Chapter 55
Ash
Not going to lie. When we first entered the Academy I didn’t have a plan. Nothing aside from show up and do the thing. Which is unlike me.
I admit, it’s a loose plan.
With some pocket change.
But a war strategy? Not a single one.
And the worst part? There’s a piece of me that wants nothing more than to give my cousins a tour of the Academy.
Show them the dormitories with their impossible staircases.
The library that rearranges itself based on your mood.
The courtyard where I first saw Kieran standing in a pool of his own shadows looking like he’d been personally offended by the sunrise.
We would have had fun going to school here.
“I’m not sure I much like this school.” Pepper dodges a window that flies past her head. Irritated, she turns around and zaps it with her chaos magic. The glass doesn’t shatter, it just stops existing.
“Aww, where is your sense of adventure?” Sabina hops on a wardrobe and surfs it down the corridor before doing a backflip off the end. She lands in a crouch, arrow already nocked, grinning and buzzing from the adrenaline.
“Show off.” Pepper zaps another flying object. A candlestick this time. The Academy is apparently emptying its furnishings at us like a drunk throwing bottles at a wall. “You two go ahead. We’ve got your six.”
I don’t remind them that the Academy is alive and some of those objects are sentient.
I don’t want to spoil the fun.
I stop down the corridor and turn. Pepper and Sabina stand there making a competition over who takes out the most inanimate objects. Pepper’s chaos magic crackles purple. Sabina’s arrows pin a flying chair to the wall.
“Hey.” I keep my voice low. “I appreciate you.”
Pepper’s expression softens for exactly one second before a roar thunders through the building hard enough to rattle dust from the ceiling.
Vanessa. Doing her job. Whatever it is she just hit out there, I hope it deserved it. Knowing Vanessa it could just as easily been a friend and not a foe.
I turn to Orion. “Let’s go.”
“My lady.” Orion smiles in that cheeky way of his. The one that makes him look like he’s about to suggest something reckless and thoroughly enjoy the consequences.
“Guardian first.” I usher him forward, mostly because he’s big and burly and honestly if I stand in his shadow, things will hit him first.
His laugh is a calm bellow that fills the corridor. He knows exactly what I’m thinking. Either through the bond or because he reads me the way a hunter reads. It’s nice. Having someone know you so well that they don’t need you to explain yourself.
And not in the manipulative way.
Maybe these aren’t thoughts to have in the middle of a crisis. But they come anyway. Because I’ve never had partners like Orion. Or Kieran. Or Finn. Ones who learn me. Understand me. Not because they want to use what they find or keep me under control.
Because they care.
It’s two sides of the same damn coin. One face is toxic manipulation. The other is love. And I spent twenty-five years staring at the wrong side, thinking that was all there was.
“You ready?” Orion looks over at me, that rogue smirk still in place.
“Nope.” I crack my neck as we start walking.
The farther we get from Pepper and Sabina, the quieter it gets. Gradually, like someone is turning down a dial. The crash and bang of flying furniture fades. Then our footsteps lose their echo. Then the corridor itself swallows sound the way deep water swallows.
The corridor narrows. The green-gold sconces burn lower. Nothing is dying, it’s just going into a deep slumber.
I rub my arms to warm them. Even my blooms surface, vines curling down my forearms, thorns pricking through skin. It’s a cute attempt to warm me up but it’s not working at all.
“You feel that?” Orion’s hand moves to his sternum, rubbing his chest.
“Yeah.”
“Something’s pulling.” The fire in his hair stutters and comes back wrong, too bright then too dim, in a rhythm that has nothing to do with breathing. “Forward.”
Helpful.
The walls change. Older stone and rougher. Maybe made by hand, long before man knew of fire. Whatever this is, it was here first, and it has the indifference of something that’s outlasted every opinion anyone ever had about it.
The floor feels cold under my bare feet. It reminds me of that time I thought I was stronger than the cold and ran to the mailbox in bare feet. In February. In Pennsylvania. It was unforgiving. Just like this.
We round a bend.
And there he is.
Blue hair. Lazy posture. Leaning against the wall next to a stone door carved with symbols I don’t recognize. But my blood does, because the thorns under my skin flare the second they hit my line of sight.
He’s got one knee bent, boot flat against the wall behind him, arms crossed, with the settled stillness of a man who arrived early, finished waiting approximately three centuries ago, and has since moved on to a state of being that doesn’t require waiting at all.
“Veil,” I whisper.
“Aengus. Og. Dagda’s son.” Orion chuckles. “Don’t tell me. That’s the door we need to walk through.”
“Orion.” Aengus grins and it terrifies me. It’s more a pleased grin and then he caught himself ginning and tried to stop it. “Still carrying my father’s luggage, I see.”
“It’s in my chest.”
“Semantics.” He pushes off the wall. Stretches like a cat. Blue hair falls across his face and he doesn’t bother pushing it back. “You know what that thing does, right? The Cauldron?”
“Heals. Restores. Brings things back.” Orion rattles it off like a field manual entry.
“Sure. That’s the brochure version.” Aengus tilts his head.
He’s studying him. Looking for, something only Veil has the answer to.
“It also made every god in the Sidhe forget what they were. Poured one sip down their throats and they went to sleep believing they were mortal. Believing they were nothing.” He taps his own temple.
“The Cauldron doesn’t just give life, flame boy.
It decides what kind of life you get to have. ”
Orion’s hand returns to his sternum. The humor drains from his face alongside all the blood.
“And you’re about to carry it back to the place where it did that.” Aengus looks at the door. “Through there. Ground zero. Where the forgetting happened.”
“What happens when he walks through?” I ask, because someone has to and Orion is processing. Slowly.
“Honestly?” Aengus shrugs. Which is so like him.
On my tour of this very academy he spoke of how magnificent it is alongside how it can easily kill you.
“No idea. Hasn’t been done before. The Cauldron hasn’t been back to the mounds since the day it put the gods to sleep.
Could be fine. Could be very much not fine. ”
“Inspiring.”
“I’m a wanderer, not a motivational speaker.” He turns those ancient eyes on me. The grin fades. I get the impression I’m really seeing Veil right now. In this very moment. The true him. “But that’s not really the question, is it?”
He steps closer.
“You’re about to walk into the place where identity goes to die. Where gods forgot their own names. Where the most powerful beings in existence looked in the mirror and saw strangers.” His voice drops. “So I need to ask you something, Ashlynne Moonshadow. And I need a real answer.”
The use of my full name rattles my chest. He’s putting power into using my name. As though he’s summoning me.
“What are you going to remember?”
What am I going to remember?
When the place that unmade gods reaches for my identity the way everyone has always reached for it—Graves rewriting me into a weapon, Amarantha claiming me as property, the military filing my humanity under acceptable losses.
Not power. That’s the first thing they take.
Not destiny. That’s just another word for someone else’s plan. Not even my name. That was given.
Orion’s laugh. Kieran’s shadows curling around my ankles when he thinks I’m not paying attention. Finnian’s hands on my face, amber eyes choosing every version of me. Whispen’s gold glow in the dark when everything else goes out.
My girls? Pepper burning down a building because someone looked at Sabina wrong. Or Vanessa threatening to eat someone if they look at me wrong.
It doesn’t live in me. It lives between us.
“Everything that matters,” I say. “Every single person who made me want to stay.”
Aengus looks at me for a long time. Long enough that the thorns under my skin stop flaring and start settling. Long enough that the cold in the corridor eases, just slightly, like the building itself exhaled.
“Finally,” he smiles. Then he just steps aside.
The door doesn’t open. Not yet.
Orion makes a desperate sound I’ve never heard from him. I turn too fast and the world swims. “Orion?” He looks okay. Until he slams his fist against his chest, causing him to cough. Then he does it again. And again.
The strands of his ginger hair burst into white flames before puttering back out.
“I’m fine.” He’s not fine. His voice comes through gritted teeth. Sweat runs down his temples. The fire in his hair flares and dies in that wrong rhythm, going from red to white. “It’s not, it’s not pain. It’s—”
“It’s remembering where it came from,” Aengus says quietly, his usual irreverence gone entirely. What’s left is a god watching something happen that he’s been waiting millennia to see. “The real question is whether it wakes up what’s in there, too.”
Orion straightens. He sets his jaw but it costs him. Then he rolls his tongue across his teeth and looks back at me with that roguish smile. But it’s a performance. He is clearly not okay.
He looks at the door.
He looks at me.
“Ladies first is off the table, yeah?”
“Guardian first,” I tell him. “Same as always.”
His mouth twitches. The smirk that says I know exactly what you’re doing and I love you for it.
Aengus puts his hand on the door. The symbols carved into the stone light up in sequence, gold chasing gold, until the entire frame burns with the same light pouring from Orion’s chest.
If I didn’t know any better I’d say Orion was a key.
I can’t see beyond the door. There’s nothing. Just a shimmer that hints that something exists there but the doorway will never reveal its secrets.
Orion walks through.