Chapter 70
Some lives began as songs.
They were older than the ones sung in halls after wine had made liars of grief, stranger than the polished verses bards gave to kings who paid well enough to be remembered as beautiful.
This was a first sound drawn from a throat that had never known fear, a note so bright the dark itself turned to listen.
Beneath starfire and falling suns,
a daughter of dawn was born.
Her name was Eilíara.
That was the first line.
Elara stood in the Void with the book open in her hands and forgot how to breathe for three full heartbeats after reading it.
She had meant to return to Tír na nóg at once.
Raijin waited there. Reynnar waited there.
Aoife, Eamon, Caelion, and all the chaos that would come with freed prisoners, called banners, and a realm cracking open after too many lies.
She knew she should have stepped through the next rift without delay.
But she had wanted one minute before she became useful again. Before she became a witness, a messenger, a bridge between realms, a thing everyone needed to point somewhere. One minute in the endless dark between worlds, where no one could ask anything of her.
The leather cover pressed warm beneath her fingers, its gold-veined binding catching the strange, starless light of the Void. Ink shimmered over the page as if the words had risen through black water, each one arriving from somewhere deeper than paper.
Eilíara.
Her name and not her name.
Her life and not her life.
She traced the line without touching it, her finger hovering just above the page. The ink trembled beneath the movement, then gathered itself into a second sentence.
At her first cry, the lantern-flames bloomed blue,
and every silver bell bent toward her cradle.
Her mother laughed and named the sound a blessing.
A breath broke out of Elara.
She pressed one hand to her mouth, but it was too late. The sound had already escaped, small and strangled, ugly in the endless dark around her.
Elara bent over the book as if her body might protect the words from being taken.
The next line began to form, but before the first letter could darken, warmth flared beneath Elara’s ribs.
She went still with the book open in her hands, its gold-veined cover pulsing faintly against her palms, as the pull came again—gentler this time, insistent as fingers closing around a thread tied somewhere inside her chest.
Reynnar?
The name moved through her before thought could catch it, and across the Void, something tugged once more until the page blurred beneath her eyes.
Elara closed the book before the next word could finish forming.
The gold veins dimmed beneath her fingers, but the warmth in her chest did not.
It pulled again, a soft, unrelenting tug that turned her before she had made the choice to move.
The Void stretched around her in every direction, black and endless, threaded with faint glimmers of roads that were not roads, but one opening burned brighter than the rest.
The rift she had sent Raijin through still waited ahead.
It shimmered in the dark, silver and gold light folding over itself like water disturbed by wind. Beyond it, Teinloch moved in broken pieces: red stone streets slick with summer rain, torchlight trembling against black glass windows, the far glow of terraces carved into the caldera.
Elara clutched the book against her chest and followed the pull and stepped into the streets of Teinloch.
Heat rushed over her first, carrying the sulfurous bite of the city.
The Ellylldan kingdom did not sleep like human cities—Latherian towns went quiet after dark, shutters closed, lamps pinched out, streets surrendered to cats and guards.
Teinloch only changed its face. Fire basins burned brighter along the avenues.
The red veins in the volcanic stone pulsed beneath the streets, warming the rainwater gathered in shallow channels until steam drifted ghostlike around Elara’s boots.
Somewhere below, soldiers drilled beneath torchlight, their commands carrying upward in clipped bursts.
Somewhere above, bells rang twice from the western spire.
The pull drew her deeper into the city, through narrow stairways cut into the mountain and along ember-lit terraces.
Twice, Elara paused at crossings where streets split around black stone fountains or descended toward torchlit squares, trying to orient herself by the burn of the mountain beneath her feet.
Each time, the thread beneath her ribs tightened and turned her before she had decided to obey.
She followed it down a lane where the walls leaned close and the steam gathered thick enough to pearl against her lashes. At the next corner, the tug eased.
Elara stopped.
Eamon stood alone beneath an archway of black stone.
For a moment, she understood nothing.
He wore no armor, only a long, dark coat fastened high at the throat, its embroidered hem stirring faintly in the heated wind rising from the vents beneath the road. Lamplight silvered the fall of his golden hair and softened the angles of his face into something almost sorrowful. Almost kind.
“Eilíara,” he said.
Her hand tightened around the book before she seemed to remember she was still holding it, then tucked the little volume into the deep pocket of her trousers, fingers pressing against it to make sure it would not slip free.
“Eamon?”
He did not move.
Behind him, the road descended into a narrow passage cut between two old walls, both carved with worn reliefs of flame-winged horses and figures lifting spears toward a sun whose face had been weathered away.
No soldiers stood nearby. No servants passed.
The city felt suddenly, impossibly distant, its sounds buried beneath the low red pulse of the stone.
Elara looked past him. “Have you seen Reynnar?”
Eamon’s expression did not change, but something behind his eyes dimmed, as if some final mercy in him had gone out.
“Eamon,” she said again, more carefully now. “What is this?”
Then she saw what he held.
Kynra’s spear.
Elara recognized it distantly, as if the thought had reached her from the far end of a dream.
The shaft was dark as storm-felled wood, the blade narrow and luminous, neither silver nor steel, but something between sunfire and bone.
Ancient markings spiraled down from the socket, each one drinking in the light around it before releasing it again in a muted gold pulse.
It should have been impossible for Eamon to stand there with it unnoticed. Impossible for Elara to have missed the way the air bent toward the blade, as if every heat-current in Teinloch had found a king and knelt.
Kynra must have come for the Tribunal after all, Elara thought wildly. Her gaze darted around the alley, but they were alone.
“Eamon, I—”
Understanding arrived, so cold it stole the rest of the sentence from her mouth.
“You called me,” she whispered.
Eamon’s fingers tightened around the spear, and the truth unfolded between them with sickening clarity. Not the Cara. Not Reynnar. The Fuil Choí. The fragment of Reynnar’s Draoth, the life-debt. He had used it to touch the bond, to mimic it, to make her follow.
Heat breathed up from the stones beneath her boots, but Elara’s hands had gone cold. Her fingers pressed hard against the book hidden in her pocket, as if that small, impossible thing could anchor her to herself.
“What are you doing?”
His throat moved. For one trembling second, something like shame crossed his face, loosening the grief around his mouth and making him look terribly, painfully young.
Then it vanished.
“What I should have done from the start,” Eamon said.
“Before Reynnar allowed sentiment to finish destroying our people.” His face hardened, all that pale beauty settling into something colder.
“You were always going to return to him.” His lip curled faintly.
“I heard it. The way your thoughts kept circling back to the human.”
He said the word with such disgust that Elara flinched before she could stop herself.
Her hand went slowly to the dagger at her hip, and Eamon’s eyes flicked down as she drew the blade from its sheath.
“You can hear my thoughts because of the Fuil Choí?” she asked, forcing each word to land evenly. “Can Reynnar hear them, too?”
Eamon laughed bitterly. “He would never. He is far too noble to bridge your mind without permission.” His grip tightened around Kynra’s spear until the gold markings flared beneath his hand. “I would not have either. Not normally.”
“Then why?”
“Because I saw your face after you ran from his hall.” His voice roughened.
“Fear. Not grief. Not horror for what had been done to us. Fear of us. So I opened the bond just enough to make certain you were betraying us, and what did I find?” He stepped closer, and the air bent hot around the spear.
“Your thoughts leading you back to the human realm. Back to a human man who made your blood rush and your heart stumble.”
Elara’s pulse kicked hard against her throat. “You don’t understand.”
“I understand plainly enough.” His eyes shone now, fever-bright and terrible. “You used Reynnar, just as Muirenn warned me. You used his gentleness against him. Learned our world, learned our power, learned what could be taken from us and carried it back to the humans.”
“That is a lie.” Her voice cracked, and she hated it. Hated that he heard it.
“Then why were you afraid?” he demanded. “Why did you run straight to the human realm after Reynnar’s call to arms, if not to warn them?”
“I told you,” she said, hands shaking. “The first day I met you, I told you most humans are kept ignorant of what those in power do. The people who hurt your kind are not the sum of humanity.”
Eamon’s expression did not soften. Her grip tightened around the dagger, but her arm did not rise. She forced herself to breathe, to keep her voice even, to hold the line between fear and reason, though it was thinning by the second.
“And what Reynnar said—”