Chapter 57
FIFTY-SEVEN
ARWEN
THREE MONTHS LATER
The monastery is gone.
I stand at the edge of what used to be the outer wall—nothing but rubble now, stones scattered across the charred earth like bones left behind by some massive predator.
The fire did its work well. The towers have collapsed.
The chapel is a crater. The Garden where the Abbot tended his horrible flowers is nothing but blackened soil where nothing will ever grow again.
Time and weather have claimed what the flames didn’t touch.
Rain has washed away the ash, leaving the stones clean but fractured.
Vines have begun creeping over the ruins—real vines, not the flowering horrors that used to decorate these walls.
The Thornwood is healing around the destruction we left behind, new growth pushing up through the burnt remnants of the old.
The wild Bloom is dying. Without the Abbot’s cultivation, without the concentrated essence from the Garden, the parasitic fungus that saturated this forest is withering away.
I can still smell it—that particular sweetness, fainter now than it has ever been, fading with each week that passes.
Another few months and it will be gone entirely.
I should feel triumphant. Should feel victorious, standing here in the ruins of my prison, knowing that everything that hurt me has been reduced to rubble and memory.
Instead, I feel sad.
I walk through the ruins slowly, picking my way over fallen stones and collapsed timbers.
The east wing is completely destroyed—nothing left but a few sections of wall that jut up from the debris like broken teeth.
The Confessional Cells where I spent so many nights have been buried beneath tons of stone.
The Abbot’s sanctum, with its silk hangings and its hidden chambers, is nothing but a pile of scorched rubble.
I find the remains of my cell by memory more than sight.
There’s nothing recognizable about it now—just a section of floor that I know used to be mine because of its position relative to the courtyard fountain, which is somehow still standing. The grate I used to look through, counting stars and dreaming of escape, has been crushed flat by a fallen beam.
Years of my life, spent in a room barely large enough to lie down in. Years of conditioning and control and the slow erosion of everything I used to be.
And now it’s just... rubble.
I crouch beside the fallen grate. Run my fingers over the rusted iron. Try to feel something—triumph, closure, relief—and find only a hollow ache that I don’t know how to fill.
I thought I would feel different, coming back here.
I thought that seeing the destruction with my own eyes would make it real in a way that reports and rumors hadn’t.
That standing in the Garden’s crater—a pit of blackened earth thirty feet across, the soil still faintly warm from fires that burned for weeks—would finally convince the part of me that still wakes up in cold sweats that it’s really over.
But the truth is messier than that.
The monastery is destroyed. The Abbot is dead. The cult that consumed my adolescence and most of my adulthood has been burned to the ground and scattered to the winds.
And I still don’t feel free.
I still flinch when people approach from behind. Still sleep facing doors, with my back to walls, waking at any change in the sounds around me. Still eat quickly and finish every bite, unable to shake the habits formed by years of not knowing when my next meal would come.
The prison is gone. But the prisoner remains.
I wonder if that will ever change. Wonder if there’s a version of me that exists without the scars, without the conditioning, without the reflexive distrust that colors every interaction.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Maybe freedom isn’t the absence of what was done to me. Maybe freedom is choosing what to do with what remains.
I searched for word of Elias in the first weeks.
Asked every survivor, every traveler, every innkeeper in the villages closest to where he’d last been stationed.
I found nothing. He may have died before I was taken.
He may have lived his whole life not knowing what happened to me. I’ll probably never know which.
Three months ago, that uncertainty would have broken something in me. Now I find I can hold it alongside everything else—another scar, another weight, another thing that is simply true. He was my brother. I loved him. Whatever happened to him, that part doesn’t change.
I’m still crouching by the grate when I hear his footsteps.
He’s trying to be quiet—moving with the careful precision of someone who has spent centuries learning how to approach without being noticed. But I know his gait by now. Know the particular rhythm of his steps, the way he distributes his mass across uneven ground.
I knew he’d follow me. He’s been tracking me since we left the village this morning, hanging back to give me space while staying close enough to intervene if something went wrong.
He does that a lot. Gives me space while making sure I’m never truly alone.
Three months ago, I would have resented it. Would have seen his protective instincts as another form of control, another cage wrapped in different cloth.
Now I understand it for what it is: care. The particular care of someone who has lost too much to risk losing anything else.
“You can stop lurking.” I don’t turn around. “I know you’re there.”
“I wasn’t lurking.” His voice comes from closer than I expected—he covered the last few yards while I was speaking. “I was observing.”
“From behind a collapsed wall?”
“It had a good vantage point.”
I almost smile. Almost.