Chapter 62
SAPHIRA
Sleep had eluded me since I had woken from the same dream. It had evolved again, ending with me standing knee-deep in the lake, staring at glittering water cupped in my palm that had transformed from clear to black as night.
I stared at the ceiling of Kaeleron’s room, listening to his soft breathing, using it to calm the chaos in my mind.
What Vaeleryn had said to me wove between Neve’s vision and what Kaeleron had said about the Sacred Milk and the origin story of the seelie and unseelie, creating a whirlwind that wouldn’t let me rest. I had run over it dozens of times, looking at it from every angle, assessing the dangers and the potential benefits. Weighing it all in my heart.
That heart that still felt as if it was missing something.
Fear kept me rooted to Kaeleron’s side, the thought of gambling with my life and him losing me making me want to push the words from my mind and banish them forever.
I lifted my hand above me, letting the darker part of me come to the fore, a feat that was easy while my mood was so dire, my twisting thoughts tearing at me like sharp vines to leave me bleeding inside.
The golden markings tracked down my fingers, and for a breath I thought they would stop as they reached my palms, but just as they had in the heat of that battle, they continued, until they formed a circle enclosing the word for wolf in the centre of my palm.
My gaze moved between the words one by one.
Cleave moon. Howling goddess. Tear shadows. Sever blade.
I heard those words in Kaeleron’s voice, spoken with the awe that had been in them when he had seen these markings appear on my hand.
I reached for that connection to the land—to the goddess, Lucia.
“What am I meant to do?” I whispered to her, feeling a little foolish but she had responded before, giving me these markings. “Is it possible to become more than I am? To become all I can be?”
I took that part of Neve’s vision to mean there was still more for me to become, and that she hadn’t been talking about becoming queen. I chose to believe she had meant I could transcend what I was now—a wolf and a seelie—to become something more.
“Am I meant to drink the water?”
Nothing happened.
No magical response from the goddess. No revelation that I would be making the right decision if I followed that dream and my heart.
I rolled towards Kaeleron, my gaze running over his profile, sorrow welling to fill my heart as I lingered, as I desperately tried to absorb his face and hear his voice, to ward off the chill that settled in my bones as I thought about what I was going to do.
A fool’s errand, he had called it.
But he didn’t know what would happen if a seelie chose to drink the Sacred Milk.
Because there was no actual evidence that said that the fae who were born of one heart couldn’t become whole through accepting the water that had nourished the other half of them.
I needed to see the lake. I needed to just see it with my own eyes.
Maybe Lucia would show me what to do once I followed her path and arrived there.
But if I told Kaeleron I wanted to see it, he would stop me.
I could understand that. If our positions had been reversed, I would have done the same.
I would have done anything to keep him safe.
I would be back before he woke and he could be angry with me then.
I risked placing a kiss on his lips before I shuffled from the bed and dressed silently, slipping into a pair of leathers and a blouse, and grabbing my boots. Padding barefoot across the floor, I glanced back at him as I neared the door.
“I love you,” I whispered. “Whatever happens. I love you.”
I prayed to the goddess and my ancestors as I slipped from the room, pleading with them to listen to me and to be my guide and to protect me. To show me if this was the right thing to do.
I found my answer standing in the middle of the courtyard, gazing at the beautiful aurora-streaked sky.
Neve lowered her amber gaze to me, a breeze toying with her fall of golden hair. “It is time.”
She had been waiting for me. She had known I would be here and must have seen it in a vision. That reinforced the feeling that I was doing the right thing. That this was the path the goddess had chosen for me and had been hinting at through my markings and my dreams.
“It’s time,” I said and pulled my boots on.
She came to me as I straightened and took hold of my hands, twisting them so they faced palm upwards, and tracked the lines where my markings had been just moments ago but were now gone.
Including circling the centre of my palm.
Only Kaeleron and Arianell knew my markings had changed.
Had her sister told her, or had she seen it in a vision?
“Believe in the threads of fate and follow them wherever they may lead you, Saphira Harper of the wolves. They will bring you to your destiny.”
Her eyes met mine before she stepped back and I staggered back several steps as she shifted into a great golden dragon, filling the courtyard.
I clung to those words, to belief, and to hope as I went to her and she curled a paw around me.
The threads of fate had brought me here, and I had followed them, but that burning feeling inside me said I hadn’t yet reached my destiny.
I hadn’t become all I could be.
Neve kicked off, tucking me against her chest as she beat her enormous wings and lifted into the sky.
Her long body undulated with each beat of her wings that carried us over the mountains and then the sea, and I fought to calm my nerves as I stared into the darkness, forcing myself to look ahead rather than behind at everything I was risking.
All I could see was glittering black water stretching to the horizon.
And then a fierce orange glow that rapidly became a fiery peak.
The Forge.
Neve swooped, banking right as we passed over what had to be Dragon’s Claw, the western island in the Stygian Isles, and I looked north, towards Broken Ridge, where Lucia had sat and made the decision to take a piece of her heart and create the fae so she wouldn’t be alone anymore.
My stomach rebelled as Neve spiralled downwards and my insides felt as if they had lurched upwards as she spread her wings wide, slowing her descent as her rear legs came down. She landed hard in the heart of an onyx mountain range south of the volcano of the Forge.
Next to a broad lake.
The shore glistened beneath my boots as she set me down and I stepped towards the pale blue water that glittered strangely, reminding me of the sands in the Wastes.
Neve shifted back, her burgundy dress appearing on her body before she stepped up beside me, her amber eyes on the water.
The Sacred Milk.
Glow bugs danced across the surface, scattering whenever the breeze blew before grouping up again.
“The water is really a pool of magic, but it shifts and changes, and everyone who dares to take a sip experiences something different. Many unseelie come here, seeking visions of the goddess, or hoping she will grant their wish.” Her gaze slid to me.
“I believe that means the Sacred Milk can give someone what they need, if they want it badly enough.”
I scoffed. “Did all the seelie who died from being forced to drink it want death?”
She gave a small shrug. “Perhaps the unseelie who forced them to drink wanted them dead. Both would have touched the water.”
“I suppose that might be true.” I frowned as I thought about it.
If unseelie had brought seelie here as punishment, to force them to drink water they knew was fatal to them, they most likely wanted them to die and must have touched the water to make them drink it. Even if they had dunked them in the lake, they would have been in contact with the water.
Contact with the magical properties of the Sacred Milk might be enough for an unseelie to bring about the death of a seelie who had taken a sip.
“Focus on what you desire.” Neve placed a hand on my shoulder. “You have remained in the light. Now it is time. Now you must drink the water to drift in the dark.”
“To embrace all that I am, have been and ever will be,” I whispered as I stared at that shimmering water that beckoned me.
That called to me.
I pulled off my boots, needing to feel that comforting touch of nature as I did this, as I followed the threads of fate and reached out to take hold of my destiny.
Neve picked up my boots, folding them over her arm, and waved me on. “Off you go then.”
I wished I felt as calm about this as she did, but then I supposed she wasn’t the one about to risk her life and drink water that was potentially fatal to her.
Swallowing my nerves, I strode towards the water, the crystalline pebbles that formed the shore warming beneath the soles of my feet with each step I took, and I didn’t stop when I met the water.
I waded into it, until it was up to my knees as it had been in my dream.
I stopped there and stared at the Forge beyond the mountains, in the heart of the archipelago.
Feeling that steady beat in it.
“Great Mother,” I whispered to that fiery heart, reaching through the rocks beneath my feet to strengthen that connection I felt to this land.
To this side of the land. Not to the seelie side.
This connection had been born in unseelie lands, in the dark heart of the Shadow Court.
Shadow that ran through my veins, through my magic.
“Guide me… show me this is the path I must take to become all I ever could be. To become whole at last. No longer divided by my blood. No longer torn between light and shadow. Your children were born of one heart. Let my fractured heart become whole, the two parts reunited as one. Let me become a true child of your land.”
I lowered my hands, skimming them through the water, watching bursts of iridescent light following in their wakes. Magic. I could feel it. But it was more than magic. It was life.
Everything I felt when I was connected to Lucia condensed into something tangible.