Page 158 of Witchshadow

People were meant to feel.

And people were meant to dance, as Iseult had danced with a prince on a balcony unseen.

I see you,she told the ghosts over and over.I understand you, but I amnotyou.She lost all sense of time, of ghosts, of tears. Yet with each acknowledgment, she was carried farther through the Loom. A current of ghosts to take her where she wanted to go. A raft atop waves she could neither swim with nor swim against.

Until at last, she reached the person at the center of it all.

He wasn’t expecting her. That much was clear. His spirit stood unguarded at the center of a simple basin. The edges of this space—the onlyrealspace in the Loom—blurred into gray nothing beyond. The ghosts couldn’t enter here; they clustered and clawed on all sides like faces pressed against glass.

“Father,” Iseult said. “I have come for you.”

Indeed,Corlant crooned, and instantly, his ghost form solidified. When he lurched around, she found—as before—that his one remaining eye was healed here.

He grinned at the sight of her, an expression that had become so familiar in her childhood. One she now understood was filled with centuries of hate and with, tucked deep inside his own secret corner, centuries of fear.

She wondered what his old smile might have looked like. The one before his Paladin memories had awoken. The smile of a man who’d loved a Threadwitch.

“I thought you would be wiser.” He twirled open his hands. “This ismyspace. I made it.”

“Yes.” She nodded. “I guessed you were Portia a long time ago. Though I do wonder why you lied.”

“Because if I had not, the Six would have killed me. I died that day, but not forever like the Exalted Ones. And so I have lived a thousand years, growing stronger with each incarnation. And oh, Iseult.” He clucked his tongue, his forehead trenches sinking deep. “It will hurt you so much more to die here than it would have in the real world.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “I’m afraid it will.”

Then, before he could react or guess what she might do, she opened her hands. Unlike before, they were not healed in the Dreaming. Instead her palms were rough with scars—scars she had earned. An eternal reminder of the choices she hadn’t made.

Living, living,she thought,breath and living.She turned toward theghosts, clustered and desperate outside the basin.Threads that heal, Threads that thrive.Then again, though this time she sang it aloud. “Living, living, breath and living. Threads that heal, Threads that thrive.”

Each soul required its own caress, its own reminder of life. So many Hell-Bards had been dead a hundred years. A thousand. But she gave each soul the magic it had lost, the Threads that had been erased.

And there was nothing Corlant could do. When he sent his Hell-Bards to attack, nothing happened. When he tried to flee the basin, he was swarmed by the lives he had claimed—ghosts now set free and ready to exact their vengeance.

It was slow work. It was exhausting, and the power of the dark-givers that Iseult had taken from the Threadstones now seeped away with each soul Iseult saved. But the dark-givers had wanted freedom, and these Hell-Bards did too.

Green Threads that build spiraled upward, a thousand thousand blades of new life to replace the ash wasteland of the Hell-Bard Loom. And it was like the old rhyme Iseult had once sung to Aeduan:

Dead grass is awakened by fire,

Dead earth is awakened by rain.

One life will give way to another,

The cycle will begin again.

No more Threads that break. Only Threads that build, on and on for as far as Iseult could see, as far as she could feel. And with each Hell-Bard she healed, Corlant grew weaker.

Living, living, breath and living.Iseult didn’t stop until she saw only a realm of green.Threads that heal, Threads that thrive.Until she had healed Caden and Lev and Zander. Until she had healed Eron and every guard she’d ever met. Until they had all been healed and there was only one spirit left.

“Safi.” Iseult smiled at her other half, bright and beautiful and golden. “Be free, Light-Bringer. Be free.” Then she carefully unbound her Threadsister from the Loom. Here was Safi’s Truthwitchery, if only half, and here were the colors and brilliance of her being. The bursts of laughter. The crass swears. The eternal loyalty and moral compass always aimed true.

Initiate, complete.

Safi and all the other Hell-Bards were finally free.

And Iseult finally turned to face Corlant. Like a corpse left to deflate in the rain, he had shrunk in on himself, an empty, desperate body huddledwithin the basin. She could cleave him with just a thought. He was too weak to fight her. The daughter with a Void power he’d passed on.

But Iseult did not want to cleave him. He would be the last life she would willingly claim, and she would not twist it or sever it. Not the man who was her father.