The Same Hour
“You remember now.” Someone’s voice fills the clearing.
Snow freezes mid-air, each flake hanging suspended in time. The blue flames around the circle roar to life, climbing toward the sky, blue bleeding into a shimmering gold. A figure steps out of it—neither man nor woman, a shifting composite of light and shadow. I’d know that presence anywhere.
“Therael?” I whisper.
“Yes,” Andrik rasps. “We remember.”
Remember what?
Therael steps closer, and the godfire parts around him like water.
“You died that day, Caelen.” Therael’s gaze settles on Andrik. “Both of you did. The fall took you before your fingers could truly lace with hers.”
Who is Caelen… why does that name feel familiar?
“But the gods do not waste true soulbonds.” Therael gestures between Andrik and Lumi. “What you had was sacred, woven into the loom of fate itself. To let it end on that cliff would have been… a tragedy we could not abide.”
“So you brought us back?” Lumi whispers.
“We gave him a choice.” Therael’s attention shifts back to Andrik. “You, Caelen. You, who loved her so fiercely, you followed her into death without a second thought.”
If Andrik is Caelen, what do I have to do with this?
“We offered you a second chance. But it came with a price,” Therael murmurs. “You chose the burden. You became the beast. The judge. The protector. And you waited.”
“For lifetimes,” Andrik whispers.
“Yes.” Therael’s gaze softens.
“And when she returned to the cold... when the snow claimed her grief as it once claimed her life... the bond began to wake.” Lumi’s hand finds Andrik’s.
“But the prophecy has conditions,” Therael continues.
“She had to return to the cold willingly. Not as a victim of death, but as a seeker of truth. In search of something lost.”
“Anna,” Lumi breathes.
“Yes. Your grief for the sister who shared your soul, brought you back to the place where you lost it. And the one who coveted you—” Therael’s gaze flicks to Micah’s body.
“—had to be ended. Not by the hand of a murderer seeking vengeance. But by the hand of a protector, choosing love over his own kin. A necessity born of a love that cannot lose her again.”
Kin? Wait—is he saying Micah and Andrik are brothers?
“Only then,” Therael intones, “would your memories return. Only then would the bond be truly complete.”
“What about him?” Lumi gestures toward Micah’s body. “What happens now?”
Therael is quiet for a long moment, the light in his eyes pulsing hypnotically. “Therin made the same choice you did, Caelen.”
Who is Therin?
“When he realized what he’d done—when he saw her plummeting toward the water—he did not stay on the edge; he followed her into the abyss, begging the gods for a second chance. He wanted to undo the moment his hands betrayed his heart. He wanted to save the woman he believed he loved.”
“But he didn’t love her,” Andrik growls. “He was obsessed. He wanted to own her light because he couldn’t find his own.”
“Yes.” Therael’s voice is heavy with sadness. “And no.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“Therin did not seek to own her, Caelen. He did not wish to extinguish her light or cage it. He wanted only to be the soil beneath her feet—to do whatever was necessary to watch her bloom brighter. He stayed for her. He jumped for her. He spent over three thousand years mourning the moment his hands failed her before he was thrust into this life.”
Therin was thrust into… this life as Micah?
“His love was not the lack of light,” Therael continues, “but a lack of direction. He was the seed that tried to claim the sun. He poured his devotion into a vessel that was never meant to hold it, and in doing so, he let the weeds of his own soul take root. He did not see that while he was busy tending to a garden that was never meant to be his, his own true bond was waiting in the shadows, unwatered and alone.”
Lumi’s breath hitches, and her eyes roam to where Micah is lying in the snow. And in this moment, she reminds me so much of Eden. The fear and heartbreak from earlier has shifted to empathy.
“He was trying,” she whispers. “All this time... he was just trying to fix it.”
“He was,” Therael confirms. “But one cannot fix a severed thread by tying it to the wrong soul. To do so only creates a knot that must be cut.”
“But—” Andrik starts.
“Just as you were tasked with judging souls, he was tasked with mastering the meadow of his own spirit. To ensure the darker parts of his nature did not take root and choke the life from everything he touched—to bloom instead of bane.”
Lumi steps toward Therael, and Andrik drags her back.
“We sent him back with a twin. A twisted mirror—Mark—a soul prone to violence, to hunger, to all the things Therin was capable of becoming. His task was to guide that darkness. To prove he could protect a life instead of possessing it. To choose slow growth over the vine of obsession.”
“But he failed,” Andrik says, looking at Micah.
“He failed.” Therael’s eyes fall to the snow. “He could not control the bane in his brother because he had not yet cleared it from himself. He could not let go of what was never his. And in the end, the bitter fruit blinded him again.”
“So what now?” Lumi asks, tears spilling down her face. “Does he just... die? After all that trying? After you let him fail because of a psycho brother?” she shouts. Andrik attempts to tuck her behind him for the second time, but Therael waves him away with a single, shimmering motion.
“I understand your anger, Naya.” Therael raises his voice.
“But as I said, the gods do not waste soulbonds—especially souls willing to jump into the dark for a mate that was not even theirs to claim. Therin—Micah—will be given another chance. Reborn once more. But this time...” he pauses.
“This time, he will find his true bond. The one he was always meant to have. The one he overlooked because your soul was carrying fragments of hers.”
Eden? That has to be Eden.
“Wait!” Lumi whispers, her brows pinching together. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying? My sister... Anna?”
“Anya,” Therael corrects her. “And Anna. Two names, one soul. She was the other half of the thread that broke on the cliff three thousand years ago. Not just your bond with Caelen—but Therin’s with Anya.”
Her knees buckle, and Andrik catches her, hauling her against his chest.
“Anya was your guardian in your first life—the older sister who left these woods and took the burden of the scout’s path so you could remain within the safety of the Archive,” Therael continues.
“She bore the scars of the world so your hands could stay stained only by ink. But the wheel turns, and the debt of protection must be repaid. So she returned as the younger sister… and you became the guardian she once was to you.”
Anya is the name of our true mate. And she was brought back as Anna in her second life. And Eden in her third.
“Micah did not love you, Lumi,” Therael admits, and my chest feels a thousand pounds lighter. I knew we could never love anyone else.
“He loved the piece of her that you were holding for safekeeping. Souls do not travel alone; they travel in constellations. He was chasing a ghost that lived inside your heart, sensing the mate he hadn’t yet found, but he looked at the wrong face to find her.”
You hunted where the echo stayed, by one small piece of soul betrayed.
For two lifetimes, we chased after the tiny echo of our mate’s soul that Lumi carried inside her. Lumi, who is also our soulbond’s sister. How are we ever going to explain this to Eden?
Everything disappears, thinning like breath on glass until I’m standing in the middle of nothing at all, holding the weight of everything I just learned.
The dark begins to warm.
A single leaf spirals down, and he unfolds where it lands.
“So now you know, Little Reaper,” he says softly.
“How am I here?” I manage. “The dust always locks me in the void. I’ve never seen any of this.”
Something akin to guilt moves across his face.
“That was my doing, Little Reaper. After I gave Sage the riddle, I went to Remavau, and I asked him to do what I could not. To reach into the dream beneath the dust and pull you down—all the way down—to the one place the truth has already been spoken aloud.” The leaves of his halo rattle softly.
“Because I could not say it to you myself. I am bound from it. But there is nothing that says I cannot walk a man to a door that is already open.”
I want to be angry that he’s been hovering at the edge of all of this, watching us claw through the dark for answers since Sage’s first headache. But I can’t find the anger anywhere.
“Then you can talk about it now?” I say. “You’re not bound from this part.”
“What you have learned for yourself, I am free to speak of. That is the shape of the cage I live in. I cannot give you the truth until you hold it in your own hands…” He spreads his fingers. “... and then I may help you carry it.”
“I have so many questions.”
“I have endless time, though you have a worried mate to return to.”
My heart clenches. But if I’m going to get things right this time, I have to get answers.
“So we were Micah in our previous life. We were human.”
Therael is quiet longer than the question warrants.
“Sage was Micah,” he says. “There was a soul in that body that the world called Micah. And it is the same soul that the world now calls Sage.”
I wait for him to fold me into it: And you, little reaper. You were there too. He doesn’t.
“I don’t like how you worded that.”
“No,” he says. “I do not imagine you do.”
“Sage was Micah.” I turn the words over.
“You said it three times, three different ways, and not once did you say we. Not once did you say I.” The cold thing in my chest goes still.
“Why does it matter how you say it, Therael? We’re one soul.
If Sage was Micah, then so was I. That’s how this works. ”