I squeezed my eyes tightly shut, trying to hold on, to see more of the vision. The angle of it shifted higher, as though I’d scaled the center tree and was looking down upon everything. From this vantage point, I could see the black veil stretching toward the magic that had long surrounded my childhood home. Clawing at the edges, as if to claim some of that magic. Drawing it inward and stabilizing the forest again, it seemed…
But at what cost?
A rumbling sounded through the vision—though I would have sworn I could feel the vibrations of it in the present. My knees buckled. I braced myself against Aleks, opening my eyes to find Zayn and Thalia staring at me.
“What about Rose Point?” Thalia asked.
I shook my head, unable to put what I’d just seen into words.
Aleks quietly said, “The magic that’s surrounded that manor for all these years…the stasis spell…I think its origin is this forest.”
Tense silence followed his words.
I swallowed hard. “Orin told me that the purpose of this grove is to nullify dangerous divine power.”
Zayn frowned, considering. “When so much divine Shadow and Light magic violently collided at Rose Point seven years ago…”
“It must have triggered a protective spell from this grove,” I finished in a whisper. “One powerful enough to reach beyond its usual borders, wrapping around Rose Point and leaving it in the strange, semi-frozen state it’s been in for the past seven years.”
“So, what happens to Rose Point if we disrupt things?” Zayn asked.
I didn’t want to guess.
No one did.
Stasis.
Things don’t live or die here.
Was the magic of this grove really the reason my old home, my mother—all that remained of my old life—had not decayed? Because of whatever spells the members of the Void Order had woven here?
How had that Order created something so powerful, so…impossible?
The more I learned about them, the more questions I had. And the more I feared they might prove an even more dangerous enemy than any we’d faced thus far.
The darkness around us deepened as the seconds passed. The wind rose and fell with a strange rhythm, as if the grove was breathing. The trees bent inward like a fist closing around a heart. Aroundmyheart. More blue blossoms were drifting down from somewhere, a mesmerizing rain falling over me.
“We have to choose…let’s either cut it free or get the hell out of here.” Thalia’s voice seemed to come from very far away. She raised her staff, shadows gathering at its tip, but she looked uncertain. “Nova. We have to choose.Now.”
But the grove seemed to be offering me another option.
Stay.
A scent tickled my nose: cardamom and bergamot, the perfume my mother wore. Laughter echoed through the trees—my father’s laugh, high and bright and alive. Somewhere in the dark, I heard music. A waltz from my birthday. The last song before everything had gone so wrong. Before so much had ended.
But what if it didn’t have to end?
This was the grove’s gift, after all: not death, but suspension. I could stay here, wrapped in the warm memory of what I’d lost, and never have to face what came next. Never have to fail again. Never have to watch another person I loved slip through my fingers.
Moving forward meant accepting that they were gone. Really gone. Not cursed or sleeping or waiting for me to save them.
Just...gone.
“Nova.” Aleks’s voice cut through the dream I was slipping into. He was right beside me, suddenly, magic flickering unsteadily beneath his skin. When I met his eyes, I saw the same terrible temptation reflected there.
He wanted to stay, too.
Of course he did. Here in this frozen moment, we didn’t have to think about his past. About what the Light Keepers had done to him. What Lorien had done, what he was still doing, what might become of us and our magic and everything else.
