Page 37

“Keegan?”

My voice slipped from my throat before I could stop it, thin and uncertain as it left my lips and floated into the mist ahead.

“Keegan,” I said again, louder now, more insistently.

Only silence answered.

And then, a moment later—

My voice echoed back, warped by distance and something far older than mere space.

Keegan… Keegan… egan…

The sound twisted through the shimmer like thread unraveling, tugged by unseen fingers.

My chest tightened. The air had changed. I hadn’t noticed when, but it no longer carried the scent of dew and grass. It was now thinner, brittle, dry, and metallic.

The golden shimmer of the path had fractured. I hadn’t shattered, merely split into trails. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, appeared.

Each one curled in a slightly different direction, glimmering with the promise of something that might be true.

I turned in a slow circle, trying to center myself, but every path looked almost the same—familiar, inviting, false.

A chill traced its weight down my spine.

“Keegan?” I called again, a little more desperate.

No answer.

I took a step backward.

But the way I’d come had gone.

It wasn’t hidden, it was gone.

The mist behind me was thick now and opaque. It was hard not to be reminded of Shadowick.

The shimmer had folded over it like a curtain falling across a stage. I reached out toward it, and my hand met not resistance, but absence.

It reminded me of the shimmer within the Academy.

There was no warmth or pressure, just nothing.

The vagueness swallowed my fingers like it meant to forget them.

I pulled back quickly, heart hammering.

“Okay,” I whispered. “Okay.”

A path stretched out ahead, one of many.

And yet…

Something about it vibrated faintly beneath my feet.

The others were quiet, still, and waiting.

But this one?

It watched.

I took a step forward.

The shimmer shifted instantly, curling around my ankles like gold-threaded fog. The moment I moved, the other paths blinked out, snuffed like candles in the wind. This was the path.

Or maybe just the one that had chosen me.

The silence around me thickened. It wasn’t peaceful. It was loaded.

The air buzzed softly with static, magic, and memory.

The trees, if they could be called that, grew at odd angles now, their trunks twisted like questions never asked. Their bark shimmered faintly, but no leaves grew from the limbs. Instead, tiny motes of light drifted between them, blinking on and off like confused fireflies.

I kept walking.

The path narrowed again as the shimmer rose higher now, brushing my shoulders, cool and cloying. The sound of my footsteps shifted.

At first, my feet stepped over grass and then stone, turning to something softer, like velvet stretched over old memories.

I don’t know how long I walked.

Time slipped.

My feet didn’t ache, but my mind…

Something began to scratch at the edges with loneliness.

It wasn’t mine, exactly, but the feeling crawled in, and perhaps, it was a yearning that wasn’t shaped like fear but wore its skin.

But it led me to a wall of mirrors, and each one was freestanding.

Tall, arched, framed in metal that pulsed with symbols I couldn’t read. It reminded me of the Academy’s Hall of Promises.

I stood before them, and the one closest to me flickered.

My reflection blinked out, and in its place, Celeste appeared.

My daughter, in all her beauty and wisdom, was smiling at someone who wasn’t me exactly.

I squinted, trying to make sense of things as her arms were wrapped around another version of me, one with soft laugh lines and flour on her sleeves. They stood in a sunny kitchen I didn’t recognize, a cottage that wasn’t my own. They looked happy.

I reached for the glass, but my fingers met cold resistance.

A pang hit low in my stomach.

Before I could pull back, the mirror shifted again.

Skye, cradling a baby. Laughing with someone in a rocking chair beside her. My chair. But I wasn’t there. Just the echo of me, somewhere distant.

The mirrors continued as she called her daughter Maeve.

One showed a younger version of myself, possibly twenty or less, dancing barefoot in a summer storm and spinning with joy as a shadow looks on behind me.

Another showed Keegan, alone, standing at the Butterfly Ward, waiting. Waiting for someone who never came.

I stepped back with a gasp.

And every mirror shimmered again.

Until they were all mine.

Dozens of me.

Hundreds.

Each one living a different life, some thriving, some broken, some content, and some empty.

I couldn’t tell which one was this version of me.

I couldn’t find now.

I spun away feeling terrified.

The shimmer thickened.

Why are you showing me this?

But there was no voice to answer.

No wisdom to gather other than the ache and the echo.

I staggered forward, deeper into the shimmer, as the sense that I had split into too many pieces like lost pages that couldn’t be sorted.

The path bent and then bent again, and again until it was no longer clear what direction I’d come from…until I couldn’t remember what the first step had felt like.

And that was when the sound came that wasn’t music or wind, but a hum that was soft and low and deep inside of me that pulled right down to my ribs like grief on the verge of love and like magic, remembering where it had first begun.

My knees gave out.

I knelt in the center of the path, surrounded by swirls of nothing and too much.

And for the first time, I wanted.

But I didn’t know what I wanted.

Only that something had been taken, not from me, but before me.

And I was meant to find it, to remember it, and to carry it back.

Even if I had no idea what shape it would be.

I didn’t know how long I’d been walking, only that my footsteps no longer made sound and my thoughts no longer obeyed gravity.

The shimmer thickened around me like fog with purpose, no longer the soft, golden invitation it had once been. Now it curled around my ankles and arms with a sense of intent and a weighted burden.

The farther I walked, the less the path felt like a trail and more like a maze stitched from breath and memory. It looped, twisted, and narrowed until the light shifted in ways that defied the logic of time.

The trees, if they could still be called that, arched over me with limbs that curled in wrong directions, bark that shimmered wet like ink in moonlight, and no leaves, only hanging ribbons of silver thread that drifted in unfelt breezes.

“This is a nightmare,” I whispered aloud, if only to break the suffocating quiet. My voice came out dry and strange, like it had been borrowed from someone else.

Nothing answered.

I took another step.

The ground beneath my boots shifted, not in texture, but in truth. For a moment, it was wood, and then stone, and then sand, before it became nothing other than a flicker underfoot like I was walking on memory itself.

I paused to see movement just ahead.

A shape emerged in the haze. At first, I thought it was a tree again, but no, it was too straight, too deliberate.

A door that stood alone with no wall or hinges to hang it.

I hesitated, but I moved forward.

My hand reached out on instinct. The brass knob was warm, too warm, like it had been held moments ago by someone else. Someone I couldn’t see but could almost feel.

It wasn’t locked.

Why would it be? It was meant for me.

I turned it, and the door didn’t creak open.

It opened me , and on the other side, I saw myself.

But not exactly.

This version of me stood taller. Not physically, but emotionally. She carried herself like someone who had nothing left to prove.

Her shoulders were square, her gaze direct, and in her hands—magic. Raw, powerful, visible magic curling around her fingertips like smoke made of stars.

She looked at me.

And frowned.

As if I were the illusion.

I stumbled back, but the shimmer behind me thickened, holding me in place with hands made of fog and memory.

The other me stepped forward, and as she did, the space around her changed.

Silver trees bloomed into libraries, stars into torches. I saw flashes too fast to grasp. My daughter laughed. The Academy shuddered. Stella stood in a field of flowers. Keegan had his back to me and walked away.

No—

I reached for him, but the scene twisted again.

And then—

I was back.

Or maybe I never left.

The door was gone.

The clearing was gone.

The shimmer had closed in again.

And I was on my knees, shaking.

It wasn’t just the images.

It was the feeling invading every part of me as if something inside me had cracked open under a weight I couldn’t carry. I was being shown a hundred truths I couldn’t shoulder all at once.

I pressed my hands to the cold shimmer beneath me, but it didn’t feel like ground anymore.

It felt like grief.

Deep, ancient grief that wasn’t entirely mine but familiar.

“Why am I here?” I whispered.

The question didn’t echo like before.

It was swallowed.

The shimmer around me pulsed once, like it had heard but hadn’t decided how, or if, to answer.

And then something shifted, not in the air, but in me.

A sudden, aching yearning washed over me, and it rooted in my chest, before blooming through my limbs like a memory I couldn’t name.

I wanted something. No, I needed something?

But I didn’t know what, only that it was missing. It felt as if a piece had been misplaced before I was ever born, and now this place was asking me to feel the absence without context, without an answer.

I closed my eyes, but in the dark behind my eyelids, the magic lived on.

Swirling.

Reaching.

And for the first time, I wasn’t sure if I had stepped onto the path…

…or if the path had stepped into me.