Epilogue
The Sanctum breathed a different silence now.
No chanting. No guards. No fire. Just dust and ivy climbing through the cracks in the stone.
Hanna sat cross-legged on the floor of the old room, her room once, but Ilys’s first. The walls were bare now, the veil hooks long rusted. A shaft of late afternoon light filtered through the broken shutters, falling in golden strips across her lap.
Morrigan lay beside her, chin resting on his paws. His coat had gone gray at the muzzle, the years softening him into gentleness. He had followed her here without being called, padding silently through the corridor as if guided by instinct alone.
When the wind shifted, he lifted his head, ears pricking. He gave a soft, restless whine, then turned toward the door, scraping a paw against the stone—the same sound he used to make when Ilys went out of sight and he wanted her back.
The sketchbook lay open in Hanna’s hands.
She turned the pages one by one, the thin paper whispering against her fingertips. Faces looked back at her, not perfectly drawn, but alive with motion. Beck and Baron. Grim with his mouth set in warning and love. Rowenna, half-smiling. A rabbit. A sword.
And Ilys, a self-portrait, over and over.
Sometimes veiled.
Sometimes not.
Sometimes flying.
Hanna touched one drawing, the smallest one, barely a thumbnail in the margin. Just a girl on a stone slab with sticks strapped to her back. Her arms raised. Her mouth opened, laughing.
She hadn’t remembered this one.
Outside, the wind shifted through the trees. The light flickered. Hanna closed the book and held it to her chest.
She whispered the word that had been whispered to her so many times, in the dark, in the light, in the quiet space between nightmares and waking, “Vasha.”
Not a blade’s parting prayer. Not a king’s command.
She had never learned it that way.
She hadn’t needed to.
Vasha was what Ilys said every night before she turned down the lamp, before she kissed her forehead.
It was the word Ilys used when she cupped Hanna’s face with both hands and called her brave.
It was what she whispered in awe, once, when Hanna had sung aloud in the garden, clumsy and off-key.
It was what she said, smiling through tears, when Hanna gave her a flower she’d pressed between pages.
It was never an ending.
It was love.
It was thanks.
It was a promise to come back.
And now, sitting here where it all began, Hanna said it again, not because she had to. Not because anyone asked her to. But because it was hers, now.
“Vasha,” she said.
And it meant: I remember her. I carry her. I choose her still.
And somewhere far from the Sanctum, far past the veil, the wind lifted like laughter.