Chapter 10 The Nightblooms Secret #5
n of such fierce, protective love that Sera had felt it like a physical embrace, and she had said, very softly, "Your blood knows the way, little shadow.
Trust it. Trust it even when you can't see where it leads.
" And then she had closed her eyes, and she had not opened them again.
Sera had always assumed it was the fever talking, the delirious rambling of a dying woman whose mind had wandered into the unfamiliar territory of approaching death.
But now, sitting in the silver-tinged darkness of her chamber in a world that existed on the other side of reality, she was not so sure.
Your blood knows the way. The words had the specific, deliberate quality of a message rather than a delusion, the quality of something that had been held in reserve for the moment when it would be most needed, and Sera pressed her hands against her face and felt the tears come, hot and bitter and unavoidable, and she let them fall because there was nothing left to hold them back with.
She cried for her mother, who had known and had not told her, or who had known and had told her in the only way she could, in the oblique, protective language of a woman who understood that some truths are too dangerous to speak aloud.
She cried for her father, who had left, and whose leaving now carried the weight of a mystery that extended far beyond the simple abandonment she had spent sixteen years believing it to be.
She cried for herself, for the girl she had been in Ashenmere who had believed that her life was her own, that her choices were genuine, that the flower she found in the dark woods was a discovery and not a summons.
And when the tears were spent, she sat in the silence of her quarters and felt the empty, scraped-out hollow that grief always leaves behind, and she understood, with the same terrible clarity that had accompanied every major revelation since her crossing, that she had arrived at the boundary between two versions of herself.
The woman she had been, the botanist from Ashenmere with her careful, ordered life and her stubborn self-sufficiency, could not survive what she had learned.
The woman she was becoming, the Shadow-Touched One, the prophesied being, the latest in a line of women who had been cultivated across millennia for a purpose she did not fully understand, was not yet fully formed, and the space between them was a chasm of unknowing that no amount of botany or logic or emotional sensitivity could bridge.
She did not know who she was. She did not know who she had been.
And the being she was supposed to become was a prophecy, not a person, and prophecies, as she had learned in her weeks in the Umbral Realm, were not descriptions of what would be but maps of what might be, and the territory they described was vast and treacherous and offered no guarantee of safe passage.
The nightbloom pulsed on her windowsill, and its silver light painted patterns on the ceiling, and Sera watched the patterns form and dissolve, and the exhaustion of three days of grief and solitude pressed down on her like a physical weight, and she was about to lie down and surrender to the sleep she had been denying herself when she noticed something that made her go very still.
The locket was open. She had bought it at the Twilight Bazaar, during one of her early excursions into the Court's commercial district, a small, elegant thing made of dark metal inlaid with silver filigree.
The vendor, a shadow-being whose emotional resonance had carried the particular warmth of a genuine collector rather than a mere merchant, had told her it was old, very old, and that its previous owner had left it behind when they departed the Garden, a detail that had intrigued her but that she had filed away as one more piece of Umbral strangeness to be examined later.
She had been wearing it around her neck since the day she bought it, and it had become so familiar a presence against her sternum that she had almost forgotten it was there.
Now it lay on the table beside her bed, open, its two halves spread flat like the wings of a resting moth.
She did not remember removing it. She did not remember setting it down.
But there it was, its silver clasp undone, its interior exposed to the silver light of the nightbloom, and inside, beneath the miniature portrait of a face she did not recognize, there was an inscription.
Sera picked up the locket with fingers that trembled slightly, and she tilted it toward the light, and she read the words that had been carved into the metal's inner surface, letters in a script that she had never seen in any book or scroll, a language that predated every written tongue she had encountered in either realm, a language so old that it should have been as incomprehensible as birdsong.
She read it fluently. The words formed in her mind with the ease of thought itself, bypassing the process of translation entirely, as though the language were not something she was reading but something she was remembering, something buried so deep in her blood that it had survived the journey across the Veil and three thousand years of forgetting.
The inscription was brief, three short phrases, and each one landed in her chest with the weight of a revelation that had been waiting, patient and certain, for the moment when she would be ready to receive it.
"Find the root. Free the garden. Remember what we were.
" Sera stared at the words, and the nightbloom on her windowsill blazed with sudden, brilliant light, and the silver veins in its petals pulsed with a rhythm that was not her heartbeat but something older, vaster, a rhythm that seemed to come from the ground beneath her feet and the walls around her and the very air of the realm itself, and in that pulse, for a single, breathtaking moment, she felt the Garden respond to the inscription's words as though they were a key turning in a lock that had been closed for three thousand years, and something vast and patient and immeasurably old stirred in the deep places beneath the world and knew, at last, that she was listening.