I was close. Not to perfection, but to the next step.
Starting today, Magdalena would teach me how to anchor myself within the continuum. I could grasp the threads. Now I needed to learn how to hold them long enough to follow the flow—long enough to weave.
I pressed a hand to my head. “I’m trying not to freak out about how little time we have left. I don’t want to prepare for another reset, Arielle. I just don’t. Can you imagine me doing that? After everything that’s happened. After coming so damn far.”
The lightness in her face faded. She folded her hands in her lap. “I don’t want to imagine it either. But jokes aside—now that the mating bond has eased, you should have more clarity. You’ve been doing well. I think today will go well.”
I released the breath I was holding. “I pray so.”
“Go get dressed. We’ve got another ten minutes. We’re meeting Magdalena outside Hyxian. She’s taking us on a little field trip.”
“Sounds interesting.”
“Knowing her, it will be.”
Hopefully today’s lesson would give me more grounding.
I would make it so.
***
The entrance to the Cave of Souls did not look like much from the outside.
No grand arch. No carved sigils announcing its importance. Just a split in the mountainside where stone had crackedcenturies ago, the opening narrow enough that it seemed the world had simply exhaled and left a seam behind.
But the moment I stepped across the threshold, I felt it.
The air changed.
It was cooler inside, but not cold. The kind of cool that wrapped around your skin and settled into your bones. The stone beneath my boots hummed faintly, almost imperceptibly, like something vast breathing beneath the surface.
Light did not enter the cave so much as linger. Pale blue glows pulsed softly along the walls, veins of mineral or magic threaded through the rock like frozen lightning. And beneath it all—layered so faintly I almost mistook it for imagination—were whispers.
Whispers within echoes, that bounced off the walls.
Magdalena walked ahead of Arielle and me.
“This,” Magdalena said quietly, glancing over her shoulder, “is where time does not move forward. It folds.”
I swallowed and stepped further inside.
“The Cave of Souls was not a resting place for the pure. Nor was it a prison for the damned,” she continued. “It was where unfinished things gathered. Souls who could not move on. Souls searching for something lost. Souls tethered to the world by longing, regret, love, vengeance.”
“Are they here now?” I asked looking around. The idea of seeing ghosts did not exactly thrill me.
“Always.”
I gave her a stiff smile, while Arielle shook her head at me.
“Over centuries, their echoes converged here, layering over one another until the cave itself became a living continuum.” Magdalena pointing here and there. “A place where past and possibility co-existed, suspended in the ether.”
The sound of her footsteps rippled outward, and for a brief second the air shimmered with threads of silver light flickering like hairline fractures in reality before vanishing again.
She stopped and faced me.
“At the moment, you struggle to hold the continuum,” she gave me a warm smile. “Here, it is already gathered for you.”
I smiled at that. “So, it makes it easier?”
