I lean in close, whispering in his ear.
He pulls back, hesitant to agree because it means leaving my side, but he nods.
As he turns to give our friends the orders, my heart clenches—I love him so fiercely it feels like it might kill me.
Not in any of my past lives, not once, have I known a love like this. Basten is the only person who ever touched my soul and left his mark.
I’m fae, yes. But I’m also human. Somehow, that’s the conclusion I always come back to in every Return. It’s what my brother and sister fae forget:
That we’reofthem, notabovethem.
Suri and Ferra dig a broken door out of the rubble, and cart it over to where Folke lies. Together, Basten and Rian lift Folke’s bleeding body onto it. Basten exchanges a few words with them, and then Ferra and Rian grip the door’s edges, ready to carry the makeshift stretcher toward help.
But Suri spares a second to look over her shoulder at me.
Quickly, so fast I almost don’t see it, she makes the Winged Lady gesture with her hands.
Then Ferra calls to her, and she reaches down to help lift the stretcher.
Tears flow harder down my face as I smile.
Friends. In thousands of years, I never had those, either.
The animated corpse of a fisherman, fish knife still dangling from his belt, stumbles over broken glass toward me.
Basten catches sight of him and peels off to move toward him confidently, sword raised. With one clean swipe, he severs the man’s head, then disappears around the corner.
I push to my feet, slowly becoming aware of how many of Woudix’s dead are flooding into the Glassmarket.
It unnerves me, how I can’t control them. How, when I reach into their souls, only a hollow chill answers.
There’s only one god they answer to, and it isn’t me.
Hunting for my breath, I press a hand against my chest, forcing myself to assess the situation.
All around me, the swelling tide of the dead terrorize any citizens who haven’t managed to take shelter. They climb through broken storefront windows. Claw at locked doors. Screams of the living echo throughout the city in a deafening chorus.
I move instead toward the tallest heap of broken stone and splintered timber, and climb up the rubble until I stand above the chaos, above the screams, above the stench of death and blood and rot.
The air around me crackles, alive.
I draw in a slow breath, and with it I pull in everything they have given me—Basten’s raw, stubborn devotion, Rian’s cunning and strength, Tòrr’s sacred sacrifice—until my heart feels too full for my body to contain.
Their blood burns like starlight in my veins.
I lift my hands to the sky.
My fingers knit gracefully through the air, each motion deliberate. My fey lines ignite like constellations across my skin, silver blazing outward, pulsing with a power that finally feelsright.
The earth shudders underfoot.
Beyond the southern gate, the lake answers my call, rising from its bed in a slow, majestic swell. I can feel its movements almost like it’s a part of me. Water coils upward, shimmering and translucent, before surging forward in a roaring wall of force, pouring over hills, through valleys, straight to the city gate.
It blasts through, flooding the streets with unyielding power.
The wall of water crashes into the undead horde, sweeping them from their feet, dragging them under, breaking their brittle bodies apart, and carrying their now powerless corpses back to a final resting place at the lake’s bottom.
And I stand there, hair whipping around my face, the floodwaters rising to my ankles. I slowly lift my hands skyward, reveling in the wind on my face, and feel it again—the sense that far from succumbing to the rising waters, I could simply take wing and soar away.
