Chapter Twenty-Five
Alyssa
The knocking came while I was still tangled up in Tank.
Three sharp raps on the door, impatient and familiar, and I knew before I even opened my eyes that it was Fizzle. Nobody else knocked like that. Nobody else would dare interrupt what had been the first real peace I’d felt in weeks.
Tank’s arms tightened around me. “Ignore it,” he murmured against my hair.
The knocking came again. Harder.
“You can’t ignore me, and I wouldn’t recommend trying,” Fizzle’s voice came through the door, clipped and irritable. “Get up. Get dressed. It’s time.”
Something about those last two words made my stomach drop.
I pulled myself reluctantly from Tank’s arms and reached for the clothes that someone had left folded on the chair by the window, trying not to think about how intrusive that felt or the fact that to our knowledge there were no other living creatures in this Court.
Tank was already moving, his body shifting from rest to alert in the space of a breath.
He pulled his shirt over his head and his eyes found mine, that immediate, instinctive sweep he always did.
Checking I was whole. Checking I was safe.
I opened the door. Fizzle sat in the corridor, his small form perched on a ledge of crystal that jutted from the wall. His eyes found mine and held them.
“Time for what?” I asked, being purposefully obtuse.
“You know what.” He hopped down from the ledge and started walking. “She’s been waiting for you. She’s been waiting for a very long time.”
The voice in the wind. The whisper that had followed me across this realm, through forests and battlefields and frozen wastelands. The presence I’d felt at the edges of my awareness since the first moment I’d set foot in Nymeria.
My mother. Not the woman who raised me. The being that created me.
Tank’s hand found the small of my back. Steady and warm, just like always. I leaned into it for just a second before we followed Fizzle into the shifting corridors of the Fifth Court.
The others were already gathered in a wide antechamber, and I didn’t have to ask how they knew.
The bond was humming with it. Something was coming.
Something big. Dean was leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed, his jaw tight, his eyes tracking every shadow.
The wolf was close to the surface. I could feel it through the bond, that coiled, restless energy that meant he was on high alert.
Maddox stood near the centre of the room while Ryder was pacing.
He stopped when I entered and opened his mouth, probably to make a joke, but nothing came out.
He just looked at me with those sharp eyes and nodded.
And Damon. His eyes were clear. Lucid. The nightmare was quiet, at least for now, and the man underneath was watching me with an intensity that made something in my chest tighten.
“Where are we going?” Dean asked. The question was directed at Fizzle, but his eyes were on me.
“Down,” Fizzle said. And then he turned and walked through a door that I could have sworn wasn’t there a moment ago.
We followed. Of course we did. What else were we going to do?
The passage led deeper than I thought possible.
Down through stone that grew older with every step, the crystal veins in the walls pulsing with light that matched my heartbeat.
The magic here was so thick I could feel it pressing against my skin, could taste it in every breath. Ancient. Patient. Waiting.
Nobody spoke. Even Ryder, who could usually be counted on to fill any silence with something sharp and funny, was quiet. The only sounds were our footsteps, and that slow, rhythmic pulse in the walls.
Then the passage opened, and the chamber took my breath away.
It was vast. Cathedral-vast, with a ceiling that stretched so high it disappeared into shadow.
The floor was smooth stone shot through with veins of gold that pulsed with a faint, steady glow.
In the centre stood a throne, though throne wasn’t quite the right word.
It was something that had grown from the earth itself, roots and crystal and stone woven together into a seat that looked ancient beyond reckoning.
Yet, it was empty.
“Where is she?” I whispered, though I didn’t know why I was whispering. The space demanded it.
Nobody answered. Behind me, I could feel my mates through the bond.
Tank’s steady presence like a hand on my shoulder.
Dean’s coiled alertness. Maddox’s grief-tinged wonder.
Ryder’s barely concealed awe. And Damon, his thread in the bond still thin and flickering like a candle in a draught.
But at least it was present, even if it was still fragile.
Then I heard it.
A whisper. Not words, not yet. Just the ghost of a voice threading through the air like silk catching on skin. It brushed past my ear and I turned, but there was nothing. Just the breathing walls and the pulsing gold and the vast, patient silence.
Alyssandra.
My breath caught. Because I knew that voice. I’d heard it in the wind on the plains of Nymeria, in the rustle of leaves in the Autumn forests, in the crash of waves against the cliffs of Ice Falls. I’d heard it my whole life in this realm without ever understanding what it was.
“That’s her,” I breathed.
The whisper came again, stronger now, and this time it wasn’t just sound. It was sensation. Warmth spreading up through the soles of my boots, through the stone, through the golden veins in the floor. The air shifted, thickened, and in the space above the empty throne, something began to gather.
Light first. Not the harsh light of the sun or the cold light of the moon but something older, something that existed before either.
It pooled and swirled, shot through with veins of shadow that moved like living things.
Then colour bled into it. The green of new growth, the deep red of autumn leaves, the white-blue of winter ice, the burning gold of summer.
All of it, shifting, never settling, flowing from one into the next like seasons passing in the span of a heartbeat.
The form took shape slowly. A figure, tall and slender, made of everything and nothing at once.
I watched flowers bloom across what might have been shoulders and die in the same breath, frost crackling along the edges of fingers that weren’t quite solid.
Shadow and light chased each other across the surface of her like clouds racing across the sky.
And then the face settled.
My stomach dropped.
She looked like me. Not exactly. Older, sadder, worn down by something I couldn’t name.
But the shape of the jaw, the line of the cheekbones, the way the eyes sat.
I was looking at a mirror that showed me millenia instead of years.
And then, just for a flicker, the features shifted.
Sharper. Harder. A cruel edge to the mouth that I recognised from a different face entirely.
Arik’s face.
The features smoothed back to something softer, something that was neither me nor him but somewhere in between. And the eyes. God, the eyes. They held so much. Every season, every storm, every life that had ever been born and died in this realm. Looking into them felt like drowning in time.
“Alyssandra.” The voice was clear now, though it still carried echoes. Wind and water and the creak of ancient wood. “My daughter.”
The words hit me like a physical blow. I’d known. Since Arik called me sister, since the pieces had started falling into place, I’d known what I was. But hearing it from her, from this impossible, beautiful, breaking thing that had made me, was different.
“Don’t call me that.”
The words came out harder than I intended. Or maybe exactly as hard as I intended. Behind me, I felt Dean’s hand brush my back. A question, not a restraint. I didn’t lean into it. I could be strong here.
Nymeria’s form flickered. The flowers at her shoulders wilted, curling brown at the edges. “You have every right to your anger.”
“You’re damn right I do.” The fury was rising now, the thing I’d been carrying since Arik whispered sister on the battlefield.
“You made me. You made him. You created two children and set them on a collision course and then what? Sat back and whispered in the wind while he burned your realm to the ground?”
The light in the chamber dimmed. Not dramatically, not like a threat. Like sadness. Like the room itself flinching.
“Yes,” Nymeria said. Simply. No defence. No excuse. “That is exactly what I did.”
That stole some of the heat from my rage. I’d expected arguments, justifications, some grand cosmic reason that would make it all make sense. Not agreement.
“I created Arik first,” she continued, and her voice carried the weight of centuries.
“I poured everything I had into him. My hope. My power. My desperate need to fix the growing problems in this realm.” The shifting form seemed to contract, growing smaller.
“But he was incomplete. There was a hunger in him I hadn’t intended.
A rage that had no source. An emptiness that nothing could fill. ”
“So you threw him away.” My voice was flat.
“I cast him out.” Her eyes closed, or the approximation of eyes in that shifting face. “Hoping he would find his own path. Hoping the realm would gentle him, shape him, give him what I couldn’t. Instead...”
“Instead he festered. And planned. And became a monster.”
“Yes.”
“And then you made me.” The words tasted bitter. “Your second attempt. Your weapon.”
The form flickered again, and for a moment I saw something raw underneath the elemental display. Just pain. Old, exhausted pain. “I made you to be the daughter I hoped he could have been. Not a weapon, Alyssandra. A choice. I wanted to give this realm a choice.”
I wanted to keep being angry. It was easier than the thing trying to crawl up my throat. The grief, the horrible understanding that was settling into my bones despite my best efforts to keep it out.