We stared.
The room was not empty.
The fire was lit, crackling gently in the hearth. Candles flickered across every flat surface, mantle, shelves, table, and not with their usual lazy sway. Their flames danced sharply, almost too bright.
The air smelled like rosemary, smoke, and something electric.
But it was the figure standing in front of the hearth that stole my breath.
Tall.
Still.
Wrapped in a long cloak of deep silver that shimmered like moonlit frost.
Her hair, long, loose, rippling like dark water, fell over her shoulders. Her hands were folded calmly at her waist.
Her back was turned to us.
But even before she spoke, even before she moved, I felt it.
That same terrible, familiar pressure from the mirror corridor, like the world tilting toward a colder center.
I dug my fingers into Keegan’s arm.
He stiffened, one hand instinctively shifting toward the shape of a claw.
The figure turned slowly.
Her face came into view.
And all the breath left my lungs.
“Maeve,” she said softly.
Not Elira.
Not the priestess.
Someone I had not seen in this form since childhood, and a version I had never expected to see inside the walls of my home.
My mother.
Her eyes were glowing with a magic I did not recognize.
For a heartbeat, I was four again.
Standing in the doorway, arms full of too many emotions and not enough language, watching my mother be… other.
The glow in her eyes wasn’t just candlelight. It was real, steady, wrong, and right all at once.
“Mom?” I croaked.
She didn’t answer right away. Her gaze was fixed on something I couldn’t see, some point over my shoulder or beyond the cottage walls. Her irises glowed a strange, luminous silver-green, like moonlight caught in a bottle of lake water. Magic rolled off her in waves, prickling my skin.
The air in the cottage felt charged. The hairs on my arms lifted. The birch sprig in the blue bottle on the mantle shimmered, leaves vibrating like they were humming along with some silent note.
My butterfly mark burned.
