Page 14

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

Renwick

Unreal to stand face-to-face with my mother after so many millennia apart.

To gaze upon her wings and see them twitch, flare, and punctuate each word she spoke was like a dream. I could remember the innate movement, as instinctual as breathing—how it felt to stretch my wings wide and take to the air, to be free . And yet we were not free, here in this dark forest seated side by side on the fallen trunk of a tree, my hands wrapped in hers.

How much time had passed outside this place? Did she know how long she had been trapped here within this realm? I was afraid to ask—afraid to startle her with the thousands of years that had spanned since our last meeting. The final night when we’d taken to the skies, and she’d spoken of ruin, of mending the rift between myself and my brother was millennia ago.

Asteria had been dragged from her bed and locked up within the trunk of a tree by the god she had tried to convince me to protect from another who claimed to be our father. Typhon had loved her, or so I’d believed, and she had loved him fiercely as if he were her own.

“She has grown strong, your mate,” my mother observed, thumb brushing like a whisper over my knuckles.

I could not help but smile. Oralia’s face, furrowed in concentration, filled my mind—her shadows, darker than my own, spilling over her shoulders and flooding the air from her fingertips.

“I must find a way to return.” I glanced down at our hands before letting hers go.

Asteria squeezed my fingers once before rising to her feet with a flare of her wings and extended a palm out to me. “Come.”

We stepped through the trees, following a winding river covered in large boulders and mossy rocks. My legs burned from the steep climb up a towering mountain, capped with snow and fraught with icy wind, which could have lasted hours or minutes. And as we traveled, I could not help but wonder what it was I would lose when I eventually resurrected.

I could not accept that this was my existence now. I would return. I would find a way. But stars , what would I be when I woke? Would I be merely a hollow shell of who I had been? I feared all the love I cradled deep within my soul would leach from me with the resurrection until I was a cruel and icy thing—worse than even when Oralia and I first met.

She had told me she’d seen moments of warmth flare within me in those early days. Moments where she thought she saw the god who could instill such fervor and love within his inner circle, who would be worth fighting for. It had been her touch slowly working on me through the weeks, beginning with the first brush of her palm against my face within the throne room. Her desperate attempt to destroy the Under King in hope of release.

Eventually, Asteria and I descended the mountain, trekking through tall grasses and waving fields of reeds, ducking beneath the heavy branches of a willow tree.

“Do you know where you are?” she asked, releasing my hand.

It was dark beneath the tree, quiet and peaceful. I took a deep breath, reaching out with my magic, but I could find nothing that whispered of this place. Only the tree, the breeze, and somewhere farther the rushing of a stream.

“I do not,” I answered.

“This is the in-between.”

My brows furrowed. The in-between was the darkness in which we traveled when shadow-walking, the twilight space between sleeping and waking. In all of my existence, I had never known it to be anything other than the brief moment where the world bent to connect two places. “I have never seen this before.”

Asteria nodded, circling the wide trunk of the tree. “You move too fast within this space to see it for what it is. For you, it is merely the road you travel to get to your next destination. A physical body cannot exist for long within this plane. But this is where I have resided since your father and brother shut me up in that tree thousands of years ago. Not my body, but my mind, my magic. ”

So she did know how much time had passed.

“No one lives here, save me and the occasional visitor. It took years to attune myself to arrivals…Even longer to learn how to see them, to interact with them, and to watch the passing of time and wait.”

Slowly, she appeared on the other side of the trunk, a sad smile tugging down the corners of her mouth. Her fingertips grazed over my cheekbone, drawing back my hair from my face to tuck it behind my ear the way she’d done when I was young and time was merely an idea in the Great Mothers’s minds.

“When your mate was small and fevered with the daemoni bite, I found her consciousness here on the bank of a river, shivering. I gathered her up and sent her back into the world, shepherding her mind and magic into her body and giving her the strength to continue on.” A knowing look crossed her face, and she shook her head. “No, I did not know then what she would be to you. Then I only saw a child who had suffered so much, who I saw myself within.”

My heart twisted with longing. “You taught her the song of creation.”

Asteria’s smile widened, her nod one of pride. “I did, and, my, did she create.”

I reached out to place a hand on the thick branch of the tree, the moss damp beneath my fingertips. “You are saying there is a way out.”

“I am saying there is a way to connect, to perhaps speak, to learn.”

We could not break free from this prison, but perhaps we could be retrieved. And I knew then it was Oralia who could find the way out.

I did not believe in the old ways. I did not believe in the fatefulness of magic or the rightness of the universe. I believed in Oralia, in her power and her strength. And I believed she would find a way.

“Why did I come here instead of the human realm?”

Asteria knew of my travels to the human world and how the souls of the humans called out to me, begging for salvation or release. There were so many more souls there than in my own world, so many it overwhelmed me, pulling my waiting magic toward them while my body resurrected.

“I do not know, Son. Your magic is what takes you to that place. It should have guided you there.”

The memory of those chains—my father’s chains—seared across my lids. They had taken my power from me, reduced me to merely a shell of myself, and then Typhon had delivered the killing blow. Perhaps that was why I had not gone to my usual place, why I hovered within the in-between, unable to revive—there had been no magic to shepherd me.

My heart clenched within my chest, and I dipped my head, pressing a hand over my sternum. Another thrum of pain, then another. I grunted, reaching out to steady myself as the air knocked from my lungs, as power zinged through my skull. Was this the final death? My magic returning to the earth? This was not my body, merely my soul and magic taking form here in this place. Yet it hurt .

My chest gave a steady beat, harder and firmer than before. My magic pulsed, sighed, before settling with ease into my veins. I could not help but search for the bond, and found it sharp within my senses. Flaring with magic and heat and light, zinging out of the darkness and through the world to her .

“ Stars ,” I breathed, gazing up at my mother in wonder. “She has already begun.”