Chapter 31
Sylph.
She was a Sylph. She had a family. Two sisters. A brother.
Osin had him.
The thoughts circled in a slow loop as Elara walked through the Void, as if repeating them to herself might make them feel more real. The things she had learned over the past year—what she was, what she wasn’t, the faith she’d abandoned—seemed to scatter like chaff across the dark.
Ahead, Eamon walked through the slow shimmer of light that marked the path back to Odhrán’s house. The thin distortion rippled around him, his silhouette bending as Draoth flickered gold across his shoulders.
She drew a slow breath.
Sídhe, yet not of the Sídhe. Mortal, yet set apart from mortality. A chord struck wrong in its making.
That was what Odhrán had said.
Now she had proof—not just a vision, but something measurable, something that had been written into the record of this world before she had been taken from it.
And yet it still did not feel real. How could she be Sídhe when she felt not a trace of Draoth in her blood, when everything about her felt painfully, unremarkably mortal?
But her name…
Reynnar had never spoken it the Latherian way.
Nor had Aoife or Caelion. To them, she had always been Eilíara.
Always in their language, with that subtle lilt of the old tongue.
She had thought Reynnar’s particular stubbornness with foreign sounds endearing at first, and then she had stopped thinking about it altogether.
But perhaps it had never been stubbornness.
Perhaps it had been something older than that—fate, or truth wending its way through him.
If he had known her before she was taken, had known her true name, he would have told her. She was certain of that. He was not so cruel as to keep something like that from her.
It was only strange. All of it.
Elara lifted her chin and kept moving. She didn’t yet know what she was—but the not-knowing no longer felt like a wound. It felt like possibility.
Eamon waited where the light thinned to gold. His form wavered, blurred by the shifting air.
“Go ahead without me,” she said, her words almost absorbed by the space between them. His brow tightened, but she shook her head before he could speak. “I need a moment. Before…”
She let the rest of it die on her tongue. There was no point forcing the words out when the meaning was already sitting between them. Whatever waited on the other side of the rift, it would not be gentle. They had been gone too long for that.
It had been reckless to leave without a word. Worse than reckless. Selfish. And someone was dead because of it. The thought landed with the same blunt force as before, no softer for repetition.
Elara swallowed and lowered her eyes to the faint shimmer at her feet, watching the current shift and bend like light over deep water. She was not ready—not for the barrage of questions, not for raised voices, not for the shame that would meet her the moment she stepped through the rift.
“Go on,” she said, more quietly now. “Tell them I’m all right.”
Eamon didn’t move. The gold light slid across the hard lines of his face and set his blond hair aflame for a heartbeat, while his moss-dark eyes watched her with that same terrible stillness. Between them, the Void rippled faintly, rising and falling like breath in a sleeping crypt.
He straightened. “Fine. But if you’re not back in five minutes, then—”
“Five minutes,” she conceded.
She watched the place where Eamon had stood until nothing moved there but the faint shimmer of her own reflection in the rift’s glow. Then even that thinned, leaving her alone with the hush.
Elara let out a slow breath, tasting the faint ozonic tang that always lingered here. For the first time since returning to this strange passage between worlds, she allowed herself to breathe without measure or fear.
They had it now. The pattern. The bloodlines of the vanished.
The timing of the ward inspections. The possibility of a gate hidden in the canal quarter, masked by the rerouting of the city’s wardlines.
Every thirty-three days, the wards blinked, and Osin struck.
The next name—Tieran Caelith—already stood poised to vanish like all the rest.
It was everything they needed to force the Concord’s hand.
Her pulse gave one hard, ugly thud.
But first she would have to face Reynnar—his disappointment, perhaps his anger, both of them thoroughly earned—and own it. Elara drew in a measured breath and straightened her spine. Hiding here would solve nothing. It was a childish instinct.
Stop stalling.
She turned toward the rift with every intention of stepping through it when she felt the shift—a disturbance in the current, subtle enough that she might have missed it if she hadn’t spent so many hours learning the particular grain of this place.
She stilled at once.
The fine hairs along her arms lifted.
Slowly, she let her gaze move through the black around her until it caught on the only thing stirring in all that depthless dark. And yet—
Even with the dagger warm against her hip, a current moved in the dark before her.
Up close, it carried something she knew. A lesser pull beneath the greater one. A hidden stream moving under the black. A sub-current. The kind she and Ivan had spent long hours learning to tame and ride together.
Her breath caught.
Her gaze swept the full breadth of the Void, searching the black as though he might simply be there, half-made of shadow. The line of a hand. The brooding curve of a mouth. The sudden glint of eyes fixed on hers across the darkness.
There was nothing.
Only the Void, vast and watchful.
Then the current moved over her again, curling around her fingers with the faintest pressure, so slight she might have called it imagination if not for the dreadful certainty of it. There was will in it. Purpose. The touch of something reaching rather than drifting.
Elara went still as stone. Her breath left her in a rush.
Could it be his?
Was he in the Void now, in another realm, with his hand on this same hidden current?
It slipped between her fingers and along the inside of her wrist, sinuous as silk. Elara pressed her fingertips into it more firmly, and it answered at once, winding around them with a slow, unmistakable intent that sent a shiver up her arm.
A terrible, fragile hope opened in her so suddenly it almost hurt.
Was this how it had happened before?
Not hallucination. Nor dream. Nor madness born of grief and exhaustion, though she had accused herself of all three.
This. A current. A thread running through the Void, carrying something of him along its length until it found her.
But she had not entered the Void again after coming into Tír na nóg.
Not until now. So how had she touched it that first time?
How had it reached her then? And what of the flowers?
She did not know, and the ignorance of it made her almost wild.
Elara swallowed and looked back over her shoulder to the rift hanging open behind her. Beyond it waited light. Breath. The others, likely already wondering what in the Mother’s name was keeping her.
But the current stirred again. A soft, unmistakable pull.
Five minutes, she’d said. Her chest tightened in a way that had nothing to do with fear. If she left now, this wouldn’t be here when she came back. She was certain of it in the same unshakeable way she was certain of things she couldn’t always explain—the way she sometimes simply knew.
Elara drew in a breath, the bloodstone giving a hard, answering pulse. Elara tightened her trembling fingers around the living pull, bowed her head once as if in grim and private prayer, and yielded herself to whatever lay at the other end of it.
The sub-current took her at once.