Chapter 57
Ash
Into the dreaming.
That’s what this feels like. Like walking into a dream. Or waking inside of one, which is exactly what I’ve been doing this entire time.
Walking through the doorway where I think I’m following Orion, I end up…not with Orion. And not at the Sidhe mounds.
I end up in a space between. Between here and there.
Darkness wraps around me, but that’s just fine because it truly doesn’t bother me.
What bothers me is Aengus standing a short distance away staring off into the complete nothingness of this place.
“I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.” A part of me isn’t surprised. Not at all. Another part, small as it may be—well, it’s really annoyed at the direction this just went.
His shoulders shake with laughter and he looks over at me, unmoving.
I walk toward him, my feet swishing through the strangeness of the space. Stretches of darkness in varying shades of grey creep toward an endless horizon.
“Where is this?”
“The in-between.” He doesn’t move. Though he is wearing that weird cape, the one where galaxies twinkle back at me.
“Why am I not with Orion?” I pause beside him, trying to see what he sees. But it’s just endless.
“Because you are needed here, sweet Ashlynne.” He flips his cape backwards, hands on his hips. “Tell me, how was the Trial of Survival?”
“That’s what this is about?” I huff.
“Did you think it would just end because you—what?” He prods and I honestly don’t much like the way it feels. Having him poke at me like this.
He also isn’t wrong. “I forgot about it.”
He hums, but it’s one of those condescending hums. “That, my dear, was in fact the absolute point of it.”
“To forget?”
“Oh yes.” He frowns down at me. “How else would the trial understand who you are?”
“Veil.”
“Aengus,” he corrects gently. “Now, are you ready for the real show?”
“What—” The word is barely out of my mouth before life rushes at me.
And it is just that. My life.
All around me on screens of every single size.
“Did I die?” I spin in a circle, watching myself from every age. Just…existing. “Is this my life review?”
“No, and well, no.”
“Aengus.” I shake my head as I watch myself lose my virginity. “Aengus,” I hiss.
“Terrible lover, that one.” He shudders. “Missionary?”
“This is definitely feeling a lot invasive.” Is my face red? It’s definitely red.
“There are so many other positions.” He is still staring at the first time I had sex.
“That is private.”
“It shouldn’t be.” He points. “He isn’t even flexing his ass. Small flexes. Soft flexes. Gentle flexes. Teases the g-spot perfectly.”
“Aengus.” I swat at the image and watch as it ripples and fades.
“Fine, fine, fine,” he says. “Survival isn’t about surviving something coming at you.” He turns to face me, the images of my life spread out past him. “It’s to determine if you’ve already developed the skills to be the queen you are meant to become.”
“Wait.” I pinch the bridge of my nose because I feel like I’m about to suffocate. “Kestra said that.”
“Oh yes. Mostly.” He nods. “See all of this. Your life. The trials and the pain and the darkest nights.” He brings up a moment not too terribly removed from now.
“Oh, Ash.” I walk up to the image, watching myself curled up on the bathroom floor, just crying. “I remember this.” Tears burn my eyes as I kneel, because the image is close to the floor.
Wetness spreads through my pants from where I crouch.
“Ah yes.” Aengus kneels beside me. His blue hair flutters with an invisible wind.
Even now in the memory, thick magenta-purple magic swirls around the moment from long before I ever knew who I was. The me from the past thought she was human. Thought she was nothing more than a woman so broken inside no one could ever love her.
It isn’t true. But she thought so at the time.
“Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Is now really the time?” I grumble.
“Time is now. Now is time.” He spins in a circle. “Time slows, it moves, it breathes with the wind.” His arm does the worm as he mutters like Whispen.
Where the hell is Whispen?
“Aengus,” I call to him. “Where is Whispen?”
“Focus, Queen Ashlynne Moonshadow of the Wild Court. You must focus.” He grips my face in his hands and I swear he sees into my soul. “What do you feel?” He slowly backs away to spin again. “Talk it out.”
Ignoring the strange god, I focus on my past self.
“The only person who hasn’t forgiven me is—” Heart pounding, I turn to Aengus. “Me.”
“Ah.” He stops, pausing before me. “Tell me about—” he points at the moment I thought I was unlovable. “Her.”
I breathe slowly through my nose and out through a small hole in my lips. “Don’t make me do this.”
“Oh but you must, Queen Ash.” He sings my name. “Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.”
“I’d rather not.” I twist my hands.
“To become, you must become undone.”
I close my eyes, letting the tears fall. The very ones that haven’t stopped falling in far too fucking long.
“I—” Swallow. “Was seeing this Fae.” I glance at Aengus.
Then back to the memory. I want to reach in and comfort her.
But I can’t. I know I can’t. “I thought I could love him.” I swallow.
“When Graves first asked me about Velasca Academy I had forgotten.” I sit back on my heels and swipe at the tears.
“Truthfully untruthful.” The sound of his voice echoes all around me.
“I didn’t really remember him until now.”
“Protection.”
“Maybe.” I sigh. “I don’t even remember his name. But I remember the echo of him. Which is odd because I knew of the Fae. But I didn’t know much more.”
“Go on.”
I breathe a little easier as the wound opens up. Like I’m staring at the bleeding part of me. Bleeding out on a cold bathroom floor.
“He was a professor here. I haven’t seen him at all.” Odd thought.
“Maybe Velasca ate him.”
He would know. “He was more earth side. Working with my team.”
“A cover.”
I look at him to the left of me, smiling and pleased with himself. He reminds me of a Cheshire cat.
I hum and look back. “Things moved so quickly. And I fell hard and fast. Harder than him. And then he left me a note that he was returning to Faerie and that he never wanted to see me again.”
“And how did that make you feel?”
“Unlovable.” I can’t even look at him. “When I look back there was nothing in the relationship that fed me. Nothing that whispered this one is for you.”
The scene dissolves and the next is me sparring Kieran in the middle of the night.
“And this woman.” He points to me.
I watch myself lunge. Watch him counter. Watch the moment my eyes went somewhere I didn’t understand yet. My heart was already his and I didn’t even have the language for it.
I was in love then. I just didn’t know love could look like that.
I turn back to the me crying around a toilet.
“Our lowest points may not be our lowest.”
“Aengus.” I sigh.
“Forgive yourself.”
“For what?”
“Look at you.” He points. “Look what you did to yourself.” He flips to another image. “And here.”
It’s me crying in the woods. Silently as Davis has my back. Through the woods hunting a lycan. That was when I turned him down and it didn’t go well. And somehow I felt bad for hurting his feelings.
“Here.”
The moment I shot Vanessa’s mate. My hands didn’t shake then. They’re shaking now.
“Here.”
When I tortured Kade. I watch my own face in the image and I don’t recognize the woman wearing it.
“Here.”
When I sat in my bunker staring at a baby picture of Lucy.
“Here.”
My mom sending me a picture of Thanksgiving. My chair empty and waiting. A casserole dish where my plate should be because she still sets a place for me. Every year. Even when I don’t come. Even when I don’t call.
My hands are shaking. Not the fine tremor of adrenaline. The deep bone rattle of something structural giving way.
“Stop.” I choke.
“Here.”
Pepper crying around a toilet. My toilet. In my apartment. She’s wearing my hoodie and her mascara is everywhere and she’s holding her phone like she’s waiting for me to call her back.
I never called her back.
“Don’t.”
“She just missed you.”
“Stop.”
“Forgive yourself.”
“I don’t know how to!” I scream at him, my heart fracturing open wide. I can’t breathe, I can’t think. I am undone.
“Forgive.”
“Why?” I choke.
“How can you become when you hold on to who you were?” He pauses before me. “You are loved. You are wanted. You are needed. Here, with us. Forgive the woman you were. She deserves that, don’t you think?” He’s holding my face and his eyes are swirling like galaxies.
“Why do I feel like I don’t deserve that?”
“Because you never learned otherwise.” He pauses. “A queen knows the importance of forgiving herself for her past. Otherwise how can she lead a court who relies on her forgiveness in them?”
I sob.
It isn’t pretty. It just is. Right now. It just is.
“I didn’t know.” I sit up, blinking through the pain. “I wanted so much more for myself. I deserved more. I was hurting. Because I felt so alone.”
“Fog.”
I scoff. “Fog.”
“You live in a fog where you couldn’t see the truth no matter how hard you tried.” He tilts his head. “My family drank from the Cauldron and forgot they were gods. You swallowed a life that wasn’t yours and forgot you were a queen. Same fog. Different cup.”
“Rude.”
He shrugs a shoulder.
“I can’t just—” I start and he waits. Patient as a god who’s been waiting for millennia. “You don’t just forgive twenty-eight years of—”
“You do.” He says it simply. “Or you carry her forever. That woman on the bathroom floor. She comes with you into every room. Every bed. Every throne. Until you put her down.”
I look at the bathroom floor. At the woman I was. At the magic swirling around her that she couldn’t see.
“I do forgive myself.” The words crack coming out. But they come out true. And in Faerie, true is the only thing that sticks.
He smiles. “Well in that case you are going to need this.” His hands flick toward me and that magenta purple trial magic shoots out at me. Deep inside me, thorns grow.
I feel them pierce the skin at my temples, around my head. It burns, but becoming isn’t easy. It’s painful and the hardest thing that must be done.
“Fit for a Queen.” He nods, “You’re needed now.” And just like that a door appears beside him.
I look at the darkness under me. And there on my head sits a crown of thorns and a simple jewel the color of magenta in the center. “Holy shit,” I look up but he’s walking away.
I stand on legs that feel borrowed, wanting to reach him. But my whole-body aches.
“Aengus.” I turn back. He’s already fading. Galaxies swirling in his cape like he’s being swallowed by his own stars.
I almost say it. Almost thank him. The word sits right there on my tongue.
I swallow it. I know better now.
But I do remember the day he gave me a tour of the castle. The day he let me wager against my own survival along with the rest of the staff. “I believe you owe me a favor. Full survival. No elimination.”
His laugh echoes through the nothing. “I was wondering when you’d collect.”
I walk through the door as a queen with a pocket full of favors.