20. Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Nineteen
The mist surrounded us, tugging me down like a quicksand. My heart lurched in my chest. The world tilted weightless and crushing all at once. My knees buckled. Instinct flared, and my hand shot out, gripping the nearest anchor.
Tairngire.
His body went rigid, a sharp flinch beneath my palm. For a breath, I considered letting go, but the mist pressed too heavy, dragging me under. I held on tighter.
Something passed between us, a current thrumming between bond and blood, grounding me even as the mist tore us from Anamcroí.
Through the haze, his eyes locked on mine with that familiar look I couldn't place.
Then the mist swallowed us whole. Discordant voices threaded sharp and endless. The hum was steady but chaotic. It clawed at my ribs, my balance, my breath.
“It’s wrong,” I shouted. “Too loud.”
“Because you’re fighting it.” Tairngire’s voice cut close. His hand clamped around my wrist, iron-strong, pulling me forward—straight into him.
I hit his chest hard, leather warm beneath my palm. He didn’t let go of my wrist. The mist churned, but his grip steadied me, forcing me to find ground in him when there was none beneath my feet.
His breath brushed against my temple, sharp with command. “Let it take you. Stop resisting.”
I jerked my chin up, furious that he would even suggest such a thing, then froze. We locked eyes. Golden green met hazel. The liminal hum dropped to a dull throb around us. The bond pulled in my chest, practically begging me to get closer to him, a current too strong to swim against.
Roots pressed under my boots. The forest was bleeding through. Still, he didn’t release me.
His eyes cut to his hand holding my wrist.
I’d touched him more in the last moon cycle than I had anyone in my lifetime.
Touch had always meant visions, fear, the Oracle’s chains.
Never want. And there I was, caught in a divine’s grip with an unfamiliar flutter in my stomach.
The one rule I’d never desired to break, yet no vision took me.
Pine and smoke clung to him, clean and real.
His eyes went dark…then curious, searching.
“You reached for me,” he murmured, voice smooth as bark stripped raw.
Heat continued to pool low in my stomach. For a heartbeat I forgot to breathe, but then his expression turned smug.
Damn him.
I bared my teeth. “Don’t flatter yourself. The realm was falling apart. You were the only solid thing there. And this wretched bond…I can’t control it. The connection is inevitable.”
My pulse kicked in his grip.
He dipped his lips to my ear. “Tell yourself that if it helps,” he whispered, pleased. “It’s still a shit lie.”
“Fuck. You.” I seethed.
He just chuckled, leaning back just enough for his presence to continue caging me in. “Horrendous manners. You can feign irritation all you want, but here you stay, touching me.” His gaze dropped to my other hand, flattened against his chest.
I reached for denial and found none. Because he was right.
“Mm. There’s it is.” His voice was velvet over iron as he leaned in once more. “Silence.”
That was when I felt him—all of him. Heat radiating. Leather brushing. His heartbeat in sync with mine. It was the bond. Had to be. It was starting to make me delusional. My breath stuttered, and of course, the bastard noticed.
His delighted smile was almost predatory, satisfied by my unraveling.
I yanked my wrist free with a growl and shoved at his chest. “Why are you still this close? What’s wrong with you?” Frustration tore my voice raw.
He didn’t stumble, because why would he? The mountain of bricks that he was. His expression was downright wicked. “Close?” he echoed. “You started close. Don’t pretend otherwise, now.”
“Maybe my intent was to throttle you,” I snapped. “And to do that, I had to get close, didn’t I?”
That earned another genuine laugh, rich, unrestrained. It reverberated through my chest.
Gods, I hate him. Truly, I do.
I dragged my eyes from him and finally felt it. The mist was gone. And this wasn’t my forest.
The air hung damp, clinging to the lungs. The Weave beneath my skin didn’t hum. It choked. Dim. Distant. Each breath tasted of ash and iron. No warmth. No steady pulse of Anamcroí. The lines here were blackened, decrepit.
I turned slowly. The oaks and elms were familiar, but their bark was scarred, their leaves curled brown. Moss crumbled underfoot instead of sunk. Even the wind carried sickness, crude and sour.
A crow croaked overhead, its feathers falling loose. A village bell tolled hollow in the distance, like mourning carried on the air. Nighttime.
Realization stabbed me. “This…is Morhaven?” I whispered.
Tairngire’s gaze flicked toward me, unbothered, as if the very earth hadn’t just screamed decay into my bones. “Yes. The mortal realm.”
My stomach turned. This was the realm I was born into. The one I was taken from. The one where souls descended with their interim bonds. The place priests spoke of in reverence, even though it was decaying in front of my eyes.
It tasted like rot.
My visions had shown this, people dying from a sickness spreading through villages, a death clinging to bodies like a parasite. The Black Death. I could feel it here. Threads unraveled by the hundreds. Lives cut short, light extinguished before it could flare.
But nothing could have prepared me for the reality of it—nothing. No tome, no warning from the Elder Sgàthánwing.
The weight of it nearly drove me to my knees. “This place…” I swallowed thickly, bile sharp on my tongue. “Is dying.”
“Mm, yes. Mortals tend to do that.” He looked off into the distance, his arms crossed. “Sometimes faster than they should.”
I wrapped my arms around myself, not for warmth but to steady the fury shaking me. “And you bring me here first?”
He watched me intensely. "Like I said, beginnings matter."
The village stank before I saw it.
Smoke clung to sagging chimneys. Death steeped into the cobblestones. Streets unfolded like an open wound—lanterns guttering, shutters nailed shut, cries leaking through the cracks.
Bodies lay beneath linen, flies swarming around them. A boy coughed a dark substance into a rag while his mother rocked him in the mud. A drunk stumbled from a doorway, tankard raised, spewing complaints to a god who wouldn’t hear him. Bells tolled from the chapel, as if they were in mourning.
“The temple reveres this place,” I whispered, bitterness shaking through me. I knew how cruel the bonds could be, but I never realized that the place itself was this grotesque. “They call it holy. A gift from the Old Gods.”
Tairngire walked beside me. “This is what mortals do with holiness. They drink it, waste it, let it decay. The plague runs through their streets because they cling to dirt and refuse to change. They blame it on Fate. Or punishment. Or trial.” His jaw tightened. “But it's their own undoing.”
I looked again at the boy—skin pale, lips blue, chest rattling—and fury scorched me. “They’re dying by the hundreds.”
“Thousands,” he corrected, voice low. “And more will follow. Death spreads faster than hope here.”
I turned on him, voice shaking. I had seen enough. Had enough of these cruel games. “And you, gods? You do nothing? Let these souls die, then send them back into the same festering shit hole again?”
His eyes locked on mine, steady and unflinching. “We are not here to save them, Little Seer. We are here to witness them, and they are here to learn.”
Learn. Just like I was supposed to.
Rage and grief tangled in my chest until I could practically feel the smoke coming out of my ears. To watch threads unravel by the thousands and call it learning? That was cruelty incarnate.
And yet…he wasn’t mocking. Not cryptic. Just cold. Brutally honest, which terrified me more than any mortal plague ever could.
The pyre roared ahead, smoke swallowing the stars. The air was tainted with burning flesh and damp wood. Every breath I managed to take tasted of ash.
Ahead of me, an old woman knelt near the fire. Her shoulders were hunched beneath a threadbare shawl, hands clutching nothing but memory.
I should’ve turned away. Tairngire would have wanted me to. But something innately human pulled me forward, hard and unrelenting, until I stood too close to her grief. I saw her silver thread—her interim bond, shriveling and broken—connected to something in the fire before her.
“Maiden,” I whispered. But the word wasn’t mine. Strange syllables slipped from my tongue. Foreign, lilting, but understood all the same.
Her head snapped up, tears cutting rivers through the dirt on her cheeks. “My daughter,” she rasped, pointing at the pyre, to where the silver thread broke off.
My stomach lurched.
“And her boy. The sickness took them, I have nothing. Nothing.” She swayed toward me, something dangerously close to awe in her eyes. “What are you, girl? An angel?”
Her words stirred a memory. Mortals liked to have faith. I’d read enough temple texts to know. A single God who loved them all. A savior, angels at his side in a heaven that never existed. My throat closed.
I wanted to tell her no, that I was no angel, no salvation. That the gods were cruel in their punishments. But the sight of her, shattered and clinging to hope like the last thread holding her shawl together, rooted me in silence.
Behind me, Tairngire’s presence shifted. His disapproval pressed close, heavy as a storm. But I didn’t give a damn, I couldn’t turn away. Not when her eyes were searching mine like I might be the last light left in this rotting world.
An angel, her question trembled in the smoke.
“I am not that,” I said, my voice rough. “But I can try to give you peace.”
Her gaze clung to mine desperately. I reached into my leathers, fingers brushing the moonstone I always carried. It pulsed faintly with Anamcroí’s light. My sanctuary. My home.
The blessing of the World Tree still lived in it, a shard of serenity. I pressed it into her trembling hand.
“Keep this,” I whispered, the words came quiet but sure. “When grief claws at you, hold it to your heart. It won’t take the pain, but it will remind you that you are not so alone in this cruel world.”
She curled her fingers around the stone as if it might slip away, tears streaking her cheeks. I caught only fragments of her whisper—thank you, maybe mercy—but her eyes softened, just a little.
This woman could have been my mother for all I knew.
Or someone like her, a child torn from her arms in the middle of the night.
The truth was I’d never had a normal mortal existence.
But I understood pain and loss because I’d had to live through other people’s mistakes, fate, and grief-ridden futures.
I couldn’t begin to imagine being sent to Morhaven for trial—everything the delicate mortal mind went through to survive the smallest feats.
Wasn’t that what human existence was, though?
Its purpose? To overcome a fragile mind and strengthen it?
To learn, like Tairngire had said. Were mortals making decisions that led them to betray their family, their friends, a lover?
Was it a just and almighty punishment to make them relive that same fate until one of them inevitably decided not to abandon the other?
And this poor woman crying in front of a funeral pyre, flies surrounding her, feeding off the sour smell of her sweat. What did she do in her past lives that would warrant losing a child?
Would I feel the same about her pain if I’d known what she’d done underneath the Fates’ gaze that would cause them to dole out this misfortune?
For that, I didn’t know. But the woman’s grief was consuming me whole, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted the answers anymore.
Behind me, Tairngire shifted again, his presence weighted, not quite with anger, nor approval. Just witnessing. I let out a frustrated sigh and stomped back toward him, but his face was expressionless.
For the first time, I thought that maybe there was a chance he understood why I couldn’t just walk away from that woman.