The mark on my skin flared, and suddenly I was moving without mypermission. My body knew what my mind didn’t—that this was flight or dissolution, escape or end. I ran toward the door as reality collapsed behind me, as two impossible beings tore the world apart with their war.
I reached the threshold and hesitated. Through the door was everything unknown, everything Jo had protected me from, everything my mother had died to keep me from becoming.
Behind me was everything falling apart, everything I’d known being unmade, everything human and normal and safe becoming anything but.
“Trust the Root,” Peeble said, and I remembered Jo’s voice, remembered the locket’s warmth, remembered that sometimes the only choice is to choose the unknown over the unbearable.
I stepped through the door.
The last thing I heard was Kaelren shouting something in a language that sounded like breaking glass.
The last thing I saw was Auradelle’s smile turning to rage.
The last thing I felt was the mark completing itself, spreading across my skin like roots, like wings, like coming home.
Then darkness, and falling, and the sound of roses laughing, whispering in a language older than words.
3
Kaelren
She fell through the door like debris—graceless, pathetic, wrong—and I threw myself after her, my shadows still coiling from Auradelle’s last strike. The crossing burned. Every ward I’d carved into my skin screamed in rage as I tumbled through folded space. Every drop of corrupted magic in my veins recoiled in recognition and fury.
I hit the moss of the Thornwood hard, rolling to my feet with corruption already gathering in my hands. Where was he? Where was—
Auradelle’s portal ripped open ten paces away, spilling golden light across the clearing. He stepped through with that insufferable grace, crown of thorns still writhing from battle-fury, not even winded. “Fascinating,” he said, his eyes fixed on something behind me. “She survived the crossing. Most humans don’t.”
I spun.
The girl—Elle—was on her hands and knees in the moss, retching bile and what smelled like that insipid Earth drink. Dr Pepper. Pathetic. This was Josephine’s precious cargo? This was what I’d sworn to protect?
But that wasn’t what made my corruption flare with rage.
It was the marks.
The marks were choosing. After twenty years of nothing, of silence, of rejection—the marks were finally choosing.
And they were choosing her.
Golden lines spread across her collarbone, elegant and perfect and absolutely wrong. A human. A worthless, mewling human wearing marks that should have been mine.
Where her hands touched the moss, things grew—small shoots, barely visible, but the Root recognized her. Welcomed her. After all my sacrifices, all my bleeding, all my careful carving of marks that never quite fit—the Root welcomed her like she was coming home.
I wanted to kill her. The thought came so naturally, so easily, that I’d already taken a step forward before I caught myself.
Josephine’s favor. I’d sworn. And I kept my word, even when it burned.
“Pity,” I said flatly, meaning it. My hands were still clenched, corruption spreading up my wrists in response to my rage.
Auradelle’s perfect eyebrow arched as he moved closer, his portal sealing behind him. “Such hostility, Kaelren. One might think you’re… disappointed.”
“One might think many things. Most would be right.” I forced myself to step back, to put space between myself and the girl who was now muttering something about brain tumors. “This is what Josephine wanted protected? This weak, useless thing?”
Elle was pushing herself up now, that garish red hair matted with sweat and bile. At least she had some grasp of how wrong her presence here was.
“She has no idea what she is,” Auradelle mused, his attention fixed on her with disturbing intensity. “Josephine kept her ignorant.”
“Josephine was a fool.” The words tasted like betrayal, but they were true. “She should have let the girl die human rather than become this… mockery.”
