Chapter 33
Elara woke to birdsong.
A delicate, trilling sound threaded through the room.
Light pressed softly against her eyelids, warm enough to coax them open.
The ceiling above her swam into view first—familiar pale stone, the faint curve where plaster met arch.
For a moment, her mind rejected it outright.
Thoughts scattered like dropped marbles, rolling uselessly in every direction.
She reached for the last thing she remembered and found only fragments, each sharp enough to cut.
The Veil.
Ivan.
A debt invoked as the world collapsed around them.
She lurched upright, hands grasping at the sheets, eyes sweeping the room. Ceiling, walls, window, door. Odhrán’s house. She was tucked back into her bed neatly, as if the night had been no more than a fever dream. Breath still coming unevenly, she turned toward the chair beside the bed.
Reynnar had fallen asleep there.
Every muscle in her body went taut.
He sat half-turned toward her, one shoulder slumped awkwardly against the carved wood, as though he had meant only to close his eyes for a moment.
Morning light gentled the harder lines of him.
One hand rested on the coverlet near hers, fingers curled loosely into the blanket, stilled in the motion of reaching.
“You’re awake.”
Elara startled and turned toward the doorway, where the words had come cool and clipped.
Aoife stood there with a plate in her hands, steam curling faintly into the air. She crossed the room and set it on the table beside the bed, near her brother. Then, after a brief pause, she asked, “How do you feel?”
Questions crowded so hard behind Elara’s teeth that it almost hurt. “Fine,” she lied. “How am I here?”
Aoife’s mouth twitched. “He found you.” Her gaze shifted to her sleeping brother, then back to Elara.
“When Eamon came back without you, Reynnar put him through a wall—would have done worse if I hadn’t dragged him off.
The gate was still open, so he went through it himself.
” She sighed, leaning back against the wall.
“As for why you lost consciousness, the best theory we’ve got is that your Draoth was spending itself in the Void.
Bleeding out with nothing to draw from. That’s only a working theory, mind you.
We don’t know that place well enough to swear to it. ”
Elara’s pulse climbed painfully. “How could it be spending itself if I can’t even access it?”
Aoife shrugged. “It was being drawn on. Whether that was you, the Void, or some other force—” her eyes flicked back to Reynnar, “—your guess is as good as mine.”
“How long was I out?”
“Only the night.”
The night.
Her stomach sank. It made no sense. A handful of moments ago—surely no more than that—she had been with Ivan. And yet Reynnar had carried her back, the night had passed, morning had risen, and she had slept through all of it.
Reynnar stirred.
He blinked against the light, his gaze wandering first over the room in the dazed way of someone pulled too quickly from sleep. Then his eyes found her. The breath he let out was slow.
Aoife swatted his arm in passing, though there was little force in it. “Eat something,” she murmured. “I’ll give you both the room.”
Elara nearly begged her to stay—anything to delay whatever waited here. But the Sylph was already gone, the door’s latch clicking softly into place.
The hearth crackled. Reynnar said nothing.
She adjusted the blanket tangled around her legs, suddenly far too aware of the sound of her own breathing.
The space between them seemed to hum faintly, strained with that same charged stillness they had never once managed to escape.
Nothing had ever been quiet between them. It likely never would be.
When his gaze lifted to hers, she braced for anger. It was not there. Only a weariness so deep it had turned almost bitter.
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
The question was simple, and somehow hurt worse for it. She would have preferred shouting—resentment she could defend against. But this careful, even tone was far more dangerous. A disappointment that asked nothing and accused everything.
Her throat ached. “We found what we needed,” she said carefully. “The records. Names tied to the disappearances. The reports the Concord buried. And—”
The words faltered.
When she looked up, his face told her he already knew.
“You spoke with Eamon.”
He leaned back in the chair, jaw flexing and relaxing again. “He told me enough.”
A silence opened between them, thin and fragile.
“I suppose he told you what I am, then.”
“He did.”
She drew in a breath, though it did little to calm her. Morning light spilled through the window and touched his face, throwing every crack in his calm into relief. Something fine and breakable. She almost didn’t press further.
“In the Pit,” she said quietly, “you never called me Elara. Why?”
A faint line appeared between his brows. “What do you mean?”
“You could say my name the Latherian way if you wished to. But you never did.” Her voice thinned on the last word. “Why?”
“Because it made you one of us.”
The words settled over her like snowfall.
“Your mortal name would not have shielded you,” he continued. “Eilíara would. I wanted them to see that you did not stand alone.”
The confession worked its way under her skin before she could build walls against it. She had always been alone. Always, before him.
“That’s all?” she asked, though she already knew it was not.
Reynnar’s gaze stayed on her, thoughtful, unguarded in a way that made her pulse quicken. “No,” he said. “Elara never suited you. Not when you said it. Not even when I tried to.” His mouth softened, though the sadness in it remained. “The name belonged to your mouth, perhaps. But not to your soul.”
She stared at him. “How could you possibly know that?”
“I felt it.” He said it simply. “I have no better explanation than that. Some part of you…” He paused, searching for the words. “Some part of you knew me before I had language for what that meant. Perhaps I only returned the kindness.”
The fine hairs along her arms lifted.
“So you did feel it,” she whispered.
He did not answer at once. He sat very still, the silence stretching between them like something living.
Then, softly, “I tried not to.”
The breath left her in a sharp pull. “I knew you before I knew myself.” She hated how naked it sounded, how young. Hated more that it was true. “Did you ever feel that?”
Something moved across his face—there and gone, the way pain moves in those who have long since learned to hide it. “Every day,” he said.
Elara closed her eyes and lowered her chin. The tremor in her limbs would not settle. The Draoth Cara wanted—reached for him. Though she had spent weeks keeping that arrested, restless thing pinned inside her, the urge was animal: a pull at her chest, a tightening that promised both balm and theft.
She hated how easily he saw her.
Hated more how deeply she wanted him to.
Her fingers clenched the blanket and shoved the ache down, locking it behind thought as though stilling a shaking hand.
“Does the name Raijin mean anything to you?”
Reynnar blinked, surprised by the change of subject, and relief eased through her like cool water.
He dragged a hand across his face. “If he was put through the Roving Circles, I might have known him. But the name doesn’t strike me.
” A beat. “Raijin is not an uncommon name among the Sylph. I’ve met many. ”
“Right,” Elara said, the attempt at ease falling flat even to her own ears. “You’re what—one hundred and fifty now? I suppose they all start blending together after the first century.”
There was a flicker in his expression. Not amusement.
“I am,” he said. “But time in Latheria doesn’t move as it does here.”
Elara frowned slightly. “What do you mean?”
“In Tír na nóg, time folds back on itself and nourishes us—it’s cyclical rather than linear—it builds; it doesn’t take.
But the mortal realm seems to run in a straight line.
The air carries a different resonance. There’s no Draoth there—no power to slow the body or guard the spirit from decay.
The moment we step across the threshold, our bodies relearn their limits.
They start counting days the mortal way, and they don’t stop. ”
A chill skated across the back of her neck. “So…the years I spent in the human realm—”
“You were taken when you were twelve. Ten years in Latheria would have burned through far more of your lifespan than ten years here. Closer to seventy, maybe eighty Sídhe years. It’s not a matter of number—it’s a matter of strain. You endured a world not made for you.”
Elara’s throat went dry. “Eighty?” The word sounded absurd in her mouth.
He inclined his head and rested his forearms on his knees, fingers loosely clasped, though every line of him remained taut. “You treat crossing as if it’s a walk between rooms. It’s not. Every door costs something. You don’t see it yet, but the body keeps the record.”
The room tilted, the world narrowing to the grain of fabric and the small, unnerving drum of her pulse at the temple.
“Why didn’t you say so sooner?”
“Because I don’t know it beyond doubt. Only what I feel.
What all of us who survived Latheria feel in the bone.
” He glanced toward the window, where pale daylight pressed at the glass.
“And I meant what I said. We do not know what opening a doorway invites into Tír na nóg. We understand too little, Eilíara. Until we know more, caution is not cowardice—it is sense.”
She licked her lips; her pulse had started up again, hard and quick. “But you saw it, didn’t you? Aoife said you found me in the Void. Brought me back yourself. You saw there was nothing there—nothing waiting to cross through with us. We needed that information—”
“And someone died so that you might have it faster.”
The words landed hard enough to knock all the air from her.