Page 190 of Ashes to Ashes

We aren’t princes, guardians, or researchers today.

We’re the consequence of their cruelty. And gods help them—because we finally know what we’re willing to become to keep our people safe.

But then I hear it—a child’s scream from the heart of the burning settlement.

Not just terror. Pain. The kind of agony that makes reality itself recoil.

“There,” I gasp, pointing toward a partially collapsed building where smoke rises in spirals that definitely aren’t natural. “Someone is still alive.”

We move as one, caution abandoned for desperate hope. Through smoke that burns my lungs and flames that shy away from our combined magic, we push deeper into what used to be a place of refuge.

I find her first—a young woman trapped beneath a fallen beam, her legs crushed but her eyes still aware. Still fighting. I drop to my knees beside her, using whatever strength I have to lift the burning wood enough for her to breathe.

“Help is coming,” I lie, because we both know there’s no help for wounds this severe.

The Wild Court survivor in my arms has gentle brown eyes that begin shifting to otherworldly silver as her life ebbs toward the edge. Her breath comes in rattling gasps, each one weakerthan the last. Blood foams at the corner of her mouth as she stares past me into something I can’t see.

Her breathing nearly stops—so shallow I have to lean close to feel the whisper of air against my cheek.

Then her chest jerks with a violent gasp that sounds like breaking chains, her eyes flying open wide. They blaze with silver light that doesn’t belong in a mortal frame—too bright, too vast, like staring into molten stars.

“I remember,” she whispers, voice carrying harmonics that make the air itself tremble with recognition. “Siobhan. My name was Siobhan.” Her voice grows stronger, more resonant, carrying notes that hurt human ears. “Nineteen summers. Earth magic. Wanted to heal like grandmother did.”

She’s not speaking to me—she’s speaking to herself, remembering a mortality she’s about to transcend. Divine consciousness flooding back in fragments that make reality bend around her small form.

“Honey cakes,” she breathes with wonder, silver eyes wide with recognition that makes tears of light stream down her cheeks. “I loved honey cakes and old stories. I wanted to coax flowers from barren soil.” Her voice breaks with the weight of remembering what it felt like to be small, mortal, limited. “I chose this. I chose to forget divinity for... for what? For the taste of honey? For the surprise of not knowing how stories end?”

The dying words hit me like physical blows because I recognize what’s happening. The terror every researcher who’s studied the deepest lore learns to fear.

She’s not just remembering her life.

She’s remembering her divinity.

The moment understanding hits her silver eyes, power detonates outward with the sound of reality tearing. The shockwave drives me backward, my bones aching as divine force rewrites the laws of physics around us. The ground beneathus cracks in perfect spirals, ancient symbols carving themselves into stone and earth with audible precision—like the world itself screaming as it’s reshaped.

Plants burst from the scorched soil with sounds like muffled explosions—not normal growth but divine creation happening at impossible speed. Flowers unfold with their own inner light, vines erupting from earth with singing voices that harmonize in languages older than mortal speech. The very air fills with the sound of accelerated growth, roots breaking through stone, stems shooting skyward.

The air itself screams as reality bends around consciousness too vast for mortal flesh—a sound like breaking glass made of wind, pitched so high it makes my teeth ache and my vision blur. My robes flutter in winds that carry scents of every garden that ever bloomed, every harvest that ever fed the hungry, layer upon layer until I’m drowning in olfactory memory.

“I am Brigid,” she breathes, and the name carries weight that makes my bones ache with recognition. Power so ancient it predates the courts themselves. “Goddess of healing, of growing things, of the forge-fire that transforms.” Her mortal body begins to glow, skin becoming translucent as power burns through flesh never meant to contain infinity.

The buildings around us stop burning—not extinguished but transformed, flames becoming flowers with petals of living fire, smoke becoming butterflies of pure light that spiral upward in impossible formations. She’s rewriting reality simply by remembering what she truly is.

But her mortal form is failing. Blood runs from her eyes, her nose, as divine essence tears at the boundaries of human flesh. She’s too powerful for the body she chose, awakening too fast, too completely, mortality unable to contain eternity.

The awakening sends shockwaves through the burning settlement, reality bending and warping around divineconsciousness forced into mortal flesh. In the distance, I hear Orion’s voice cutting through the magical chaos.

“Finn!” The call carries desperation and relief in equal measure, his guardian senses overwhelmed by the divine display. “We need to move! Everything is destabilizing!”

I look down as Siobhan’s mortal form finally gives way. Her divine essence burns too bright, too vast for flesh and bone to contain. She dissolves into light and flower petals, her consciousness expanding beyond the limitations of mortality until there’s nothing left but memory and magic dancing in the air.

She’s dead. Truly gone. But in dying, she remembered what she truly was—and that changes everything.

The power she awakened still pulses through the air like a beacon, calling to others of her kind. Around us, reality ripples with the aftershocks, and I can feel other sleeping gods stirring in response to her divine death cry.

Orion appears through the smoke carrying a bundle that resolves into a child—maybe seven years old, her Wild Court heritage evident in the thorns already sprouting beneath her skin in response to terror. She clutches his shirt with small hands, face buried against his shoulder. Behind him, Kieran materializes from shadow-walking, ice-blue eyes reflecting the flames around us like mirrors made of winter.

“Three families,” Kieran reports, his voice carefully controlled despite the frost spreading from his feet in patterns of barely contained rage. “All dead. Children, elders, everyone.”