Severin watched him approaching, a slow smile spreading across his face.
I picked up Grimnor and ran after him.
An Order member cut me off, tossing a sphere of something that exploded into chokingly thick smoke. I coughed and stumbled forward, trying to wave it away.
By the time I made it to clearer air, it was too late.
Aleks had reached the threshold of the portal.
“NO!” The scream tore from my throat, raw and desperate.
He paused to look back at me, one last time?—
Then he stepped through, Severin following with a slow, deliberate bow in my direction, just before the portal collapsed.
THIRTY-NINE
Nova
Nearly four days had passed since the battle at Calista's grave.
My kingdom had needed me every second of those days—to guide them through their grief, to reassure them, to help them pick up our latest broken pieces and continue to rebuild. And theystillneeded me, of course. But on the afternoon of the fourth day, my brother offered to run interference so that I could have a brief chance to escape. A chance to breathe.
Because he knew as well as I did how I desperately needed time to think outside of the spotlight, to find a quiet place where I could sit and make sense of Aleks's last words to me.
You can't follow me this time.You understand that, right?
And I did.
But that didn't mean that my heart wasn't breaking. Or that I could just move forward, as if nothing had changed. As if he wasn't gone.
And not taken, this time...he'dchosento leave. Which made it all the more painful, whatever his reasons for doing it.
I already had a destination in mind when I slipped out of the palace by way of a rarely-used servant's passage. Phantom hadn't let me out of his sight these past three days, and today was no exception; he offered to join me, and to carry me, before I could even ask.
I huddled close to his back, my hair loose and flying behind me as we raced across the blooming landscape. The day was warm, the air sweet with spring blossoms, the sky clear.
That sky was also brighter than I'd ever seen it, thanks to a visit Lorien and I had paid to the Aetherstone yesterday. It had been an experiment, an attempt to see how stable his magic could be, now that he'd been, in a sense, reborn. That was how I'd managed to talk him into helping me bring some more of the life back to my realm—because he was as curious as I was about what he could and couldn’t do, magically speaking.
Whether or not he'd help me with this next chapter of my story remained to be seen, though; I still couldn't make sense of him, even after all we'd been through.
But he'd been hanging around the palace these last few days, making use of the library and studying all the notes and artifacts from our adventures thus far, which Eamon had been carefully archiving. Making plans, I think—but keeping them to himself. We'd scarcely talked outside of our brief trip to the Midna Palace, though, and I didn't know where we were supposed to go from here.
He'd both saved my life and tried to take it away, and now a shard of his soul quite literally resided in my body. Even if my own magic had overtaken it, it didn't change the fact that it had originally been his. And he’d let me…keep it.
We were tied together, whether we liked it or not, like threads woven into the same piece of fate's tapestry.
Phantom raced into the forest where Calista had been laid to rest, and I instantly felt a shift in the air—that lingering sense of ancient magic prickling over me. As unsettling as I’d initially found it, part of me welcomed it, now; it made me feel closer to my Vaeloran legacy than anywhere else in the kingdom. Like I was coming into a place I could someday call home, even if I wasn’t entirely settled yet.
Calista's gravestone had clearly been visited recently. My eyes were drawn to the offerings left there—smooth stones arranged in careful little stacks, alongside several carved wooden tokens, each one unique. Someone had tended to the ground as well, clearing away the weeds and smoothing the earth into gentle curves.
All of it was Lorien's doing, I assumed.
I knelt before the stone, placing my palm against its cool surface. The marble had been worn smooth by weather and time, but her name remained clear.
So many secrets still buried with her.
Would we ever know the whole truth?
