Epilogue
JUPITER
Three-ish months later?
Several months later, or so we’d roughly calculated since the Ophis planet’s days were longer than Earth’s, I sat on the balcony of a crystal spire, and watched the twin suns go down over the city they called Aurelian.
The fissures in my skin had healed. Mostly.
Silver lines still traced my arms, my collarbones, the backs of my hands.
My hair had stayed white, root to tip, no sign of the original color coming back, and at some point I’d stopped waiting for it to.
Everything on this planet was silver or violet or emerald anyway.
I fit in better here than I ever had on Earth, I supposed.
Noodle was stretched along the railing, soaking up the last of the warmth. His thoughts were slow and satisfied.
I turned, sensing a presence behind me, and found Percy leaning in the doorway, arms crossed, still in the dark fitted armor the Ophis military had lent him. It suited him better than it had any right to. He looked like some kind of sexy ass Spartan warrior in combat boots.
He dropped into the chair beside mine, and was immediately snoring five seconds later, utterly exhausted.
The bond gave a small, warm pulse, and I could feel where each of my bonded mates were at.
Aiden, Draco and Jamie were lending a hand in the refugee quarters, while Rowan and Lucas were just beyond the border of the large city, near the sea, where a portal highway had been in use for centuries, apparently.
Portals that once again connected the thirteen worlds together across the Milky Way.
Theo and Eris were meeting with some of the Order elders, discussing the logistics of bringing more Aelari over from Earth, and where to begin.
The riders who’d greeted us that first day had been Ophis.
Every single one. Their starlight had called to mine, and mine had answered, and for one blinding, overwhelming moment, I’d felt less alone than I ever had in my entire life.
They’d climbed the cliff on foot, their mounts, called the Cree, couldn’t make the ascent.
When they reached the crest, they’d stared at the crowd of bedraggled, bloodied, shell-shocked refugees scattered across the hillside in utter bewilderment.
But there was also recognition. Not of individuals, but of kin.
Of blood. Of the magic that lived in all of us, the same magic that lived in them.
They’d dropped their weapons, and the woman at the front—her name, I’d later learn, was Seraphine—had walked straight up to me and pressed her forehead to mine, and the starlight in her veins had tangled with the starlight in mine, and I’d sobbed like a child.
They’d brought us to a place called Aurelian.
Carried the wounded on their Cree, walked alongside the rest of us, and the whole way down into the valley, I’d kept waiting for the punchline.
For the catch. For the moment when someone would reveal that this was all some elaborate trap, or that the city was actually a ruin, or that the bane were still here, lurking in the shadows.
But Aurelian was real. The crystal towers were real.
The bridges connecting them, the gardens spiraling up their sides, the markets and homes and public squares.
All of it was real, and all of it was inhabited by Aelari who looked at us like we were ghosts.
Like we’d stepped out of a story they’d been told as children, a tragedy so ancient it had morphed into myth.
The first twenty-four hours were just chaos and confusion. There were the obvious emergencies like injuries, missing children, people halfway to full breakdowns, and a full-on stampede of Aelari civilians trying to get a look at the spectacle.
Some were terrified. Some looked suspicious, while others were welcoming. It was hard to say, since the language barrier was a son of a bitch and nobody had gotten past the basic “hello, please don’t stab us” phase of translation until at least a week in.
We set up a sort of triage camp in the plaza just inside the city walls.
Blankets, cots, and whatever supplies the Ophis could spare from their own stores.
The Assembly members tried to take charge, obviously, but since most of them couldn’t even talk to the locals, that went about as well as a screen door on a submarine.
The Order elders stepped up, and for that, I would be forever grateful. Tala immediately started organizing people. Malakai paired up with one of the Ophis lieutenants to coordinate shelters, food, water, security, the whole nine yards. I did my best to stay out of the way and not pass out.
Nobody expected me to do anything in those first seventy-two hours. I think the city’s council assumed I was some kind of holy relic, because every time I tried to stand, a half-dozen people would rush over and physically put me back down.
I tried to make myself useful anyway. It was a compulsion, maybe. Or just guilt, since I’d been the one to drag everyone through the portal in the first place. But even the simplest things left me gasping, like carrying water, helping patch wounds, even just answering questions.
Most of the time, it was enough to just lean on one of my guys and try not to let my knees buckle.
The city itself was unreal. Aurelian operated like something halfway between a medieval kingdom and a sci-fi utopia.
There were no cars. No engines. No computers, unless you counted the weird crystal tablet things the locals carried that glowed with lines of unreadable text.
Everything ran on magic. Literally everything. Lights, heating, water, all of it.
The Cree were everywhere. Massive horse-creatures that were way bigger up close than they looked from the cliffside.
The Aelari rode them through the city, up ramps, across bridges suspended god-knows how high, sometimes even into buildings.
There were stables built right into the ground floors of the towers, and the mounts were apparently incredibly intelligent and revered.
Most of the riders had a familiar bond with their Cree.
There was an emperor too. I didn’t meet him, but everyone talked about him, or at least gestured vaguely in the direction of the palace at the center of the city.
The Aelari councils, the actual power behind the throne, were a different story.
Each council ran their own city, or sector, or cluster, depending on how many people lived there.
Aurelian had its own, but there were seventeen other major cities scattered across the continent.
All of them operated independently, but they communicated via these insane crystal tech pillars that shot beams of light into the sky.
The language situation was a nightmare. Not just one, but five different dialects that morphed depending on what end of Aurelian you were standing in.
The Order members who’d studied the old tongues were recruited instantly as translators, but even they could only get by on context and hand signals with some of the dialects.
Most of the refugees from Earth had zero luck communicating with the locals, except by drawing pictures or shouting very loudly, which, shockingly, did not work any better.
I spent a lot of time feeling like a lost tourist. Every day, I’d wake up to the sight of the twin suns rising over the city, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with myself.
On good days, I helped with the wounded, or sat in on meetings between the Order elders and the city council, offering my opinion whenever someone thought to ask.
On bad days, I just… tried not to fall apart.
Most of my shield was finding their own rhythms. Jamie kept mostly to himself, which wasn’t a surprise, but he spent a lot of time with Gretchen exploring the spires.
Lucas and Rowan were obsessed with the way magic ran water through the city, and spent an entire week shadowing the Aelari engineers as they tuned the crystals in the aqueduct towers.
Percy, Aiden, and Eris stuck close to me, which was both sweet and a little claustrophobic, but I think they were genuinely worried I might collapse if they left me alone for five minutes.
Phoenix was a goddamn rock star from day one.
The locals adored him, probably because he could make their gardens bloom by just walking past. The crystal bridges were lined with living walls of emerald vines and massive, iridescent flowers that shimmered in the sunlight.
Every single time he walked the main avenue, people would literally stop to watch.
I guess it was pretty rare to see a Taurus off of their home planet these days, so he was a spectacle,
Theo and Draco got sucked into the Order’s meetings with the Aelari scholars, because of course they did. My dad joined them a lot too, his professor brain going absolutely haywire as we essentially had to rewrite everything we thought we knew about the home worlds.
The Aelari had no intention of keeping secrets.
They wanted to share everything, and thank fuck for that because we were going to have to figure out a way back to Earth soon to collect the rest of our people…
those who wanted to leave Earth, that is.
Some of the refugees might even want to go back, and they had every right to.
The more we learned about what had actually happened to Aelari society after the First Crossing, the less sense any of it made. The Assembly had always framed the home worlds as these haunted, ruined graveyards. Dead planets.
Yeah, no. The Assembly had no fucking clue.
The Order elders started putting the pieces together.
In the beginning, it was a translation nightmare.
Half the words the locals used for basic concepts didn’t even exist in Order lexicons.
They didn’t call themselves the Aelari, for starters.
Here, it was “Allari,” and the inflection shifted depending on the dialect.