Chapter 3 Aurelia
Aurelia
Sitting at the edge of the world had a way of making one feel quite insignificant.
Looking out over the vast expanse of forest in front of me, I was reminded of just how small I was. Perspective is strange like that. What felt like the end of the world—losing him, watching him slip—would barely register as a ripple in a place this large. But it was everything.
It was the only thing.
Grief and fear. They do something to your sense of scale. Twist it. Shrink it. Until all your pain fits inside a tiny glass bottle, stoppered tight and swallowed down. But once it’s in you, it’s all you can see. All you can feel. It makes you forget the shape of who you were before.
I carried that bottle with me now, tucked between my ribs and resolve. Because Aeryn was still there, somewhere inside himself. I just had to bring him back.
I’d traded years to keep us steady—mending his shirts by firelight, rising before dawn to bargain at market stalls no one wanted us at, stitching favors together so we could eat when coin ran thin.
I’d smiled through whispers, swallowed my own anger so he didn’t have to.
Piece by piece, I’d given myself away just to keep what was left of him.
I sat with my boots dangling over the cliff’s edge, the cave at my back, a shallow bite in the stone that broke the wind but left the whole world spread open before me. Below, the forest spread like a dark tide, green at first glance but bruised and shadowed underneath.
Fog softened the edges, and if I squinted, I could just make out the final climb—the last rise before Nyxarra’s gate. Where the trees ended, the clouds hung heavy, a curtain drawn across the world. The forest was mean and bitter, but men on the trade route were meaner. I’d take the forest any day.
Out here, at least, the things that wanted to kill you didn’t pretend to be kind.
Wind knifed across the cliffside, tugging at my hood as I prepared to climb. Looking down, that sensation bloomed in my chest again—warm at first, almost welcome. Then it curdled, rising through my throat and tightening behind my jaw.
The urge to jump.
Not to die. Just… to fall. To see if the trees would catch me.
I pulled my pack around and checked the contents by touch: flint, dried meat, salve, a coil of rope, the iron-bite hooks dulled from summers climbing the sea cliffs back home.
I’d left Synnex five days ago, keeping to the hedgerows and deer paths to avoid the main route.
Twice I’d thought I caught a trader’s lantern through the mist. Twice I’d left the path rather than risk a man with an easy voice and sly fingers.
By the third day, the forest seemed to slip the map entirely.
Sound dragged. Trees leaned where they hadn’t before.
A milk-white fog spilled down the gullies and pooled in the low places, swallowing trail marks and making the compass needle quiver.
I stopped, closed my eyes, and tried to find true by memory.
“East at dawn, west at fall, trust the moss when you can’t trust at all.
” A children’s rhyme. I turned the words over until the sense of them fit in my bones.
I moved only when the rhymed beat of the line matched the beat of my feet.
The fog thinned. The path returned like it had decided to forgive me.
A bell chimed once—a small silver sound that didn’t belong to birds or weather. The fog shifted. For a moment it drew in, like a single lung filling, before exhaling frost across my face.
A lantern glowed ahead, the light the color of old honey, held chest-high by a shape that swam in and out of the fog.
“Trader’s lane runs east,” the man said, voice smooth as oiled rope. “You’re off it.”
He didn’t look lost. The fog looked hired. His cloak was too fine for a hauler, his boots too clean.
“Name?” he asked pleasantly.
Hayat’s rules beat time with my pulse. Don’t give what you can’t take back. Don’t trade a name.
I smiled like I had one to spare. “I only need the river.”
“River won’t keep you,” he said, drifting closer, lantern tipping. “Not out here.”
He leaned into the light and I saw it—no steam from his mouth, though my breath rose in pale clouds. His pupils were wide as a night road.
“You’ll freeze before dawn. I’ve a tent. Fire. Tea.”
“Kind,” I said, “but I’ve a fire waiting.”
I adjusted my pack and let the iron-bite hook ring once against the haft.
He cocked his head. “Steel’s heavy for a girl alone.”
“Only if you’re holding it wrong,” I said.
He clicked his tongue. “East, then. Tell the river I sent you.”
“I will,” I lied.
I stepped sideways into the scrub and counted thirty paces with the children’s rhyme in my throat. When I looked back, there was no sign he’d ever been there. Only lantern light thinning, thinned, gone.
The bell chimed again, closer now. The air tasted metallic, like iron left too long in the mouth. My fingers itched toward my dagger, but I forced them still.
I ran the rhyme until my breath burned. The path returned.
Every blessing in Synnex carried a price. Fire burned. Tides drowned. Vines strangled. But Nyxarra wasn’t a place of bargains. It didn’t bless. It kept. Once you stepped into its twilight, you belonged to it.
Synnex was everything Nyxarra wasn’t—chilly but not cold, even in winter, the air salted and sweet with sea wind and the occasional frost. Where Nyxarra pressed a marrow-deep cold into the bones and shadow into the lungs, Synnex gave light that clung to your skin and refused to let go.
The wind here cut sharper than I’d expected. I thought climbing the cliffs in the hot sun of Synnex had been hard. At least there, the rock had been warm, familiar.
My home backed up to a wild tangle of forest and jagged coastline. After Mama and Pa were taken, I needed something—anything—to make me feel again. So I started climbing.
Not the worn path Mama took down to the beaches after supper each evening, basket in hand.
She never chose just one goddess to honor.
She left a little something for each of them—water poured into the tide, a leaf set on the sand, a spark struck from flint, a whispered breath into the dark.
Balance, she said, mattered more than devotion to one alone.
I made my own way. Down the rocks. Through the wind. Until I reached the sand raw and shaking.
For a heartbeat, I saw Hayat again in my kitchen, silent, leaning one shoulder against the doorframe while I packed.
He didn’t lecture. He didn’t beg me not to go.
He just reached over and tested the knots in my rope, thumb pressing each twist firm, then tucked a strip of dried fruit into the side pocket without a word.
The descent wasn’t long, but it was steep. A shelf of jagged shale led down toward the next stretch of trail winding toward the base of the mountain. A shortcut, if I could manage it. A death sentence, if I slipped.
I looped the rope around a tooth of rock near the mouth of the cave behind me and set both hooks. My boot wedged into the shallow ridge below, and I leaned my weight slowly over the edge. My left hand found purchase—then the right—guided more by instinct than sight.
One careful step at a time. My muscles remembered the rhythm from Synnex’s cliffs, but the cold here was a different beast—biting, numbing. I climbed lower until I reached the narrow shelf halfway down. It stretched just wide enough for my boots to rest and my back to lean into the rock behind me.
My fingers locked on the rope, boots slipping against frost-slick stone. Somewhere beyond, Nyxarra’s gates waited. Somewhere beyond them, the palace gardens—and the Etherblooms. The only thing that might bring Aeryn back to me.
Halfway to the ledge, my muscles began to shake. Just twenty feet more, I told myself.
A low groan rippled through the rock. The tooth I’d anchored to shivered in its bed, a seam of shale giving way beneath the frost. A spray of pebbles skittered across my boots.
“No,” I breathed.
The rock tooth sheared free. The ledge under my heels crumbled with it.
The rope went slack as the world dropped.
Frost and grit burned my palms; the cliff face tore by, too fast, too close.
I swung once, twice—then the line snapped taut on a lower spur, jerking me hard enough to knock the breath from my body.
“Hold—” I rasped, reaching for anything.
The lower spur broke.
The sky flipped. Pebbles scattered into mist. My stomach lurched as the cliff face turned to cloud. Just before everything went dark, a figure appeared at the cliff’s edge above me. Still as stone, head tilted. Watching me fall.
Stone became wood beneath me; cold became salt wind. And then I was somewhere else entirely.
The air blinked, and the world exhaled heat instead of frost. Lanternlight.
The soft gold glow of sunset on whitewashed stone.
Warm salt wind curled through the market square of Synnex, carrying the scent of citrus and spice.
Terracotta roofs clung to the cliffs above a sapphire sea, golden vines tumbling over balconies.
Wind chimes tangled with the goddesses’ charms swayed in every window.
I could almost believe the past week in the forest had been nothing but a fever dream. I bit the inside of my cheek, but no pain bloomed there.
A shout drew my gaze.
And I was ten years old again. Barefoot in the square, my nightgown clinging to my legs. The bonfire roared in the center, flames licking the wooden stakes where Mama and Pa were bound.
We’d been dragged from our home mid-sentence. I’d been reading to Aeryn when the door splintered inward. The book had fallen from my hands, its pages splayed like broken wings—caught mid-flight, as if it, too, had tried to escape.
The Halorian Guard gave no time to run.
I clung to Aeryn’s hand as if letting go would kill us both. His small fists pounded a guard’s chest, his guttural screams echoing in my ears, a sound I’d never been able to forget, as they yanked him from my arms and dragged us toward cages disguised as carriages.
Mama’s face was serene even as her hair singed. She found us through the smoke. I’ll find you, she mouthed. Then the fire swallowed her words.
They burned. And in a way, so did I.
The heat shimmered, bending the square into something… wrong. The crowd blurred. The same woman passed me twice. A shop sign’s letters slid into a language I didn’t know.
I stumbled toward the apothecary—its crooked sign creaking overhead. Colette was already bustling behind the counter, sleeves rolled, hair pinned in a mess of brass combs.
“You’re losing him, Aurelia,” she said without looking at me. “Something’s shifting.”
“Changing,” her raven called. “The darkness will eat the light.”
Her words clung to me as I stepped back into the street.
The market went silent. Through the stillness, he appeared. Gold eyes, unblinking, fixed on me. The air thickened, pressing against my ribs.
The apothecary door swung open. Only white waited beyond it. Cold rushed in and the gold-eyed figure stepped forward.