Gideon, as a boy, looked like someone who hadn’t decided what he was going to become.
But someone else decided for him.
“He’s not invited,” the second voice said flatly. “If we let him in, we let that place in. We let her in.”
Her.
Even through the distortion of the flame, I felt my birthmark stir, a faint sting like a warning prick.
The Priestess.
The first voice hesitated. “What if he doesn’t have anywhere else?”
“Then he learns that the world isn’t always easy,” the second voice said. “Like the rest of us did.”
My stomach twisted at the cruelty of his words. Wasn’t Stonewick about being driven toward the light?
But then I thought about everything that kept Stonewick safe.
Protection. Fear. Boundaries. Wards.
All the things that had kept Stonewick safe were the same things that had left a child outside, shivering in the cold.
My eyes stung from tears I hadn’t expected because I knew what it did to a person when they were told, again and again, that they didn’t belong.
Because I knew what it did when your only choices were to become hard… or disappear.
When I found out my husband wasn’t in love with me anymore…that our family had been built on lies, I felt like I didn’t belong. The family that I had helped to build was breaking down around me, and I had nowhere to go. Magic saved me. Hope saved me.
I watched the boy in the flame lift his hand, palm out toward the Stone Ward. He didn’t touch it. He just hovered his fingers that trembled slightly
He lowered his hand and turned away, walking back into the trees like someone who had run out of hope for the day.
The image distorted, but I heard one last phrase before it blurred to nothing.
“…his name is Gideon,” the first voice said. There was something like regret in it, as if naming him aloud made him real enough to feel guilty about.
For a moment the image almost didn’t make sense.
Gideon.
My chest tightened, the ache sharp enough that it felt as though the flame had reached inside and closed around my heart.
Because the Gideon I knew would never have looked like that. He would never have allowed anyone to see him as a lonely boy standing at the edge of warmth.
He had built his arrogance carefully, layer by layer, until it worked like armor. He polished it, wore it openly, and used it to keep everyone at a safe distance. Cruelty had become his crown, because showing anything softer would have destroyed him.
And now—now he was in my dreams looking tired and weak and uncomfortably humble, offering a stone he could have clung to like a lifeline, warning me without asking for anything in return.
He had helped the orcs.
He had… tried.
The boy in the flame and the man in my nightmares were suddenly the same thread, pulled tight across decades.
And it made me feel sick with a kind of sorrow I didn’t have time for.
My mother was with the Priestess.
