Chapter 35
Chapter Thirty-Five
No alarms sounded. No trumpets announced the movement.
The gate widened until the entrance cleared and the fog in my brain lifted. Onyx stepped closer, our skin brushing.
The moment the glow faded enough to see, I squeezed Onyx tighter. Seven robed figures stood waiting on the other side of the gate. They gathered in a loose formation and my light spread like the sun rising, illuminating them until they shared in the radiance.
The walled city no longer perched above the restless souls seeking release. It opened for them.
Happy tears pricked the corners of my eyes. Onyx wasn’t letting me go. He wouldn’t let me face the Aether on my own.
Silence stretched and for a long moment, no one moved. Their faces shifted like white flames, features becoming solid before brushing into obscurity again like a breeze kicking up dust.
A being stepped from the group and lowered her hood. “Welcome to the Walled City, Octavia Alderidge and Onyx Grimaldi.”
Ethereal hands trailed starlight as she spoke and long ribbons of it cascaded down her shoulders and along her back. A flicker of her facial features solidified before they disappeared again, as though only the robes were made of material substance.
Warmth enveloped us. I felt her voice inside me as well as without. No fear here.
“I am called Aelthira,” she said. “Elder of the Aether. Keeper of what remains, guardian of memories of all who pass through.”
Her voice slipped through the air, skipping like water over stone. For a heartbeat, her mouth curved quick and bright and then her face unraveled, edges dissolving into light.
“You are welcome here, Tavi.”
I didn’t move. The glow inside me pulsed, pressing against my ribs. “What happened?” My grip tightened around the magic, afraid it might leak out. “Why was the gate closed?”
I already knew but I wanted to hear it from her.
Aelthira tilted her head, studying me like I was something newly made.
“We dimmed.” She lifted a translucent hand; light flickered weakly along her fingers.
“Faith thinned. The realms forgot to believe, and the well ran dry. Our power failed where yours grew and the gate sealed. Souls gathered with nowhere to go.” Her gaze drifted past me, toward the open threshold.
“Until you came.” Her attention snapped back, sudden and sharp. “Did you mend the barrier?”
I swallowed. The memory of it. reaching, asking, still hummed in my bones. “I didn’t mend anything.” My voice came out rougher than I meant. “I just…asked for a little help.”
Aelthira’s expression softened, something ancient easing in her eyes. “Yes,” she murmured. “Asking is often how it begins.”
The other spirits drew closer, their forms brightening as they drifted toward the gate. They brushed the air like wind through tall grass, curious, restless. alive in a way that made my chest ache.
Aelthira focused on my companion. “Onyx Grimaldi.”
He stilled beside me.
“Will you step forward?” she asked. “Will you be the first to cross?”
The word first echoed, heavy with promise and risk.
Onyx—
His fingers tightened around mine. His hesitation was there, quick and sharp, before he steadied. “Yes, I’m ready.”
I didn’t mean to hold him back, but the thought of never seeing him again hit hard enough to stop my heart mid-beat. My fingers locked around his.
For a second, I almost pulled him away from it. From all of it.
Onyx felt it. Of course he did. He didn’t move right away. He stood there with me, letting the moment stretch between us. Then, gently, he tugged, and this time I released him.
He deserved this. They all did.
Onyx stepped through the open gate, then turned to look back at me. The yearning must have shown on my face because Aelthira raised her arm toward the city beyond.
“Will you join us?” she said to me.
My heart leaped and I swallowed hard. “Yes.”
We followed the Aether into the heart of the city. What I’d taken for cold grandeur softened the closer we got, white stone threaded with warm wood, like the place had grown instead of being built.
Pillars of ivory twisted with trumpet vines, fused together in quiet harmony. It felt…safe. Whole. This kind of beauty asked nothing from you.
My shoulders knocked against Onyx as we walked, closer now, not for comfort but for support.
The temple waited at the center.It didn’t belong to the rest.
Gold pulsed beneath its walls, slow and steady, a living heartbeat. Lines of spirit-script ran along the arches and glowed faintly in time with my breathing.
Water filled the tiled pools at its base, starlight spilling across the surface, catching on leaves and curling vines that dipped toward the edge.
The Aether stopped, leaving a wide, deliberate space between us and the temple. They said nothing. This wasn’t theirs to experience. Only to witness and guide and remember.
Choice lived here. No one crossed until they were ready and not a moment sooner. My mouth went dry.
Onyx had been ready for a long time, long before my arrival.
He turned to me, steady and certain in a way I’d never quite managed to be. “I’m ready,” he assured me. “We don’t have to do the goodbye thing. We’ll see each other again. This time I will find a way to let you know it’s me.”
My laugh broke on the way out, sounding more like a sob. “I’ll never swat another fly again. Just in case it’s you.”
A smile pulled at his mouth. “I appreciate the restraint.”
Neither of us knew where he’d end up. Only that this wasn’t the end we’d once thought it was.
It had to be enough. After all, I never thought I’d see him again. Him, like this.
I stepped into him before I could think better of it, clutching Onyx like I could memorize the shape of him in one try.
“I’m sorry we didn’t get more time,” he murmured against my hair. “Maybe in the next life.”
“I’ll miss you,” I said, because there wasn’t a version of this where I wouldn’t.
He pulled back enough to cup my face, his hands warm, solid, and real. “Don’t,” he said in an undertone. “Don’t turn this into something sad. Live, Tavi. Laugh.”
A whole, unbroken Onyx. I tried to hold onto this version of him when his mouth brushed mine. The kiss was not desperate, not claiming, but something quiet and grateful.
It was a promise neither of us needed to speak out loud.
I kissed him back long enough to answer. Then he was gone from my arms.
He winked, because of course he did. “I’ve already seen you on the other side,” he said. “So…until next time.”
Before I could lose my nerve and ask him to wait, he stepped into the shadow of the temple columns. Water rippled under his feet.
Onyx turned to me one last time and then tipped backwards, falling, flying, through gold-lit air and into the open doorway beyond.
Light swallowed him whole. And just like that, he was gone.
It worked.
It worked and I wanted to be devastated but there was no room for it in my chest. Not when I was glowing and so fucking proud of Onyx for what he’d done, what he’d survived.
Now, finally, he was getting the peace he deserved.
The lump in my throat refused to ease. There were many other souls out there to see to.
I sidestepped away from the temple like I’d somehow break the spell if I blinked. Then warmth spread through me and when I looked up, Aelthira had her hand on my shoulder.
Light flickered along the lines of her fingers before they blended together, and in the glow I saw the burst of stars like supernovas. Or universes bursting to life.
“Wait,” she urged. “Your people are coming. They felt the shift when you opened the gate. They’ll want you to stand tall and greet them.”
My soldiers from the camp trickled into the city, the first to recognize the energetic change for what it was. I said goodbye to my lost ones, to my friends.
“One day I hope to see you on the throne of a united Faerie,” Lisbet said, her furry red fox ears still poking through her hair.
I startled. “Whoa. Hey, no. No way. Not me. I’m dead too.”
Lisbet only smiled and shot me a salute, the same way she’d ended every meeting of the Claw & Fang, before she stepped into the pools of the Beyond.
Marsh and Nora followed, professor guiding student to the bitter end, and they both squeezed me tight. Then they too disappeared.
Aelthira stepped closer. “You’re not dead, Tavi. You understand the difference in the song of your soul compared to those who have truly run their course in this lifetime.”
I shook my head. “I’m dead. You can’t really come back from being stabbed in the heart.”
“You’re meant to go back,” she insisted.
Then Livvy was there, smiling like she already knew how this would go. “I told you so.”
She threw her arms around me, solid and sure. Another presence closed in behind her and wrapped us both in something bigger than I’d ever had. Dad. Noren.
For one impossible second, we fit. All three of us. Like we’d always been meant to. I didn’t breathe because if I did, it might break the wonderful moment.
“You’re leaving?” The words scraped out of me, wrong and too fast, but the truth hit anyway.
Baronne didn’t let go. “We’re moving on together,” he said, his voice steady. “I waited for her, for you, and now it’s time for us to start something new.”
Livvy leaned into him, her hand finding his like it had never forgotten how. “I’m ready for another adventure. You have this covered, honey.”
“No.” The protest tore out of me. My hands fisted in their clothes, gripping tight enough to wrinkle fabric and anchor them there. “No, you can’t be. You just got here. I just got—”
I didn’t even know what I’d gotten. Them? Finally them?
“You can’t go yet,” I said again, softer now, like I might change their decision.
Dad pressed a kiss to the top of my head the way I’d imagined a thousand times. “You’re going to be okay. You always are.”
“I don’t want to be okay,” I choked out. “I want you.”
Livvy pulled back enough to cup my cheek, her thumb brushing away a torrent of tears. “Love,” she said gently, “we don’t belong to the same part of the story anymore. We know it. Our time has come and gone. It’s up to you now to keep going.”
“That’s not fair!”
“No,” she agreed. “It isn’t.”
Her admission almost broke me more.
“We’re ready to be together again.” She glanced up at Dad, at her mate, the one she’d been forced to live without for decades. Something quiet and complete passed between them. “You have everything you need now. You’ve already built a solid foundation.”
I clung harder. “I don’t. Not this. Not enough of this.”
They didn’t argue. They held me while I fell apart between them.
Souls drifted past us toward the temple, but the world narrowed to this borrowed moment and the last fragile piece of something I’d never gotten.
Dad pulled back first to look at me. His eyes—my eyes—searched my face like he was trying to memorize it. “You are everything we hoped for. Strong. Kind. Still loving, after everything.”
I shook my head. “Then stay.”
His smile hurt. “We can’t.”
“You have your own life to go back to,” Livvy added softly. “People who are waiting for you. Someone who loves you.”
“I love you.” Because it was the only thing that mattered.
“And we love you.”
They slipped their hands together. This was it, the moment I felt them leaving, before either of them moved. I almost grabbed for them again. I almost begged.
But something in the way they looked at each other, like they were whole, finished, finally right, stopped me. So I stood frozen and let it happen.
“Bye, honey. We’re so damn proud of you! We love you always,” Baronne called back.
“Know that wherever we are,” Livvy added, “we’ll be watching out for you!”
They walked toward the temple, fingers intertwined, steps in sync like they’d been practicing for a lifetime together that they never got. I told myself it was a comfort seeing them together and happy.
Somehow it didn’t feel like one.
My parents never looked back as light swallowed them both. They stepped into the temple, floated above the water…and poof.
They were gone.
The familiar emptiness of the space they left behind tore something in my chest open.
I was an orphan again.
The thought landed heavy before it shifted. No, I wasn’t the same. I wasn’t the same person I’d been before this. I used to be lonely in crowded rooms, even with my pack around me but never mine, not fully.
Now I named them.
Melia. Bronwen. Poppy. Laina. Coral. Julie. Mike.
Their names anchored me, one by one, stitching something back together where the tear had been. I wasn’t alone.
Not anymore.
But it still hurt like hell.