Kael’s heart dropped like a stone. “Eiren?”
Valea nodded once. “She came with a message.”
Maris stirred, eyes unfocused but glimmering. Her lips parted, and when she spoke, her voice was soft like the echo of a prayer.
“She kissed me.”
Kael knelt beside her burshing her hair back.
“The goddess made of stars. She… knew me.” Her hand trembled in Valea’s grip. “She said I was called.”
Kael swallowed hard, shadows whispering around his throat.
Valea let go gently, allowing Kael to slide his arms around the girl who had become the axis of his every thought.
“She showed me… the Veil,” Maris murmured. “It’s fraying. Tearing. It holds back something… monstrous. And I—”
Her voice broke. Her whole frame did, curling in on itself.
“I think I’m what’s meant to mend it. Or destroy it.”
Kael’s jaw flexed.
Eiren’s blessing and now it pulsed beneath the skin of this breakable —stubborn girl who had once sewn patches onto noblemen’s coats.
Valea stood, face unreadable. “I’ve already sent for Aldwyn. He’ll help us decipher what she saw.”
Kael barely heard her.
Maris was burning in his arms not with fever, but power. Something sacred. Something blasphemous. A mortal girl kissed by a vanished goddess.
He pressed his lips to her hairline and held her tighter.
And in the quiet between heartbeats, he realized something bone-deep:
The goddess had given him a weapon. Or perhaps a warning.
Either way, he would not let her go. Not now. Not ever.
Chapter twenty-seven
Power and Promise
-Kael-
She was taller.
It was the first thing he noticed as he followed her into their chambers, an imperceptible shift to any outsider, but not to him. Not when he had memorized the curve of her shoulders — the slope of her spine. The smallness of her, once so human and fragile.
Now… she moved like something reborn.
Not quite Nightbound. Not quite mortal. But something that hummed in a new way .
He watched from the doorway, silent, unseen. The wraiths stood at either side of the threshold, unusually still, as if they too sensed something new inside her. A presence. A shift.
Maris stood before the hearth in a soft robe, her skin glowing faintly in the low firelight. Hair unbound. The starlight in her eyes, those pale green irises with silver bursts flickered brighter— as if the galaxies were waking up behind them.
He swallowed hard.
