Epilogue
Weeks passed. The season rolled into blistering winter, but my heart began to thaw.
Rita—while entirely unaware of the tragedy we were actually discussing—helped lead me to an understanding in myself, though I accepted the grief would never truly leave me.
That I knew. There would always be a scar across my heart where Lynn once was.
Roxie went back to her duties as resident assistant under a new alias—Gia gifting her a Tinctured vial each morning that concealed her true face and aura—though I think it was more for a sense of normalcy than a real desire on her part.
Gia joined her as the newest late enrollee at Saint Peter’s so they could be closer to one another, the two finally accepting their connection.
They were beautiful together. They completed each other, mind and soul.
Their joy was contagious like a thick silver lining in Chaos’s wake.
Celine—or Serenity, as I’d started calling her on occasion—left to seek out which of her guildmates from Elysium remained in the woken world after hearing what Lynn’s last words to me had been.
She insisted that should Rasputin rear his ugly head again, we would be prepared.
Centuries without communication meant the hunt for her guild would be no easy task.
On occasion, Gia would throw out an aura reading returning with my sister’s location: Egypt, Rome, Taiwan.
It seemed she’d search to the ends of the earth to find them.
I missed her with a fierceness, but I knew this season wouldn’t last forever.
And so, I’d wait for her to return. As she’d done for me.
Cillian’s healing proved slower than we’d hoped.
Complications from having his soul and body separated for so long showed up in unexpected ways.
One day he’d be upright and seemingly on the mend, the next he’d sleep for days at a time.
I lent my Ethereal magic to help in his healing as often as I could, when I wasn’t trying to find my way back into the Shroud.
Something inside told me I needed to return.
That my fight was not finished, though I had nothing to prove such feelings were valid.
I just … felt it.
Getting acquainted with the Baneful magic in me was the biggest challenge.
The call to revenge when I’d thought Bethesda was our true enemy had been intense.
But the justice I now craved—to find and destroy Rasputin, the one who’d hardened my daughter’s heart to the world—was all consuming.
Time and again, I bashed my head against the veil.
Slashed and stabbed and tore, but my desire evaded me—the Shroud having seemingly abandoned me.
As I walked down the hall to Fhírinne to seek answers as to why I couldn’t return to the Shroud, I found Cillian knelt over Lynn’s final resting place. He looked up at my approach, dark bags under his eyes.
I made my way to his side, resting a hand on his shoulder. “You should get some rest.”
“I’m fine,” he said, voice shaky. “Can’t sleep anyway.”
“Nightmares again?”
“My life is a nightmare,” he said so low I almost didn’t hear him.
“It’ll get better,” I said gently. “You just need to rest and gain your strength back.”
He stood and placed a kiss on my cheek. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right.”
Fingers intertwined in his, I scanned the grave … the freshly disturbed soil and the hand-dug tunnel reaching clear down to the bottom. The scent of fresh rot crawled up my nose as I raised Cillian’s hand to my face, soil embedded under his nails. “Were you … digging?”
“No, searching.”
I dropped my hold on him, nausea rolling in my gut. My magic reflected my concern back at me, light pooling in both my palms. “Searching? For what?”
Cillian turned to face me, a strangeness in his eyes. Left hand buried in his pocket, he came back to extend a closed fist, palm up. Between his fingers, fresh red dripped. Blood.
A wide grin cut across his face. “Nothing now.”
“Cillian … what is that?”
“What, this?”
My body flushed cold as his fingers opened to reveal my worst fear: the stone once buried in Bethesda’s chest. Not Lynn, but the monster she’d been manipulated into becoming.
I frantically searched his face; every muscle turned to solid stone.
This didn’t make any sense … he hadn’t even known about the stone. Hadn’t seen it or—
“Something wrong?” he asked, stepping nearer to me, twirling the stone about. “Sister?”
And then he winked, reptilian eyes blinking from the sides.
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