Page 94

There’s no reason to hold back—I pull her close, tangling my hands into her midnight hair. The gentle scent of roses floods me with warmth.

“Come, stop your ship so you may hear us.” I whisper the words into the curve of her shoulder. She trembles beneath my lips, and fresh tears roll down her cheeks.

“I don’t know all that happens on this bountiful earth.” I kiss each tear away, following their salty trail up her neck, over her cheeks, until my mouth hovers above hers. “But I do know this—the future is finally ours.”

Cora closes the gap between us, and her lips are sweeter than honey, than ambrosia. When we finally part, her fear is gone. Now she beams.

It’s this last image that takes my breath away: Of all the transformations I’ve seen during my impossibly long life, Cora’s smile is the most beautiful.

Epilogue

History remembers only our shades. Our names are lost, our millennia truncated into fleeting stanzas inside the stories of men. Epics depict our bone-littered beaches, but never the reason for them. Our wings and claws become fins and scales. Now we are temptresses, the danger of our mouths lost to images of honeyed lips. It’s our beauty, not our knowledge, that drives men into the sea.

But I don’t care. The centuries will rewrite our story countless times before the dark doors of Dis open for me again. In some retellings, we’ll be heroes, in others, villains, but I no longer crave verses singing our absolution. I don’t need them—I am forgiven.

I am free.

With the curse broken, the island’s wildlife returns from the shadows, and her trees bear fruit once more. But most important, Scopuli’s gates open to the outside world. Divine forms restored, Raidne and Pisinoe escape into its arms, and now I’m the one who watches from the beach as they’re swallowed by the horizon. But my sisters are never gone for long, drawn home by Scopuli’s call. Cora and I throw welcomefeasts in their honor, and they regale us with tales of the changing world—how wooden ships become metal, how buildings kiss the sky. But soon after the stories fall from their lips, freedom’s song lures them away again to a new corner of the earth, with new myths and new monsters to behold.

Maybe Scopuli’s magic was unrelated to Ceres’s curse, or maybe it’s a gift from the Fates, a consolation for all the years they made me wait for Cora. Whatever the cause, time here moves slowly. Weeks take decades to write themselves into our bodies, and Cora and I make use of them. One day, we’ll venture from the safety of these shores with Raidne and Pisinoe, but until then, it’s each other we explore.

And now when ships appear on the horizon, there is no call to arms. Instead, we stand together on the cliffs and watch in rapt silence as the world passes us by. Cora takes my hand in hers and leans the entire weight of her body into mine. That beautiful human body, growing only more magical as the centuries pass, each gray hair and new wrinkle that graces her skin a miracle as incredible as my resurrection, because somehow, impossibly, I’m the one fated to behold them. She’s a constantly shifting landscape that I’ll study for as long as I’m able.

With Cora at my side, my former prison blossoms into paradise.