I watched shifters come up to her as she dismissed their concerns, and she kept walking.
My vision blurred for a second, and I glanced toward Nova and Ardetia, who kept their gazes forward.
But then I felt something else build in my mother.
Pure exhaustion.
This wasn’t the kind of sleepiness that came knocking after a long day, but the type of fatigue that grew slowly, year after year, watching danger circle closer and closer to the people she loved.
And I recognized that tiredness immediately.
Her thoughts brushed through me again, faint but unmistakable.
Better me than her.
She was thinking of me, trying to circumvent a choice she didn’t want me to have to make. It felt like a punch to the stomach.
“You should have told me,” I whispered to the fading image, but the memory continued forward.
“She wasn’t taken,” I said softly.
Nova’s gaze shifted toward me.
“No,” she agreed.
I looked toward the place where the trees had been in the vision.
“She walked into the Wilds and out of it,” I whispered as the light faded under the branches, and the path narrowed.
And then I felther.
The Priestess.
I narrowed my eyes and saw someone standing near the edge of the clearing, just past the orc encampments…barely a shadow in the background, but I knew it was her.
The shape wasn’t completely clear, more suggestion than detail, but there was no mistaking the Priestess.
A figure in a cloak stood and waited.
Waiting for my mom because she knew that my mom would make this choice.
“That’s—” I started, then stopped, because saying it felt like making it real.
I watched several orcs approach my mom, and she barely stopped, ignoring their pleas because they could sense the shadowed woman ahead.
Nova’s eyes narrowed. “That’s what the orcs described.”
My mother continued toward her mother; her steps were steady and without hesitation.
She didn’t even pause.
She walked straight toward the figure and never once looked back.
The memory pulled closer until the clearing filled my vision.
Then something moved in the shrubs beyond the cloaked figure.
At first, I couldn’t place it. It wasn’t someone stepping forward or an animal shifting in the brush.
