53. Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-One
There was light. Not torchlight, nor stars or the Ash king’s fire. Something vaster, blinding in its nothingness. The kind of brilliance that swallowed everything until I wasn’t sure if I had eyes left to see.
When the haze cleared, the stone beneath me was gone.
I stood barefoot on black sand, grains cool and velvet-soft against my bloodied feet. Before me, an endless sea rolled in, water so clear it glittered like shards of glass. Each wave rose, broke, and folded back into silence, as if time itself had ceased.
Impossible Stillness.
This was death. The King of Ash had claimed me, stripped me hollow and cast me onto his shore.
My mouth worked soundlessly. “So this is the end,” I whispered, a rasp breaking apart in the endless air. “I’m…no more.”
Then there was movement.
A figure emerged where the horizon bled into the sea. White, blinding, every step bending the tide beneath its feet. My chest seized, lungs clawing at air. I staggered back, useless. It continued its advance.
The light dimmed enough for me to see the outline of a face. Not the Ash King. A woman. An…angel?
Her hair gleamed silver, liquid bright. Feathered white wings fanned wide behind her. Her eyes held the cosmos—white, red, and the endless black swirling like smoke within her gaze.
I stuttered, breath breaking. “W-what…Y-you—”
Her voice was ancient and mercilessly calm. “Kindness is a currency, child. And I’ve come to yield the return.”
The words struck somewhere deep. I’d heard words like those before…somewhere. In another life, perhaps—wait, no I had no other lives…I didn’t—
Recognition shuddered through me. The features were hers. The lines of the face I had studied across temple firelight were now transfigured, hair no longer blood red but silver-white, her body alight with something unearthly. Holy.
The High Priestess.
No. Not only that. Something...divine.
She laughed then, the sound lilting and smooth. “Yes, that was me. One of my many disguises.”
Disguises…for what? Who was she, really? Clearly, a goddess, but it felt different, like her light was spun from divinity itself.
She knelt down and reached for my face, her touch was gentle. “I can see your thoughts running wild, Seer. We do not have much time here, and you need to go back to finish what you started.”
“I—I thought I was dead...”
She brushed my cheek once, wiping away a tear I didn’t realize had fallen. “Part of you is, yes. Your physical body. The one that only half of you has come to know. But the other…the one you’ve buried, lives still.”
You wear false skin, and you bury me. The voice rang in my ears—the one that I had always heard when the Shaman took me dream walking through the liminal. The woman in the red cloak.
The High Priestess who wasn’t turned her gaze to the side. I followed it.
There was a body on the sand a few paces away.
It didn’t stir. Pale as moonlight, freckles scattered like stars, hair a spill of strawberry gold across the black shore.
Familiar, though my mind recoiled from the thought.
I had seen her before. Again and again, faceless in my dreams, running beneath the canopy, bow slung across her back, calling the forest to rise.
“No,” I whispered, stumbling backward. “It isn’t—”
The goddess bent close, her radiance burning into my skin. “You know her. You’ve always known her.”
“I don’t.” The words felt foreign on my tongue.
Her voice threaded through my denial. “You saw her when the visions first tore you apart as a child. You felt her when the forest answered your call. She is not a phantom. She is the marrow that was taken from you. The one who ran when you were forced to kneel.”
I shook my head hard enough to make the beach blur. “She’s dead. Whoever she was, she's gone. She can’t…She can’t come back.”
My logic warred with my heart, I knew this girl—I knew her. She ran free, so free. And I suppressed her. I had accepted my fate, had lived my life turning my back to her every time she appeared in visions. She was fear itself, disguised as the anger I couldn’t control.
“No, child.” Her wings stretched wide, silver burning at their edges. “You buried her. It is not the same as death.”
You wear false skin, and you bury me.
My knees buckled. The sand bit against my palms. The body’s glazed eyes caught the light, unseeing, and still, so familiar it hollowed me out. The curve of the jaw. The bowstring calluses that marked her hands. The echo of my own soul screaming back at me.
The visions took me, violent and absolute.
A little girl, barefoot, laughing, sprinting through a sunlit forest. Branches tore at her skin, but the animals ran with her. A wolf darted at her heels. A stag bent his head as she passed. She belonged to them, and they to her.
The same girl crouched in shadow, always hiding, always watching. A cruel queen’s voice echoed in her skull like a curse.
She had a father who swung her up on his shoulders, who taught her to string a bow and loose it clean. How to wield a staff in defense. She had a mother who sang to her by the hearth, who grew thin, pale, fading into the silence of sickness.
The mother withered. The father left, too, on a mission. He didn’t return. Just a girl and her brother, huddled in the dark, learning to fend for themselves.
The girl grew alongside her brother. Their laughter sharpened into silence. Her bow became a weapon. She hunted, she survived, but she never stopped loving the creatures of the forest, even in her heartbreak. They loved her back when she bore the weight of loss like a second skin.
And then, him.
The man. The god. His eyes were wild, burning. The one she once trusted with her life.
I saw her stand before him, older now, face lifted to his with a betrayal that crushed her. Chains coiled at his throat and wrists, shackled. He gave up his forest, his freedom, everything he was, to bear what the gods demanded of him.
And she—this girl, this self I had buried—stood there helpless as he was bound, unable to tear him free. Her final moment was his surrender.
The vision crushed me, breath stole, ribs splintered around it.
All of it—her laughter, her grief, her love—was somehow also mine.
The visions tore away, leaving me gasping on the black sand, doubled over. My other self still lay before me, her body paler than before.
The High Priestess—no, the divine thing she really was—knelt close, her voice softer now, but laced with a resonance that pulled at the essence of my very soul.
“You see her now. The one you cast aside. To continue, you must become whole again.”
My throat burned. “But…how?”
Her silver hair lifted in a current that wasn’t there.
“The King of Ash cannot be allowed to unmake Fate. Not while the stones still lie hidden. Not while the threads can yet be mended. Even now, he poisons the Everwoven, manipulating mortal fates to bleed his darkness.” The galaxies in her eyes wove together, creating a hazy effect that emulated rage, yet her voice remained calm.
“You are the only one who can touch the stones. The only one who can stop his madness. And you cannot stand against him broken.” she continued, “The journey ahead will demand a lot from you, child.”
Thousands of emotions and thoughts that were both mine, and also not mine, swam in my head. Eisarnach and his betrayal, the realization that Tairngire had been taken by the queen who hunted me…or her, or...
I shook my head, raw, desperate. “I don’t know how.”
“Yes. You do.”
Her gaze flicked to the satchel at my side. I still had it. The one that carried the Obsidian Heart. My chest clenched. Neit had stolen the Iron Vein. If the Ash King held it now, I was already lost.
“You are not yet defeated,” she said, reading the thought before I could shape it. “Your will would not allow it. These stones speak only to you, Seer. They wait.”
The satchel pulsed, heat bleeding through the leather. I opened it with shaking hands. Both lay inside. The Iron Vein and the Obsidian Heart. Together.
Impossible.
She spoke again as if she had just read my thoughts. “No, child. Far from it. Your will manifested a false stone. That is what Neit holds now.”
Tairngire’s voice rose, clear in my memory. Don’t let them find each other. Don’t let them speak.
But his face bled into another memory—chains, betrayal, the other name on his lips as he was taken. Why should I trust his warnings now, when he had already cut me open?
I squeezed my eyes shut and bit back the tears.
I knew it would be dangerous to fall for Tairngire, and I had done it anyway against my better judgment.
I was paying the price. But this girl who lay before me, she had known Tairngire, too.
I had seen him there in her memories, kneeling down in front of her.
But she was me…and I…her.
I looked down at the stones, began to reach for them out of instinct and stopped myself just short.
The figure’s wings arched like blades of light, her eyes endless and calm. “They are not your doom,” she whispered. “They are your inheritance. Trust me, Seer.”
Trust. What a strange thing to ask from someone who stood over me my entire childhood, someone who paraded me through the streets of Anamcroí like a sacrificial lamb, slaughtered for visions. Another who abandoned me when I needed them most.
My hands trembled over the stones. The Heart’s steady beat. The Vein’s dissonant hum. Separate storms clawing for release.
And then, words, not mine, tore through the silence. I have waited for you long enough. Our trust in her is of no importance now. Listen to my voice. Take me back.
It was the same voice that haunted me in the liminal, where the Shaman had taken me to her. The one in my dreams. The one I’d run from. The one belonging to the body in front of me.
Tairngire told me not to let the stones speak…
I heard a scoff in my head, the voice was in my mind…listening to my thoughts. And you would trust him? The one who betrayed us both?
He didn’t truly betray me, though, I realize that now…
Oh…but he did. He’s always known what the Obsidian Heart is. Your connection with the soul stone. He withheld the information from you. He keeps his secrets. He is so very good at keeping his secrets, never divulging his reasons. This you know well.
A soul stone.
The words settled into me with terrifying clarity. A stone that held part of my soul, not stolen, but found. It called to me.
It chose me.
I had been running from it because running was easier than remembering, easier than admitting that the ache and anger I carried had never been emptiness…
It had been absence.
I tried to shake the voice loose, but it didn’t retreat. It only softened, curving inward like breath returned to lungs that had forgotten how to draw air.
Let go, Aurenya.
My name, the one Saorla had given me in this life, spoken without command, without hunger. And as if it knew exactly where my thoughts had gone, it continued to speak.
I will carry your memories. I will hold the weight you were never meant to bear alone. But you cannot take what is already yours while pretending to be less than whole.
I saw it then, the truth I’d been circling since the beginning. My false skin, the mortal shell shaped by lies, obedience, and survival.
It had protected me once. It had helped me endure. But it was never meant to be permanent. Along with it came every role I had been forced to play in this temporary lifetime. Every silence mistaken for consent. Every version of myself designed to be palatable.
Merge, the voice urged, not as a demand, but an invitation to something…more. Become what you were before they broke you in half.
Fear rose sharp and instinctive. Because to let go wasn’t to disappear. It was to be remade, to remember. And remembrance meant pain. It meant grief. It meant reclaiming power I had once been punished for holding.
I drew one last breath in the space between life and death and let myself feel it all.
Saorla’s laugh. Branwyn’s sharp wit. Every lie I had worn like armor in that gods-forsaken temple.
I was angry. I was relieved, sorrowful—so many things.
Aurenya was so many things.
And I was so, so tired of resisting…
So I stopped fighting. I surrendered.
It was time to let this vessel go. Time to return it to its rightful owner, which had always been…me.
It was Bleddyn’s turn for revenge, and I would sacrifice my mind and vessel to reconnect with my higher self. My decision was made. Final.
The stones answered and they sang with resonance. The storm split open and light erupted between my palms, brutal and blinding, sacred and unforgiving. My body seized as lightning threaded through every vein.
Two worlds collided, and truth met truth. The body on the sand stirred, as if recognizing its missing half. Her eyes—my eyes—flew open, searching. For one heartbeat, she was there, familiar and whole.
Then her face shifted.
A mirror. My face, my form—the only shell of myself I’d known for the past twenty-five turns of the sun folded inward, collapsing into pure light, and it struck me all at once.
Pain.
Joy.
Grief.
Not one at a time, but an amalgamation of emotions colliding with each other in a symphony of destruction and rebirth.
Becoming whole was never going to be gentle.
And then…silence.
When I opened my eyes, I was sprawled on the cavern floor of the Morrígan’s compound once more, blood tacky against stone, breath ragged but steady. A glow lingered at the edge of shadow. I turned my head toward it.
Druíneach was there, The Weaver of Truths.
The goddess who split my soul in two in the wilds of Aeos Sítheann a century ago in front of the god who I thought I’d loved.
The High Priestess of Anamcroí. My destruction and retribution, Aurenya’s ending and sacrifice swirling in the vortex of her unyielding eyes, watching me with a smile that was neither kind nor cruel, but unbearably heavy with the weight of knowing.
“Hello Bleddyn Vale,” she said, voice rough as a tempest under a Full Moon in Lirathen. “Your brother awaits somewhere unknown, and your Forest God needs you. It is time to go claim what was torn from your hands and save the Seven Realms."