Chapter Twenty-One Frejara #2
They stepped forward one by one—five of them all together—not women, not exactly, but their memory, carved in smoke and shadow.
Their faces blurred, flickering at the edges, as if the chamber itself refused to recall them clearly.
Yet their presence was undeniable, and they were radiating a fury so ancient and absolute it felt less like rage than reckoning.
Shoulder to shoulder, they watched. Not Mowgara, not the woman bleeding out on the floor, but me.
The living intruder in a room built to hold only ghosts.
A pressure gathered behind my eyes, mounting with each heartbeat. The air tasted of rust and ruin. Firelight crawled across the chamber in slow ribbons, bending the walls into shapes that shouldn’t hold. Even my own form felt altered – stretched, uncertain, no longer wholly mine.
Then the air shifted – not in the fire, not in the room, but beside me.
It bent, almost imperceptibly, like the pull before a storm breaks. I turned, heart jolting, drawn by a pressure that hadn’t been there a moment before. And standing there, no more than a few paces from where I stood, was Mathias.
He looked as out of place as I felt. His coat was the same he’d worn that evening by the fire.
His boots still carried the grime of the trail.
And his face… his face held the kind fixed in disbelief that mirrored my own.
For a moment, neither of us moved. He stared at the Queen.
At the blood. At the woman on the floor. Then his eyes found mine.
Something flickered there – not fear of pain or death, but of the knowing we were both here, truly here, in flesh and breath, where no living thing belonged.
He stepped toward me, slow and cautious, as if unsure the ground would hold.
I reached out without thinking, fingers brushing his hand – and felt it.
Not the blur of a dream or the weightless shimmer of a vision, but the warmth of him, solid beneath my palm.
The chamber did not shudder to cast us out.
It held us, vast and watching, as if still deciding what to make of us.
The space shifted—subtly, soundlessly—and the air seemed to draw taut around us.
At its centre, the woman in the nightgown began to stir.
She moved not as visions do, nor with the haze of dreams, but with the slow, dragging effort of a body pulled upward by pain itself.
Blood clung to her jaw, her neck, her chest – thick and dark where it soaked the shredded fabric.
One hand stayed pressed to her belly, fingers trembling where they gripped the torn cloth. But it was her eyes that stopped me.
Her gaze moved with quiet intent – not drifting, not lost, but precise.
It passed from Mathias to me, pausing on each of us in turn, as if measuring what part we had come to play.
There was no fear in her expression, no plea.
Only a kind of recognition so deep it felt like memory – ancient and intimate, and unbearably close.
Her mouth parted. She shaped words with it, careful and deliberate, but no sound reached us.
The chamber held its heat, unbroken but for the slow crawl of fire along stone.
Something inside me tightened with each passing moment.
I took a breath and felt it stutter. She was speaking to us, but I could no more catch the meaning than I could still the pounding in my chest.
Beside me, Mathias moved – not toward her, but slightly forward, a step of protest or panic or both. His voice cracked as he called out to the space between them. “I can’t hear you,” he said, louder now, something raw threading the words. “I don’t know what you’re saying—”
But she didn’t stop. Her lips kept moving, insistent now, the shape of the words unchanged. Again. And again.
And then the world broke around us.
It wasn’t sound as I knew it. Nothing stirred the air, yet something split the chamber wide – a force so sudden it left the world gaping. Like cloth torn down the centre, reality gave way, and through the rupture, came her voice.
“I am her mother.”
It didn’t echo. It didn’t rise. It settled – heavy and absolute – behind my eyes, in the hollow of my chest, where it burned like a brand, searing through thought and breath alike.
“I am her mother.”
My hand clenched around Mathias’ without meaning to. His gaze was still locked on the woman, face drawn tight, as if that single sentence had torn something in him open.
“I am her mother.”
And then the veil tore fully, as the chamber unravelled around us, light and blood and stone collapsing into dark as it surged to cast us out.
I woke choking on air that wasn’t there—the scream already in my throat, ragged and sharp, as my body convulsed against hands I didn’t recognise.
For a beat, the world was still the chamber – heat and fear and pain – until the broken roof of the temple swam into view, and I was back. Back in the dark. Back in my own skin.
Mathias held my shoulders, his voice a whisper somewhere near my ear, his lips so close to my skin I could feel their warmth: “Come back. Come back to me.”
Maeve was crouched close, one hand braced at my back, the other gripping my wrist to still its trembling. I could feel the terror in them—not loud or frantic, but contained and focused, like soldiers who’d seen something impossible and were still trying to make sense of it.
“What?” My voice broke against the inside of my throat. “What is it? What?”
Mathias didn’t answer. His mouth parted, then stilled, and his eyes flicked to Maeve’s – searching, unsure.
Something passed between them, quick and unreadable.
Then Maeve reached into the folds of her satchel and drew out a worn scrap of polished steel – the kind used for shaving or stitching – and held it out to me.
I took it, slow and uncertain, and tilted it toward the light.
At first, all I saw was the wreck of myself – hair damp with sweat, cheek streaked with blood from where I’d clawed at the stone in the throes of waking. My skin, drawn tight with the violence of whatever I’d just left behind. But then my gaze locked on my own eyes, and something inside me lurched.
The same blue, midnight deep. But haloed now – a ring of gold blazing around each pupil, sharp as sunlight on steel, bright as a forge-fire. Not a glint, not the trick of the morning light, but something flaming and alive, as if fire itself had taken root behind my eyes.
The steel bit into my trembling fingers – cold and sharp.
It didn’t feel like a mirror but like a fragment of something broken, catching the face of a stranger, with eyes alight in a terrifying, alien fire.
I gripped it tighter, the sharp edge digging into my palm, a thin line of crimson welling up and tracing the curve of my knuckles.
Then Maeve’s hands were there – cool, deliberate – folding around mine without force, uncurling my fingers one by one, the shard sliding from my grip like a breath exhaled.
Blood welled along two of the cuts, dark against the tremor-soft flesh, and she cupped my hand like it was something fragile.
Her thumb swept slow across the skin, wiping away the blood in careful arcs, not to erase the wound but to soothe it.
As if she’d done it a hundred times before.
As if she had waited her whole life to do it now.
Maeve’s hand left mine only long enough to reach into the satchel at her side.
She drew something out – wrapped in linen, worn soft from years of folding – and softly placed it in my palm.
The cloth held no weight, and yet my hand trembled beneath it.
I didn’t need to open it to know. I felt it in the shape that met my skin – the curve of the hilt, smooth and impossibly familiar, the cool press of pearl settling against my blood-warmed flesh.
It was not the dull blade I had carried with me since longer than I can remember.
It was not the one I had taken from the pyre at Irongate, just a hilt now, the steel of it having melted in the black flames.
It was a third one, one I had not touched before, but one I had started to suspect existed somewhere in the world, waiting for me to find it.
My fingers curled around it as if they had done so a hundred times before, and Maeve gently pressed her hand over mine again.
“It’s time, Unbroken Blade,” she said with a tremble in her voice. “It’s time I tell you what I know.”