Chapter 65 #2
and the bridge of souls collapsed.
The dead wandered the Void,
calling for a goddess who could no longer hear them.
But even in fury, áine could not reach Tír na nóg.
The barrier of Epona’s sacrifice barred her from her vengeance.
So she sought a mortal to act in her stead—
a man carved hollow by longing,
hungry for purpose, eager for power.
His name was Osin,
and in him áine planted her fear of endings
and her hatred of all that escaped time.
She stole from Rhiannon and made him endless
and through him, she took the Sídhe child born under the moon-aligning stars,
a girl bright with starfire and Epona’s last blessing,
a spark of the original soul,
walking three roads beneath one name.
She was the first light,
Epona hid her in Sídhe flesh,
veiled her in breath and whispered song,
and set in her blood the last living strand of the world as it had first been sung.
But in every loom, the girl fell.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Three souls.
Three deaths.
One must live to light the path.
Elara closed the book, and it vanished between one breath and the next, her fingers closing around empty air. Her hand remained lifted, useless and trembling. “I don’t…” Her voice broke. She forced herself to try again. “I don’t understand.”
The entity watched her with a look almost gentle enough to be mistaken for mercy.
“Three flames,” he said. “Three deaths. One must live to light the path.”
The words moved through the gathered soul-fields. Around them, the Windsinger lights stirred as if something old had passed over them, a song remembered by things that no longer had mouths to sing it.
“You carry the spark of the original soul,” the entity said. “The first ember struck from the hands of the Three. Epona gave it breath. áine gave it continuity. Rhiannon gave it passage. Life, time, and death braided into one small flame, and from that flame every living soul learned how to burn.”
Algernon’s fingers tightened around his staff, and Ivan’s attention slid to Elara, the weight of his gaze settling on her like a hand he had not dared to place.
“I don’t understand,” she said, again though some part of her had already begun to.
The being smiled. “The first spark cannot be destroyed without consequence. If áine snuffs it out, truly snuffs it out, then the pattern collapses backward through everything she has woven from it. Time sickens. Memory curdles. The little order she prizes begins to rot from its root.”
Elara’s grip tightened around the dagger. “So she can’t kill me.”
“She cannot kill what you are,” he said. “But she has become very good at killing what you become.”
The words settled over her slowly.
Algernon’s face had gone ashen with understanding. “Her iterations.”
The entity inclined his head. “Human. Sídhe. Fomori. Three realms. Three lives. Three reflections cast from the same original flame.” He lifted one hand, and two lights drifted from the surrounding river.
One burned pale gold. One deep violet-black.
“Every soul cast into the circle of the realms throws three reflections,” he said.
“Human. Sídhe. Fomori. Three lives, bound across three planes. Three sides to the same impossible coin.”
Elara’s brows drew together. “Entangled fields.”
She saw water again.
The human girl beneath gray light.
The Fomori girl sinking into black waves.
Uisce’s visions.
“They were me,” she whispered.
“They were your counterparts in this iteration. áine reached them. Osin helped her bury them. Two flames drowned before they could wake.”
Elara’s stomach dropped.
The entity looked pleased with himself. “The goddess of life died protecting her children. She barred áine from Tír na nóg, sealed the true realm behind her own flesh. And so the Sídhe were hidden from the Weft-Spinner’s hand.”
“But Elara was raised human,” Ivan said.
“Her form was changed,” the entity said. “Her soul was not.”
Elara thought of every hand that had held her beneath water. Every Druid that waited for visions. Every burning in her lungs. Every voice calling her special while they made a ritual of nearly killing her.
“They tried to drown me too,” she said.
“Yes.”
The word came softly. The Fold seemed to close around it.
“They thought they were calling spirits,” Elara said, forcing each word through the cold gathering on her tongue. “They thought the visions came from the divine.”
The entity’s smile thinned with delight. “They came from you.”
Ivan’s hand tightened on her elbow.
“Past lives,” Algernon said. “Counterpart deaths. Memory bleeding through the entanglement whenever she was brought close enough to dying.”
“Very good, old scholar.”
Elara barely heard him. She could feel the water again, the hands, the chanting, the sick desperation of men trying to make prophecy out of a drowning girl.
“What were they looking for?” Ivan asked.
The entity’s eyes flashed.
A question.
Elara turned toward him, but Ivan did not look away from the being. Whatever was taken from him, he gave no sign of it beyond the slow closing of his hand at his side.
The entity smiled. “Ah. The question beneath all the others.” He studied Ivan for a long moment, something almost appreciative passing through his expression. “You know,” he said softly, “your record is here as well. Should you dare to find it.”
Ivan absorbed the words without blinking, though a muscle flickered once in his cheek and vanished. Elara saw the effort it took for him not to look toward the river of soul-fields waiting around them.
Osin had taken from him, too.
Her breath left her in a thin stream, and the being’s smirk lingered, pleased with the wound his truths had opened, pleased with the ruin gathering in her face.
Then his attention drifted toward the breach behind them, and the river of soul-fields thinned beneath his gaze as though even the dead wished to see what had become of the living.
“But you may wish to leave soon,” he said, with a faint sigh of indulgence. “Your friends are dying with such determination, and I would hate for you to miss the end of it.”
The Fold opened beneath their feet.
Elara’s stomach dropped before her mind understood what she was seeing.
Below them, the shore had become a slaughtering ground. Shades poured from the surf in endless ranks, climbing over the rocks on bent limbs, pallid bodies shining wet beneath the starlight, mouths opening and closing around hungers that no longer belonged to souls.
Every wave delivered more of them. Every retreat left corpses behind, and some of those corpses rose again.
The Vredians had abandoned formation. They fought wherever the sea had driven them, scattered across the water and shore with blades, broken rods, bare hands—anything that had not yet slipped from their grip.
Her pulse climbed into her throat. Her hands went cold.
There were too few of them.
Far too few.
The stone steps they had climbed to enter the Fold were gone, shattered into jagged remnants that jutted from the dark below, with nothing left to bridge the drop between this place and the sea.
Ivan was already at the mouth of the rift, searching the distance below. His gaze swept the shattered remains of the steps and the blood-soaked shore beyond, hunting for another way down. His hand closed around Elara’s wrist, urgent against the cooling blood on her skin.
“We go, now.”
Elara gave a tight nod, but her attention caught on the deeper current below the Fold and refused to leave it—the rusted pulse of Osin’s hidden kingdom throbbed beneath the river of souls, patient and monstrous, feeding on everything it had taken.
It looked vulnerable now that she could see it.
A root exposed. A heart laid bare. Something that could be severed if they struck fast enough and with enough force.
That had been the plan before she saw the soul-fields.
Before she stood between her own stolen record and Raijin’s.
Before she understood the Fold was not merely a prison Osin had built around stolen power, but an archive of lives, memories, and fragments.
From a safe distance, collapse had sounded like liberation.
Here, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of living records, it sounded dangerously close to annihilation.
Her fingers tightened around the dagger. What if they were wrong? What if destroying the Fold did not free what Osin had taken? What if it shattered the soul-fragments trapped here beyond recall?
Ivan tugged once at her wrist.
Elara forced herself to move with him, one step toward the rift, then another.
Her mind had already begun rearranging the pieces.
Retreat first. Save who they could below.
Return with more knowledge, more time, more than a desperate theory.
She could still feel the stolen soul-fields behind her like eyes, like pages left open in a storm.
Then she looked back at Algernon.
He had not followed.