The Eternal One smiled gently. “I did.”
“Help me see what is beyond my sight.”
The woman nodded once. “I would start by telling you what you would eventually learn anyway as Grand Matriarch. Your mother knows, as did her mother. It passes only through the blood of the First Daughter alone—no one else’s. Do you understand?”
Without saying so explicitly, Kai was being asked to keep this forthcoming knowledge from her wife. She didn’t know how to feel about that.
The Eternal One must have sensed her hesitation. “Not my rule, exactly. This was the decision of your ancestors, and has been the way of things for five centuries.”
“My mother has kept this secret?”
“She holds tight to Yirian tradition.”
Kai sighed. “My hold has proved loose. Are you certain you wish to tell me?”
“I would prefer to wait, I think, but unfortunately, time no longer waits for us.” She rose from her stone bench and crossed over to one of the many cracks growing in the mountain walls. Hints of gold, like the veins throughout the floor, shone through. With the lightest of touches, she traced a crack, and black dust fell to the floor. “We may already be too late.”
Kai’s blood froze, and she looked deeper at her surroundings. The cracks…they were everywhere. “What has happened here? Was this a result of the attack on our mines?”
She’d been assured that all structures were sound.
“No. This is something else. Something worse.” The Eternal One turned to face her. “My name is Drakaa. I am the first of my kind.”
“Your…kind?”
“Five centuries ago, I entered this mountain with my people to guard this stone.” She turned her gaze toward the monolith of gold-veined marble. “My people called me Mother then, and when your ancestorslearned the truth of my people, my new title was born. It amused me, so I let them keep it.”
Kai hissed out a frustrated breath. “Do you expect me to believe you’ve been alive for five centuries?”
The Eternal One wasn’t a day over forty.
“Some days, I wish it were something I dreamed up. But, alas, I did not. Shall I continue?”
Shadi believed all of this? Had kept it secret all this time?
Kai’s mother let this woman, Drakaa, decide their clan’s unions year after year. She was thought to be a wise woman, and her word was trusted as though she were an embodiment of the gods themselves.
There must be a reason. Shadi was too…careful. Astute. Too rational to go with something this outlandish without the rationale to support it.
For that reason alone, Kai nodded for Drakaa to continue. Once she had the full story, she would decide how to proceed then.
“As a young woman, a god gave me a gift,” Drakaa began, her gaze turning distant. “I didn’t question it then. Out of selfishness? Maybe. Or was it selfish on his part? Or…maybe love isn’t reserved for only humans.”
“What did he gift you?”
“Reincarnation. Rebirth. I was the first—the gods made sure I wasn’t the last. You would know us by our strange eyes.”
Eyes of blue and brown.
“Our younglings who are born with these eye colors…,” Kai began, her mind spinning. All her life, she’d watched these babies stripped from their mothers’ arms.
Drakaa nodded. “They are my people reborn. In the beginning, I suggested we integrate with your clans, but your ways have always been sacred, and your ancestors wouldn’t hear of it.”
“What kind of god would curse you with such an existence?”
Kai couldn’t imagine it. She’d always assumed the Unseen were secluded by their choice, not the other way around. Did they have the freedom to leave, or were they bound to this stone somehow?
“The gods are not so different from us,” Drakaa said. “They were inherently dreamers. They never ceased wanting more, whether that was more color in a flower or more death in the sea or more love from a mortal woman...”
