. Her pulse spiked.
Shit.
Elara jumped to her feet, wiping her damp palms on her trousers as she grabbed the nearest book from the shelf. She barely registered the title as she hurried toward the front, forcing herself to breathe.
Act natural. You weren’t doing anything wrong.
Nothing at all.
Then she rounded the corner—and stopped short, breath catching.
Sybil.
The girl quirked a brow at Elara just as the Hunter stepped in behind her, his expression tightening into something long-suffering, as if he were reevaluating every decision that had led him here.
“Well, look who it is,” Sybil drawled, eyes narrowing as she tilted her head, a smirk tugging at her lips. “She looks like she’s ready to bolt any second. Or is that just your usual effect on people?” Her gaze flicked up to the Hunter, teasing.
He didn’t rise to the bait. “Sybil’s here to help us with the translation issue. I thought her unconventional approaches might help us look at it from a different angle.”
Elara nodded, though her focus drifted back to Sybil, who crossed her arms. “Not without what we discussed first, cousin.”
The corners of the Hunter's mouth thinned. “Of course.”
Without another word, he slipped into the stacks, his footsteps barely a whisper in the quiet of the library.
Elara shifted on her feet, curiosity prickling at her as she watched him return moments later, a small leather-bound book in hand.
It looked ancient, its edges worn and cracked, as if it had survived countless hands.
Sybil’s eyes lit up as she took the book from him. “Perfect,” she said, flipping through the brittle pages, her eyes scanning quickly before she snapped it shut with a thud.
Elara’s fingers twitched. She was desperate to know what was in that book, but the Hunter and Sybil were already moving toward the front of the library. She hesitated, then followed, her thoughts buzzing.
At the desk, the Hunter warmed the cold pot of tea with a flick of his hand and began explaining their problem to Sybil. Elara barely listened, watching his hands instead as he poured a cup, added honey, a splash of milk, and stirred.
Without missing a beat, he handed the tea to her, eyes still on Sybil.
Elara stared down at the cup, watching soft spirals of steam curl up toward her face. Then she took a sip.
Perfect—the balance of tea and honey, just enough milk.
He’d memorized how she liked it. He’d been watching, paying attention—even to something this small.
Elara’s eyes flicked up to him, her heart stumbling—but he didn’t look back. His attention stayed on Sybil, on the spell, as if he hadn’t noticed her breath hitch or the way that small kindness had shaken her.
Since learning to work the threads, Elara had gained control over the Draoth Cara. She could mute the bond, choose when to feel him, when to pull away—and he always noticed. Always knew when she shut him out.
Except now.
Now it felt reversed. He must have muted her too, his walls firmly in place. Her fingers brushed the bloodstone at her throat—his oath—but she felt nothing from him at all.
“This is dangerous,” Sybil said, her eyes never leaving the map in front of them. “Even if you manage to pull this off, there’s no guarantee Osin won’t sense it the moment you start moving within the channels.”
Elara’s stomach dropped. Of all the things she had considered—of all the risks—she hadn’t factored Osin in.
How had she missed that?
“We’ll deal with that when the time comes,” the Hunter said, his tone calm—almost dismissive. But the way he avoided their eyes made Elara pause. He had a plan. Or at least a piece of one he wasn’t ready to share.
Sybil seemed to catch it too. Her eyes narrowed, teeth worrying her lower lip before she looked away. A moment later, she reached for a scrap of parchment and began sketching, saying nothing as her focus returned to the equations spread across the desk.
“If you're serious about this,” she murmured, barely glancing up, “you’ll need a filter. Something to narrow the focus and zero in on the most consistent fluctuations. Otherwise, it’s going to keep latching onto those surges and destabilize.”
The Hunter crossed his arms, watching her work. “A filter… but it can’t be static. The Void’s core currents are fluid. If we make it too rigid, it’ll fail when the next shift happens.”
Sybil paused, tapping the quill against the parchment. “No, not rigid. Dynamic. A spell that adapts as the Void shifts. Something that can modify itself based on the patterns it recognizes.”
“That’s what we were trying to do already,” Elara said, finally finding her voice. “But we keep hitting the same wall. It adapts, but not fast enough.”
Sybil sat back in her chair. “It’s because you're asking too much of a single spell. You’re trying to make it interpret the core shifts and adapt to them all at once. That’s too much. You need to separate the functions—one spell to identify the shifts, another to react. You’re overloading it.”
Elara's eyes widened. “If we split the tasks, we reduce the strain on the tether. The adaptation becomes more efficient.”
“We need to test the theory again,” the Hunter said, holding Sybil’s gaze. “But this time, with two separate components. If we can get them to work in tandem without overloading—”
“Then you might finally see some results,” Sybil cut in, her tone dry but not unkind, a flicker of approval in her eyes.
The Hunter exhaled slowly, frustration still lingering in his posture, but there was a flicker of something else—determination, maybe. He ran a hand through his hair, then nodded, the tension easing slightly from his shoulders as he moved to sit beside his cousin.
“All right,” he muttered. “Let’s see if this works.”
The shift in their dynamic was immediate. Where Elara and the Hunter usually worked in near silence—turning ideas over before daring to test them—Sybil was the opposite. Loud. Impulsive. She flung out theories and tried them before they were fully formed.
Every few minutes, she was off again—scribbling equations, muttering incantations, tossing spells into the air just to see what stuck.
It was jarring at first. Elara’s head ached from the noise. But Sybil’s reckless pace did something unexpected: it broke the stagnation. They stopped circling the problem and started cutting through it.
Failures came faster—and so did answers. Each half-formed spell either sparked a new idea or showed them exactly what wouldn’t work.
Elara and the Hunter focused on refining the first spell—the identifier—while Sybil stress-tested the second: the reactor.
The identifier was precise, tracing the core currents of the Void, pinpointing the stable fluctuations.
Elara could almost feel the ether responding to her adjustments, the spell becoming more fluid, more in tune with the Void’s unpredictable nature.
Meanwhile, Sybil's reactor spell was wild, adaptive—just like her. It didn’t wait, it shifted, responding instantly to the fluctuations the identifier picked up, adjusting to the flow.
The problem had never been their theory—it was how much they had demanded from a single spell. Trying to force one incantation to do everything: interpret, adapt, react. It had been doomed from the start. But now it felt… right. Like they were finally moving forward.
Sybil leaned back and stretched as the light in the library softened, the last of the sun slipping beneath the horizon. Elara barely noticed the hour, still riding the adrenaline of their progress. They’d made real strides—more than she’d expected.
Still, they weren’t finished. A few more days to refine everything. Maybe the Hunter could convince Osin to allow it.
Just a little longer.
Elara’s thoughts trailed off as Sybil set down the book the Hunter had given her earlier. She glanced up to find Sybil no longer interested in it, now flipping absently through the notes spread across the desk.
Her brow furrowed as she read the title: Whispers of the Weft.
A literary novel, of all things. It wasn’t what she had expected. Written by Lachlan Alden, the back cover described it as “a captivating tale of a tailor who stitches dreams into reality, weaving stories that interlace both the fabric of her creations and the destinies of those who wear them.”
Elara blinked, utterly baffled. Of all the things the Hunter could have handed her...
“Well, I’d best be off,” Sybil said, dragging herself up from the chair.
Her eyes slid over to Elara, a smirk playing at her lips.
“If you actually manage to pull this off…” She shook her head, a quiet scoff escaping.
“I’ve warned you about him, haven’t I?” She jerked her chin toward the Hunter.
“Always ends with something burning or someone bleeding.”
The Hunter rolled his eyes as he stood and stretched, his shirt riding up just enough to reveal a sliver of muscle, the faint line of a scar, and a trail of hair disappearing beneath his waistband.
Heat flared in Elara’s cheeks as her gaze lingered a beat too long. She snapped it upward—straight into his knowing look, one brow arched, amusement flickering in his eyes.
Her heart stuttered, cheeks burning as she tore her gaze away, cursing herself for getting caught.
Elara didn’t need to look to know Sybil had noticed. She felt it—the prickle along her spine. When she finally glanced over, Sybil’s smile was pure mischief, but her eyes held something sharper, more calculating, that made Elara’s stomach tighten.
She leaned in, voice low. “You’re wasting your time with all this. There’s a faster way. A cleaner way.”
Elara’s pulse thundered in her ears. She didn’t dare move as Sybil’s breath ghosted over her ear. “What the Void consumes, only death can retrieve.”
Her eyes widened, but the seer was already pulling away. “Open a rift for me, won’t you, Iv?”
It wasn’t until the door clicked shut behind them that Elara realized she’d stopped breathing.