Chapter 65
The deeper current brightened as they followed him.
Red-gold light moved beneath the dark, stirring the stars nearest Elara until they gathered around her like things summoned from sleep.
Their light drew inward, each one seeming to hold the memory of a form: the suggestion of pages, of covers, of something bound and complete, though no paper waited there and no hand could have lifted them.
They resembled books because her mind had chosen the gentlest lie.
Ivan’s hand had left hers, though his blood remained on her palm, cooling in the lines of her skin.
He walked a pace to her right now, his attention moving constantly through the luminous dark, while Algernon followed on her other side, his staff tapping against the unseen floor, his face paling with every step.
The entity moved ahead of them, the stars drawing back from the hem of his ancient robes.
“What are they?” Elara asked, then cursed herself as the words left her mouth.
He glanced over his shoulder, delighted.
She felt the theft immediately—a small, precise plucking somewhere deep inside her. The Cara recoiled, curling instinctively around the hollow left behind.
“Oh, do be careful,” he said. “You have so few innocent things left to misplace.”
Ivan’s head turned sharply toward her.
“I’m fine,” Elara said before he could speak.
The entity smiled as if the lie amused him, then extended one pale hand toward the nearest cluster of lights.
“Every life impresses itself upon the world,” he said, strolling ahead as though lecturing in a garden.
“Most fade. The field loosens. Memory disperses. The dead become less burdened by being remembered, and the living less burdened by remembering them.” His gaze slid over the lights.
“A merciful design, I suppose, if one has a taste for mercy.”
Elara looked at the thousands upon thousands of fields suspended around them.
Each one distinct. Each one held. The nearest star pulsed.
Within it, she caught the impression of laughter, a child’s bare feet on wet grass, a hand closing around another hand in the dark before all of it folded away again.
Her stomach hollowed.
“Osin stopped them from dispersing,” she said.
The entity hummed. “Osin learned to interrupt the release. To sever memory from mind. Draoth from body. Consciousness from the field that held it. What should have drifted onward was caught instead.” He lifted one elegant hand, and the lights nearest him trembled in their bindings.
“Collected. Ordered. Made useful. Though your king lacks artistry.
He keeps only what feeds the machine. Power.
Pain. Obedience. The moments that make a soul most pliable.
“But what cannot disperse must resolve somewhere. Osin learned very early that an emptied body is more obedient than a living one. The Sídhe were useful for what he could strip from them. Humans, too, once he grew less particular. Draoth. Memory. The field that made a person more than flesh with breath passing through it.”
“The shades,” she whispered, ice sliding down her spine.
“Indeed. A corpse remembers certain things. The jaw remembers closing. The hands remember grasping. The dead flesh remembers wanting warmth, even after the soul has been removed from it. Osin gives that want direction.”
The taste of bile crept beneath Elara’s tongue.“I’ve heard a shade speak before,” she said, reaching for the memory and finding only the torn space where it should have been. Her fingers tightened around the dagger. “I can’t remember what it said.”
Ivan answered without taking his eyes off the being. “It said Tuatha.” He paused. “Then it said your terror was sweet.”
Elara looked at him, and for a moment the river of stars seemed to fall away, leaving only Ivan’s bloodless face and the sickening realization that she had once heard those words and lost them.
The entity stopped. Slowly, he looked between them, reading her too easily. Too eagerly.
“Ask,” he murmured.
Elara’s teeth ground together until pain flared through her jaw. She clung to the anger, but something else found her first, pulling at her attention with restless insistence.
The frequency of her own field.
Reaching.
Her gaze slid past the entity and the river of stolen souls, settling on the soul-field he had led her toward as surely as if he had taken her hand and placed it there himself.
It rested above a light unmistakably hers: warmth and cold woven together in a frequency she had carried inside herself all her life without ever being able to reach.
She knew it the way she knew her own reflection.
When she looked directly at the impression on the cover, the words resolved beneath her attention.
Eilíara. The Recovered Testament.
Beside it waited another.
Raijin.
Close in the way blood was close, sharing something at the root older than the souls they had each become. Elara stood between the two and reached for neither. She had learned the cost of reaching, so she locked the grief behind her teeth and looked beyond.
The surrounding lights waited in clustered brilliance, thousands gathered around them.
She moved through the currents slowly, reading them the way she had learned to read the hidden movement of Teinloch’s streets, with the nameless sense beneath her skin that had woken too late and too violently to feel like a gift.
A signature rose from the nearest field.
Windsinger.
The another.
Windsinger.
Windsinger.
Windsinger.
She stopped.
The word passed through her, each repetition striking deeper than the last. All around her and Raijin, the records clustered in numbers too vast to count.
Their lights held that same high, clear frequency, the old relationship to breath and current, to the first inhale of the world. Epona’s first breath.
“He”s been targeting Epona’s direct bloodline,” she said. Not a question.
The entity regarded her for a long moment and for the first time, something like surprise disturbed the perfection of his face. “Close,” he said. “But you know it falls slightly short.”
His eyes remained on Elara, and something almost like fondness passed through his expression, wan and malformed, an imitation of tenderness learned from watching others perform it.
“You have always been quick,” he said, his gaze drifting to the river of Windsinger soul-fields.
“In every life, every iteration, every time you find your way to this place or something near enough it, you ask me for the same story.” His eyes returned to hers.
“You have paid dearly across more lives than your mind knows how to count, so I will give it to you now for what you have already spent.”
He reached into nothing and drew out a book bound in worn leather veined with black, its cover scuffed by the memory of many hands. Elara did not take it at first, and the entity clicked his tongue, the sound delicate and displeased.
“Come now. I have grown tired of reading it aloud.”
Reluctantly, her fingers closed around the cover.
The book carried a faint pulse beneath the leather, the lingering presence of a story that had survived being buried, altered, forgotten, and found again.
Beneath her touch, the title rose slowly through the dark surface, the letters forming like ink remembering itself.
THE SONG OF THE THREE SISTERS
As told in the old tongue of Tír
Ivan stepped to one side of her and Algernon to the other, close enough that she felt the heat of them through the cold river-light. Elara opened the book, the pages breathing beneath her hand, and then the words appeared.
In the first days, when the Void was no more than a silent sea,
three sisters rose from its dreaming depths.
Epona, First Breath, whose heart beat like a newborn star.
áine, Weft-Spinner, who twined time upon her fingers.
Rhiannon, Last Door, whose shadow knew every ending yet to be.
Together they shaped the circle of the worlds:
Epona drew forth Tír na nóg, a realm of wild Draoth and wandering song.
áine cast the skein of Latheria, where moments marched in orderly lines.
Rhiannon raised Vorrath, a realm of deathless seas and endless storm.
For a long age, the sisters walked together,
and the realms thrived in their turning.
Then, from their shared breath, they made life.
Humans woke beneath Latheria’s sun,
fragile and bright and brief as sparks.
The sisters watched them build, grieve, love, and begin again,
and for a time, they were pleased.
But Epona, bright-hearted Epona,
watched the children of Latheria and grew lonely for a love that was truly her own.
She descended in a cloak of dawnlight
and found a human man with a spirit fierce enough to bear her gaze.
From their joining came the Sídhe,
children of starlight and flesh,
neither mortal nor divine—
a new people born between breath and time.
And so the circle shifted.
When áine saw them, her loom shuddered.
For the Sídhe bore no ending she had written,
no future she had spun.
They slipped through her grasp like wind through a broken net.
“Abomination,” she named them.
“Unraveling. A threat to the order.”
And she lifted her hand to strike them from existence.
Epona wept, and her tears struck the earth as starfire.
Gathering her children close, she fled with them into the realm she had made,
deep into wild Tír na nóg, where the spirits answered her grief
and the old songs bent around her will.
But to seal it from her sisters, she paid the oldest price.
Epona gave her life to her creation.
Her body became the forests and rivers.
Her breath became the Sídhe’s unending Draoth.
Her heartbeat became the barrier none may cross.
And the goddess of life was no more.
áine turned then to Rhiannon,
her voice a blade sharpened by grief.
“You knew,” she said.
“You watched her break the circle, and said nothing.”
Rhiannon bowed her head—not in guilt, but in mourning.
“For life deserved its chance,” she answered.
“For every soul, even one you did not weave.”
So áine cast her into the Looped Hour,
a prison of repeating moments,