The pressure sharpened.Not from the forest or from the house.It was the mirror ...or something accessing the mirror’s magic.Understanding settled with ugly clarity.The barrier hadn’t risen because he was crossing realms.It had risen because ofwherehe was going.Because ofwhowaited there.
The kiss they’d shared and the quiet that followed.The way the darkness had recoiled just long enough for something else to notice.It hadn’t been relief.It had been a signal.If he forced the mirror now, he wouldn’t just reach Lisa.He would lead whatever was stirring straight to her door.
“No,” he said quietly.“You don’t get her.”
The decision locked into place.He would go where the pull wanted him to look, but not the way it expected.Not blind.Not reaching for comfort.If the seal was cracking, the answers lay deeper, along the old paths.The thin places where memory and magic overlapped.Where the forest still remembered what the world had tried to forget.
He would learn as much as he could before he let himself touch what he loved again.When he went back to Lisa, it would be with truth in his hands, not a beacon at her throat.
Rezer turned from the mirror and grabbed his coat.The forest beyond the door stirred, bracing.“Yeah,” he murmured.“Me, too.”
And this time, when he stepped into the morning, he didn’t head for the mirror at all.He followed the pull sideways, toward the forgotten anchor where light and dark had first been bound, and where the Chamber had learned his name.
CHAPTER9
“Be nicer to the foliage, it’s your elder.”~ Syndra
Syndra had always loved the forest.This version of it, however, was trying very hard to end up on her bad side.
The clearing where they’d made camp still glowed with the last embers of their fire, orange light licking low over blackened wood.Above, the canopy arched high and restless, leaves whispering in a language older than even she wanted to remember.Dawn hadn’t quite decided whether it was coming or not; the sky beyond the branches hung in a murky blue that felt more like held breath than morning.
Syndra sat with her back against a fallen log, arms draped lazily over her knees, pretending for Oakley’s sake that she was relaxed.Her magic knew better.It hummed under her skin, restless, prickling as if every root and stone in the realm had turned to face them.
Across the extinguished fire, Oakley was failing spectacularly at looking calm.
He poked at the ashes with a long stick like they’d personally offended him.His jaw worked, his shoulders tight, dark hair mussed from too many times running his fingers through it.He looked very young in that moment, and very human, despite the faint elven angles that had grown sharper since he’d come fully into the realm.
He was also talking.
Again.
“...I’m just saying,” he muttered, stabbing the same piece of charcoal for the third time, “if the trees are going to start talking in riddles, the least they could do is give us a map.”
Tamsin, ever the portrait of stoic patience, stood at the edge of the clearing with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, gaze tilted up toward the canopy.The early light turned his pale hair to frost and etched the fine lines at the corners of his eyes a little deeper.He looked every bit the former king he’d once been, and every bit the male who had not slept.
“The trees do not think in maps,” Tamsin said quietly.“They think in seasons.In tides.In balance.”
Oakley snorted.“Yeah, well, balance told us ‘not you’ and then went radio silent, so forgive me if I’m not feeling charitable toward foliage right now.”
Syndra huffed under her breath despite the knot in her chest.“Be nice to the foliage.It’s your elder.”
Oakley’s eyes flicked to her.“It already insulted me,” he pointed at himself as he said “almost warrior, remember?Pretty sure respect is off the table.”He tried to make it a joke.The problem was, she heard the crack in it.
She remembered.The words had rolled through the ground and up her bones not long before the sky began to pale.
Not the former king.Not the former queen.Not the carefully trained almost-warrior.The daughters.Elora.Cassie.One of dark and one of light.
Syndra swallowed around the dryness in her throat.She’d lived through wars.Lost friends and kin and an entire way of life.She’d helped hold the line when darkness had crawled through their realm like a plague.And held the side of light when that darkness divided them.But nothing had ever hit her quite like knowing the forest itself had refused her help and pointed a hungry, ancient want directly toward the girls she’d come to love like her own.
Tamsin turned from the trees and joined them, lowering himself to sit beside her.His thigh pressed solidly against hers, warmth seeping through the leathers.
“You’re humming,” she said.
He gave her a sidelong look.“I am not humming.”
“Not with your mouth,” she amended, flicking her fingers toward his chest.“With your magic.It’s loud.”
Oakley’s gaze ping-ponged between them.“Is that a thing?You can hear each other’s ...magic?”
