Instead, I move to sit at the edge of our protective circle and start writing smaller contracts, maintenance work that doesn't require significant cost, anything to keep my hands busy and my mind from dwelling on the hollow feeling in my chest where two months of life used to be.
It's an old pattern, one I perfected during my years at Grimrose. Stay busy. Stay useful. Don't give yourself time to feel the emptiness.
"You're still trying to do it alone." Rumi's soft voice hits my ears but it's free of accusation. He settles beside me without waiting for an invitation, close enough that his shoulder brushes against mine.
The contact sends warmth spreading through me, his essence reaching out to soothe edges I didn't realize were raw. At Grimrose, we never really had the time to sit like this, not often enough. Everything is different now.
"Old habits," I say.
"I know." He doesn't push or lecture. He just stays beside me, his wings shifting to block the chill coming off the cave walls. "The others are worried. They felt you pulling at the contracts again."
Of course they did. The shared system means nothing stays hidden anymore. Every small maintenance check, every tiny adjustment to the surveillance web, they all feel it now. The privacy I used to have, the ability to pay costs in secret, that's gone.
I should resent it. Part of me does.
But a larger part remembers standing in the kitchen at Phoenix Sanctuary, tasting sweetness for the first time in years, crying over a bowl of strawberries because my mates gave me back something I'd lost so gradually I'd forgotten it existed.
"I'm not paying anything significant," I say. "Just monitoring. Making sure the loyalists haven't moved."
"I know that too." Rumi's shoulder presses more firmly against mine. "But you're out here alone instead of sleeping with the rest of us. That's the part that worries them."
"I don't know how to stop," I admit quietly. "Watching, planning, preparing for threats. It's what I've always done in some part even before I remembered everything."
"You don't have to stop. You just have to let us watch with you."
He shifts, his arm moving to sit around my shoulders, pulling me against his side. The gesture is so similar to that night after the intervention, when he held me while I cried for the first time in decades, that something in my chest aches with the memory.
"Come to bed," he says. "The contracts will still be there in the morning. The loyalists aren't moving. And you need rest more than you need to prove you're useful."
I should argue and insist that someone needs to keep watch, that the surveillance web requires attention, that I'm fine. Instead, I let Rumi pull me to my feet and guide me back to where our mates are sleeping. Letting out a deep breath, I myself settle into the space they've left for me, Skye's hand finding mine in the darkness, Stellan's heat bleeding into my cold fingers, and Jade's tail curling around my ankle in unconscious possession. Rumi's wings fold over all of us, his golden warmth seeping into my bones.
For once, I don't fight it. For once, I let someone else keep watch while I rest.
3
Rumi
Thewildmagicgetsworse the further north we travel, and by the third day I'm the only one who can reliably navigate us through it.
I take point because my senses catch the chaos pools before we stumble into them. The others follow in a loose formation behind me, trusting my judgment in a way that still catches me off guard sometimes. A century of being the one no one trusted at all doesn't vanish overnight, even with five mates who would die for me.
The strange landscape we passed through yesterday was unsettling. This is something else entirely. The corruption here has had decades to fester, maybe centuries, and it's developed a kind of awareness that makes my skin crawl. I can feel it watching us, testing our defenses, and probing for weaknesses in our bond. Twice in the last hour I've had to pull Stellan back from stepping into pools that looked like solid ground but would have swallowed him whole.
"Left," I call back, steering us away from a patch of air that tastes wrong.
The wrongness is hard to describe to anyone who can't sense it directly. It's not a smell or a sound or even a feeling, exactly. More like a pressure against the part of my mind that processes essence, a warning that something ahead doesn't follow the rules reality is supposed to obey.
Harlow confirms my instinct a moment later. "The veil's thin here.Reallythin. I can see through to the other side without even trying."
We give that patch a wide berth. Whatever happened to make the barrier between life and death so fragile, I don't want to find out by losing someone through it.
The wild zones come more frequently as we continue. Pools of raw essence that shimmer with sentient hunger, reaching for anything living that passes too close. Pockets where time moves differently, and we lose an hour crossing a clearing that should have taken minutes.
The black threads in my aura prove useful for the first time since I learned what they were. When the chaos presses too close, I feel them reaching out, absorbing the excess energy before it can destabilize us. My father told me the threads were part of my divine heritage, that balance requires holding darkness as well as light. I believed him because I wanted to, but I didn't fully understand what he meant until now, watchingthe wild magic part around me because part of me speaks its language.
I am darkness and light. Chaos and order. The thing that stands between extremes and keeps them from tearing reality apart. For the first time in my life, that feels less like a burden and more like a purpose.
We find the underground community on the fourth day, following signs that most people would miss entirely. Scratches on rocks that form a pattern only visible from certain angles. Essence traces so faint they're almost invisible, deliberately dampened to avoid detection.
