Chapter Twelve
Elysia
The world dissolves.
One moment I’m sitting upright in the healer’s cottage, trying to keep my eyes open, the next I’m falling under. At first, there’s only darkness and the echo of exhaustion humming through my bones. A hollowness within me that I didn’t know existed before I left my village.
My eyes open and I instantly recognize the void of my mind where I last saw my nightly visitor. The floor beneath me is smooth stone and faintly luminous. Mist coils low around my ankles, drifting in slow, lazy waves.
Then, I feel him.
His presence is immediate, wrapping around me before I see him. The air carries a quiet hum and smells like the world before a storm. The scent settles into me, curling at the back of my throat, grounding me.
“You finally sleep,” he says, voice a deep murmur from behind me.
I turn toward his voice, my breath catching at the way my core tightens seeing him. It’s then that I admit to myself just how worried I was at never seeing him again. Yet there he stands, shrouded in shadow.
Still hidden. Still distant. Still him.
My brow pinches as I notice there’s something different in his stance despite the shadows swirling and obscuring. There’s a tension beneath the stillness, the way storms gather pressure before releasing drops of rain into the soil beneath. His fingers are straight and pressed tightly to his side.
“I didn’t think you’d come again,” I admit, taking a few steps closer without even meaning to.
I’m helpless against this unnatural pull that my body has already given in to, while my mind struggles to understand it still.
“You didn’t dream for two nights,” he says, tone clipped with what sounds like concern. “I couldn’t find you. I tried.”
He tried …
My voice is uneven as I breathe out. “Why did you seek me out if I didn’t call out to you? That’s why you said you came before.”
My stomach coils in anticipation of his answer. I know instantly that it will change everything, yet I fear the ramifications of it. My focus needs to remain on my own survival and ensuring I’m not fractured indefinitely if I do survive. Already I’m fraying at the seams and altered forever.
A long pause drifts between us. His specialty, I’m coming to realize.
“Because your absence felt wrong.”
His words sink into me, but I don’t know how to respond. A warmth blooms in my chest and I press my hand against it instinctively, as if I could gather it in my palm and hold it forever.
He moves a little closer and my eyes narrow, desperate for a glimpse of him. The mist and shadows never dare rise enough to give it to me, though.
His head and the shadows tilt to the side before his voice floats through the air, a hint of fear in it that makes my skin pebble. “What happened, Little Dove?”
That nickname again. It slides over my skin like a balm to wounds not even visible to the eye. Yet somehow in his presence, the injuries crack open, wanting to be seen and nurtured despite my best efforts to conceal them.
“I …” I fail to get the words out and grimace as images resurface in my mind, sharp and biting. Wetting my lips, I try again. “I killed a man.”
The words scrape out of my throat like broken glass.
His head snaps straight up and I avert my gaze as I struggle to find the words to explain. To defend my actions so that he doesn’t think me a monster … the way I see myself in the aftermath.
“I didn’t mean to. I didn’t think … I just moved. He was going to hurt Thalia, and I didn’t even think, I just—” My voice breaks off into air as my throat begins to constrict and my lungs all but cease to work.
Heat flushes my cheeks as my eyes sting. My head swings back and forth, and my lips thin, trying to hold back the soul-wrenching sobs threatening to escape.
Tears begin their journey down my cheeks to collect at the edge of my jaw as I stare at him and admit with a trembling whisper, “I didn’t want to take his life.”
But I did.
I don’t remember my knees giving way, I only know that I’m falling and that my breath won’t come. I’m unraveling from the inside out.
The floor rushes toward me, but he’s there first.
Arms wrap around me, strong and sure. I’m lifted gently, pressed against the solid heat of his body, my face buried in the curve of his shoulder. He sinks down with me, kneeling on the mist-drenched floor, holding me tightly.
My breath hitches as everything I’ve been holding back rips its way out as my eyes squeeze shut, trying to escape the memories. The unbidden sobs I didn’t cry in the real world escaping now. I choke on them as I try to speak.
“I didn’t want to do it,” I say again, over and over, like saying it might make it true. “He looked so shocked. Like he couldn’t believe it. I don’t think I’ll ever forget his eyes.”
I curl into him instinctively, my hands clutching the fabric of his shirt, softer than anything I’ve felt before.
My cheek presses to the hollow of his neck as my tears slip freely now, hot trails down my face that soak into his shoulder and neck.
He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move, just holds me tighter as I unleash everything I’ve held in so tightly.
His hand cradles the back of my head, and I feel his breath against my temple, even and steady. His chest rises and falls in steady rhythm beneath me, the cadence of his breath syncing slowly with mine until my lungs remember how to inhale fully again.
We sit like that in the mist and silence, his arms wrapped around me while I tremble. I don’t know how much time passes. Minutes. Hours. Time doesn’t exist here, only this stillness between us.
Eventually, my breathing slows. The weight in my chest eases, the sobs fading into silence. Only then do I become aware of the way I’m curled into him, how his hand strokes my back in slow, circular motions.
I shift slightly, wiping my hand across my damp cheeks before my eyes drift open, and I finally allow myself to look at the pieces of him that the fleeting shadows allow me to see.
His skin is dusky gray, with a soft purple undertone illuminated by the soft glow of the ground.
His forearms are corded with muscle, faint silver veins raised slightly beneath the surface in delicate ridges.
The texture of his skin is impossibly smooth, like the river-polished stone my father gifted me, and I find my head drawing back to look up.
“Don’t look,” he says suddenly, the words sharp with panic. His voice is a command—but not angry, just afraid.
“I …” I start, but he tightens his grip subtly, pulling me back against him, burying my face into the hollow of his neck again.
“Promise me,” he breathes, quieter now. “Don’t look. Not yet.”
I close my eyes again, heart still thudding in the cage of my chest. “I promise.”
After a moment, I whisper, “Can I at least know your name?”
His grip tightens imperceptibly.
“No,” he says, barely audible. “I’m sorry.”
Disappointment churns in my gut, but I nod anyway. I don’t want to push him away, not when I’m only just realizing how much I’ve needed someone to hold me in the chaos of my life.
We sit in silence again before I offer, “I’m sorry you had to witness me falling apart.”
His voice comes again, soft against my temple, the warmth of his breath tickling. “You didn’t fall apart,” he says. “You just broke open. That’s how new things are discovered.”
I say nothing in response … I just breathe in his words, trying to infuse the clarity and resonance it brings me into my core. Because no matter what happens when I wake, I don’t want to forget his words or this moment of peace within the storm.
Already, I feel the edges of the dream unraveling, the hum of waking and the pull of the real world.
“Don’t go,” I whisper.
The warmth of his body against mine begins to fade. His arms remain until the last possible moment, and then even they disappear into fog.
His voice follows me, faint and raw.
“We’ll find each other again.”
The warmth of his arms is replaced by a gentle sway and a jostle beneath me. I blink into the pale light above me, eyes adjusting slowly to the soft hues of dusk cascading across the horizon. The dream slips from my fingertips like the mist that engulfed us, but the ache in my chest remains.
The rhythmic creak of wagon wheels and the soft clop of hooves on the hardened trail ground me back into reality. The scent of frost and pine replaces his scent of fresh rain that I’d clung to.
“About time,” a voice murmurs nearby, startling me slightly.
I shift groggily and turn my head toward Lisbeth, who’s sitting across from me, her arms folded tightly across her chest. She’s watching me with a vague look of amusement.
“I didn’t think you were ever going to wake,” she says, brushing a curl behind her ear. “Luan came to collect us this morning. You didn’t so much as twitch when he tried to rouse you. He was fuming about it but ended up muttering something about dead weight and carrying you into the wagon himself.”
I let out a light chuckle at the image rippling through my mind. That sounds like Luan.
I push upright, groaning slightly as my muscles protest from being prone against the hard wooden floor of the wagon. My head spins with bleariness from a deep slumber I’d desperately needed.
“I slept … all day?” I rasp, the sound of my voice scratchy and dry.
She nods, passing me a canteen of water. “The sun’s already starting to dip again. We’re crossing into the northern port territory now.”
I blink, trying to make sense of how much time has passed.
As I move to sit straighter, something shifts across my legs, a thick wool cloak that’s been draped across them.
I reach toward my collar, surprised to find my scarf, the thick one my mother had packed, tucked securely around my neck.
The ends are wrapped and knotted tightly beneath my chin, the way only a careful hand could achieve.
Someone had ensured I’d be warm with the growing coldness. I glance at Lisbeth. Her eyes immediately flick away, her jaw tightening slightly.
“You didn’t have to,” I murmur softly, fingers brushing the wool near my throat.
She shrugs one shoulder. “It was cold. You were shivering. I didn’t want to listen to you coughing the rest of the way north.”
Her voice lacks the sharpness it usually carries. There’s something gentler there, buried beneath the armor she so often seems to wear. I don’t press her for more. I just tuck the cloak tighter around my legs and let gratitude settle quietly into my chest.
She lets out a heavy sigh and looks away from me. “Also, Thalia told me I had to tell you when you woke up that if you need anything she will be in her wagon.”
I smile and let the conversation fade, sensing Lisbeth’s discomfort.
The landscape has changed while I slept.
The fields and sparse forests of our journey have given way to peaks of mountains that stretch upward like jagged teeth into the sky.
The Sacrum mountain range looms close, cutting across the Vothia Empire lands like a line drawn in stone.
Snow clings to the craggy cliffs, melting only in small patches where sunlight touches.
Ahead, the path twists, leading us toward whatever outcome the High Priestess has waiting for us. The sight of the mountain makes a quiet, looming unease settle deep within my chest. It whispers to my mind, signaling the drawing conclusion of one journey, while another is yet to begin.
I press a hand to my chest where my pendant rests beneath my cloak. The stone is cool against my palm, grounding my nerves as it reminds me of both home and the elf now.
The road is narrowing now, curling higher along the base of the cliffs, every breath I take growing colder and thinner. The air stings against my cheeks and lungs, but it’s the sky that steals my breath.
For the first time in my life, I can truly see where the two opposing cloud systems converge in the middle.
The bright, soft white clouds that I have always lived beneath are beginning to thin and stretch, blending with the darker formations gathering near the mountaintops.
Clouds that churn with various gray tones, lightning flickering within them like silver veins that remind me of my elf.
The clouds darken and the storms within them seem to grow more volatile as they disappear on the other side.
They belong to the Nithrin side of the empire. The realization settles cold and heavy in my gut.
The northern port is truly at the center of it all, the place where both elven courts are suspended in the sky, anchored high above, tethered invisibly to the ground below.
I shift in my seat, fingers brushing the pendant beneath my cloak again as a strange truth settles into me: I’m about to meet humans from the other side of the Sacrum Mountains. Those raised beneath Nithrin dominion. People who grew up with nightmares instead of dreams.
I wonder what differences lie between us, shaped by what we dreamed, or didn’t. Would they be more volatile and on alert?
Time will tell.
The path narrows further as the wagon lurches up another slope, flurries of snow beginning to dance in the wind.
A chill runs down my spine, not due to the plummeting temperature, but for the fact that I’m about to face the exact moment that fractured Maggie forever.