Chapter 19
LILY
The afternoon sun filtered through the canopy, casting shifting patches of light onto the forest floor as we moved through the trees. The woods smelled of damp earth and pine. The crisp autumn air cooled the sweat at the back of my neck.
I walked beside Lorien, still reeling from everything I had learned with the Weavers.
My thoughts tangled like the threads they claimed were hidden inside me.
I wasn’t ready to believe that I was meant for something bigger.
And yet, I had agreed to return. Agreed to train, to learn how to use this power I barely understood.
If they would help me find my way back home after.
Beside us, Syra walked in silence, her sharp eyes always scanning the woods ahead. She hadn’t said much since the threads had been revealed, but her presence had weight. Where Ysella offered warmth and patience, Syra offered clarity—and sometimes, the brutal kind.
Syra had pulled me aside earlier. “You need to tell them how you got here? What brought you back to us?”
I didn't know where to begin.
But I told them. About the necklace. About the pendant my gran had left me, the way it had shattered. About waking up in the forest, breathless and terrified, in a world I didn’t understand.
Syra had gone very still. “Describe it again. Every detail.”
So I did. The gold casing. The intricate engravings. The way the sand inside had seemed to glow from within.
“Elowen's pendant,” Ysella had breathed, and something like awe had crept into her voice. “The failsafe. We thought it was lost when she—” She'd stopped herself, exchanged a glance with her sister.
“But how did your grandmother get it?” Syra had demanded.
“The pendant was meant to be passed down through the Weaver line—from one powerful Weaver to the next, always seeking the one with the strongest connection to the Weave.
It disappeared the night Elowen vanished.
We've been searching for it ever since.”
“I don't know,” I'd admitted. “Gran never told me about it. Would never even let me touch the box it was in.”
Syra had studied me with those sharp, assessing eyes. “You said there is no magic in your time. No Weavers. Somehow your bloodline locked away their magic. And yet the necklace still found you. You, my girl, are far more connected to this than you realize. The pendant chose you for a reason.”
The pieces clicked into place—not with the crushing weight of destiny, but with the sharp clarity of a researcher finally seeing the pattern she'd been tracing for years.
Three years researching people who'd vanished from Victorian records.
Hundreds of names, seventy-three locations, patterns that no one else believed were real.
My colleagues had called me obsessed. My advisor had warned me I was chasing ghosts, that I'd never get my PhD if I kept pursuing a thesis no one would take seriously.
But I hadn't been able to stop. Something had driven me to keep digging, to cross-reference census data and parish registers, to document every disappearance with meticulous precision.
Like I'd known—on some level deeper than conscious thought—that I would need that proof.
That I would need to understand exactly what had happened to these people.
Because without that knowledge, I wouldn't be able to help them now.
I was a historian. I'd spent years documenting the dead, the disappeared, the deliberately forgotten. And now I was being asked to save them. I'd been preparing to rewrite history itself. I just hadn’t known it.
I glanced at the sun high in the sky filtering through the canopy. How much time had passed? I needed to get back before August realized I was gone.
The group moved carefully, their steps practiced and quiet. The Weavers had long learned how to slip through the woods unnoticed, their presence barely more than a breath against the wind. I stayed close to Lorien, whose warmth and patience had already begun to ease some of my nerves.
“You’ll come back tomorrow?” she asked.
I nodded. “I need to learn more about this magic that has been hiding inside of me.”
She gave a small smile. Then, a shift—sudden and unmistakable.
A tense ripple moved through the group. Someone ahead of us stilled, their body going rigid. Lorien sucked in a sharp breath.
“Run,” one of the Weavers whispered, barely more than a breath. “They’re here.”
My pulse slammed into my ribs.
The Witch Hunters.
Panic struck like a lightning bolt. The others reacted instantly, vanishing into the trees like ghosts. I turned to follow, but Lorien grabbed my arm.
“Not that way,” she whispered harshly, shoving me toward a thick patch of underbrush. “Hide. Stay down and do not make a sound.”
“Lorien.”
“Now.”
I hesitated for only a second before scrambling into the brush, pressing myself against the damp earth. My heart thundered in my chest as I forced myself to stay still.
Lorien turned to run.
She wasn’t fast enough.
A figure lunged from the trees, tackling her to the ground. She thrashed wildly, her cry cut short as the hunter wrenched her arms behind her back. Metal glinted in the filtered sunlight—iron manacles, thick and cruel.
The moment they snapped around her wrists, Lorien went rigid. A sound escaped her—half gasp, half sob—like something vital had been severed.
“There will be no mind games from you today, Weaver,” the hunter growled, cinching the iron tighter.
She thrashed, wild and desperate. But she was outnumbered and the iron had already done its work. Her magic, whatever she might have used to escape, was gone.
I crouched behind a fallen elm, briars snagging my skirt. I dug my fingers into the dirt, forcing myself not to make a sound.
“Take her to the clearing.”
I froze.
That voice. Unmistakable.
August.
He stepped into view, his sharp gaze flicking to Lorien, then surveying the area like he expected others to still be nearby. His posture was composed, unreadable, but I could see it—the way his fingers twitched slightly at his side, the way his jaw tightened just a fraction.
My stomach dropped. He was here. Of course he was here—this was what he did. This was who he was.
But seeing him in that clearing, watching him give orders to bind a Weaver in iron, was different from knowing it abstractly. Different from hearing him talk about his duty over brandy in his study.
This was real. Lorien was real. And August had just helped capture her. The man who'd tended my wounds with shaking hands. The man who'd asked if I was worth remembering. The man who'd looked at me last night like I was something precious.
And I couldn't reconcile the two.
I moved carefully through the underbrush. Each step measured. Each breath shallow. The dry leaves beneath me threatened to give me away, but I couldn’t risk stopping. I had to see—had to know what happened to the Weavers when they were taken.
The clearing opened ahead, but I couldn’t get any closer. If I did, I’d be seen. And if I was caught now, August wouldn’t hesitate. He would turn me in without a second thought, and I would be unraveled before I could convince him otherwise.
So I stayed where I was, heart pounding in my throat, hidden in the tangled bramble just beyond the tree line.
Then, a rider approached.
A man, somewhere in his fifties, dismounted a massive black horse, his boots sinking slightly into the damp earth. His presence alone made the air shift, as if the very forest recoiled from him. My mouth went dry. Every instinct screamed at me to run—but I couldn’t look away.
The Unraveler.
I knew him instantly from the vision. Elias. The man who'd burst through that door twenty-seven years ago, who'd been struck by wild magic and corrupted into something that consumed the very thing his wife had died trying to protect.
I studied him, committing every detail to memory.
He looked the same. Older, yes—the dark hair now streaked with gray, the sharp angular features lined with decades that had weathered him but not softened him.
The bone structure was identical. The way he carried himself with precise, controlled purpose.
But his eyes—the most magnificent green I had ever seen—should have been arresting. Instead, they were dull. Empty.
Like the magic had taken something from him, too.
A chill ran down my spine. This was the man who unraveled Weavers—who stole their threads from the fabric of existence. And as I watched him approach Lorien, the reality of it settled over me like a weight I couldn’t shake.
This wasn’t just a fight.
This was extermination.
And I was standing on the wrong side of the line.
I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t bear to watch what was about to happen to Lorien.
My body moved before my mind could catch up. Branches tore at my sleeves, whipping against my skin, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t.
Tears blurred my vision, hot and wild and endless. I couldn’t breathe—I didn’t know if it was the sprint or the panic or the truth finally cracking open inside me.
These women weren’t evil.
I wasn’t evil.
And yet, the world saw us as something to be erased.
I didn't stop running until the trees gave way to buildings, until the forest floor became cobblestones beneath my feet.
My lungs burned, my legs screamed, but I pushed harder, sprinting through Oxford's streets as the weight of everything pressed down on me.
My heart pounded in time with the accusations that had been drilled into me since I arrived—Weavers were dangerous, unnatural, a threat.
Lies.
I didn’t stop running until I reached August’s home, bursting through the door with shaking hands and a fractured mind. My breath came in ragged gasps, my body trembling from exhaustion—and from the sick, lurching certainty that nothing I believed could protect me now.
Behind me, the front door remained open, letting in the cool autumn air.
And somewhere in the distance, in a clearing I'd never find again, Lorien's threads were being pulled from the world one by one. Because I knew the truth now: survival meant choosing sides. And I’d just run straight back into the home of the very thing I was supposed to fear.
The enemy.
The man I was falling for.