Chapter 7 #2
She muttered a curse under her breath, squared her shoulders, and pushed into the fall. It slammed over her—needling her skin, stealing her balance—until she lurched out the other side, gasping.
The cave opened around them, its overhang glittering with veins of luminous mineral that glowed soft silver-blue, scattered like constellations.
Every movement cast faint reflections along the stone, as though the cavern itself held light.
Water dripped from her cloak, pattering softly onto the smoothed stone.
Reynnar glanced over—and heat rolled off him, subtle but potent, warming her skin, then her clothes, then the heavy curls plastered to her cheeks. They sprang back at once, a wild halo of unruly spirals.
She shot him a scathing look.
He turned away too quickly, shoulders shaking.
“This,” Reynnar said after collecting himself, “is Tiarath n’Astra. The Mirrorfall Cavern.”
Elara turned in a slow circle as she attempted to press her curls back into something resembling order. “It looks like a night sky trapped underground.”
“That’s what Turlaith children believe.” He nodded toward a small alcove carved into the wall, where tiny wooden figurines—animals, feathers, spirals, stars—were arranged in careful rows. “They leave offerings here each season. Wishes for the year ahead.”
She drifted toward the carvings no bigger than her palm, some intricate, some barely more than shapes—each one left by small hands hoping the goddess would listen.
Then her fingers hovered over a particular offering.
A clumsy wooden hawk—uneven wings, a slightly crooked beak.
But something beneath the rough surface tugged at her. A faint hum.
“You made this,” she said before she could second-guess it.
Reynnar went very still beside her. “I did. It was first my offering, back when I traveled with the Roving Circles.” A beat passed. “How did you know?”
Elara traced the hawk’s beak with her fingertip. “It just…felt like you,” she said, frowning at her own lack of explanation. “Like it’s carrying your shape somehow.”
His eyes searched her, and her pulse fluttered—traitorously light—until she looked away, returning the little hawk.
The cavern narrowed into a tunnel, the glowing crystals guiding them toward a thin spill of blinding white light.
When they stepped through, she nearly lost her footing.
The cave opened onto a cliff—an overlook suspended above a vast, wind-carved basin.
Water hurtled down beside them in a thunderous cascade, spraying a haze that the sunlight fractured into shimmering shapes. Spirals that looked like wings.
“What is this place?”
“The Turlaith call it the Titim na Fírinne,” he said. “They believe the spirit of the mountain—Cloiche—shows you what you are. What you might one day be.”
She studied his expression—shadowed, contemplative.
“What did it show you?”
He exhaled a laugh. “That I would never be what I was meant to become.”
“And what was that?”
He hesitated—just a breath. “Here,” he murmured. “Let me show you.”
A presence pressed softly against her senses—not hers, not his; something…
more. The wind lifted his hair, exposing the side of his neck.
A faint marking glimmered there—three spiraling arms curling out from a single point, turning over one another in an endless loop.
Her breath hitched. The Druids—their symbol had been almost the same.
Three paths, three forces, bound in one unbroken motion. She used to trace it on temple floors…
He touched the marking absently. “You asked me yesterday what the word Tuatha meant. This is the mark of the Tuatha Dé Danann.”
At the name, the mark brightened, answering him. His eyes did the same.
“They were the first creation of the Triad,” he said. “Before Sídhe. Before mortals. Before the realms fractured into what they are now.” His gaze drifted toward the falling water, unfocused. “The Tuatha weren’t meant to rule. They were meant to bridge.”
Elara stilled, a creeping cold crawling up her spine. “Bridge what?”
“Everything,” Reynnar replied quietly. “Goddess and world. Spioraid and flesh. Element and will.” He glanced back at her.
“Each Tuatha has the voice of an element. Not its master—its representative. And in turn, each chosen Tuatha becomes the Spioraid’s representative for entire nations.
Not kings—” his mouth twisted, “—though some act as if they are.”
Elara absorbed that in silence. Representatives of nations. The weight of it pressed against her like a stone. Osin hadn’t taken just a powerful Sídhe when he enslaved Reynnar—he had stolen something much greater. A ruler in all but name.
Ivan had used that word once—Tuatha. He’d said the shades were mindless, nothing but hollow things…until he spoke that name. Her pulse ticked faster. “How does it work?”
Reynnar’s jaw tightened. “Fire answers me in battle,” he said. “Not with words—but with presence. Recognition. The Spioraid Tine flare when I call on flame. They know who I am.”
“They…know you?”
He nodded once. “As their voice.”
“That’s what they said of Lord Osin.” Elara stepped closer. Her gaze traced the mark at his neck, mapping its lines. A bridge, they’d called Osin. A sacred thing. A necessary one. “I was told my entire life he stood as a bridge between mortal and divine.”
Reynnar tilted his head. “And you believed that?”
She worried her lower lip between her teeth. “I believe he holds a force beyond anything I could begin to understand,” she said finally. A presence she’d felt like pressure behind her eyes. Like a hand closing around her neck.
“Whatever hold he has,” Reynnar said, “it’s fouled. Tainted at the root.” His eyes stayed on hers, steady and merciless. “He isn’t a bridge. He’s a fracture. A leech wearing a crown—and one I intend to break.”
Heat rushed through her veins at the promise in his words, too fast to cage.
She wondered if it slipped past her defenses, brushed his through the Cara—because his eyes darkened, a wicked glint catching there, as if he’d felt it too.
Something in her recoiled at the thought, even as another part of her leaned closer to the fire of it.
Because she believed him. Because she could see it—how merciless he could be. How patient. How exacting.
The gentleness he showed her was not the absence of violence.
It was the restraint of it.
The mark at his throat faded, sinking back beneath his skin as if it had never been there at all—like her own binding sigils once had, retreating when they were done reminding her who held the leash. The thought caught, tugging loose another.
“The Druids,” she said. “They carry a symbol almost exactly like your own. Could they be connected? Or—”
Reynnar barked a laugh. “Eilíara,” he said, shaking his head, “your Druids built an entire religion atop pieces of ours they did not understand. They took rituals meant to honor Na Spioraid and reshaped them into something palatable to humans. They rewrote our cosmology to suit their politics. They assigned our deities temperaments that made sense to them.” His jaw flexed.
“And then they had the gall to call it theirs.”
Her stomach tightened. All her life, the Druids’ teachings had been immutable. Ancient. Absolute. But of course it all had been another lie.
“And while they preached their borrowed doctrine, they kidnapped my people. Drained the Draoth from their veins. Dissected us. Slaughtered us. And repackaged our power as gifts bestowed by their version of the Triad.” His eyes burned.
“An entire empire fueled by the death of those they first imitated, then condemned. So yes. There are similarities. Because it is theft. And the consequences of that theft are carved into the bones of every Sídhe who did not survive it.”
Elara swallowed, her pulse fluttering. “I’m so sorry.”
He stepped in before she could pull back, a fingertip lifting her chin—gentle, but leaving no room to hide.
“Sorry for what, ealaín? For being shaped by the same cruelty that tried to break us both? For acting when you saw the truth and refusing to look away? For trying—relentlessly—to undo a wrong you never created?” His thumb hovered beneath her mouth, close enough to feel her breath, never touching.
“You never once stopped to ask what it would cost you. Only what it might save. And when you were finally free to run—when no one would have blamed you—you turned back. You chose to finish it. You chose to kill the leech.”
A short, humorless breath left him.
“So tell me,” he said quietly. “What, exactly, do you think you owe an apology for?”
She shook her head. “For everything.”
He offered a small, subdued smile. “I do not accept.”
Elara’s heart thudded painfully as she turned away, his hand falling with the motion. “Why did you bring me here?” she asked, her voice even despite how quietly it carried over the low roar of the falls.
Reynnar came to her side, their shoulders nearly touching. “Partly to show you,” he said, gaze tracking the cascade, “and partly to remember. What the Titim na Fírinne showed me all those years ago.”