How could I explain what even I didn’t fully understand? Shadows obeyed bloodlines older than the Courts themselves. They clung to history, to lineage, to the remnants of the First Court’s magic. They didn’t react to strangers. They didn’t acknowledge outsiders. They didn’t touch anyone but me.
I stepped toward her without thinking.
The shadows tightened around her.
I stopped immediately.
“Atlas?” Her voice softened, searching for something in my face that I wasn’t ready to expose.
I forced my breath steady. “They’re responding to you,” I said quietly. “Even when you don’t call them.”
A slow, thoughtful blink. Not fear—never fear—but a careful, measured attempt to fit this new impossibility into the puzzle of herself. Confusion first. Then something gentler. The faintest glimmer of recognition brushing the edges of her expression like dawn at the horizon.
Her gaze met mine, clear and steady. “Why would they do that?”
The shadows stirred again, answering to a name she hadn’t spoken aloud. I could have lied, I should have lied, but her eyes made lying impossible.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Her expression sharpened instantly. “Yes, you do.”
There was no accusation, just truth laid bare.
“Caelira—”
“You looked away,” she said, voice quiet but precise enough to cut. “You never look away.”
Gods.
She saw too much. Always had.
“Some things,” I tried, choosing the words with care, “are dangerous before they’re understood.”
“Dangerous to who?” she asked. “Me? Or you?”
The flinch I couldn’t suppress answered her for me.
Her breath stilled.
“There is something,” she whispered, voice trembling like a bowstring drawn too tight. “You do know something. Tell me.”
Her demand hit square in the chest, not because she was wrong, but because she wasn’t. Because prophecy is a current that drowns the unprepared. And if I let her step into it now, without history, without grounding, without armor, it wouldn’t matter how powerful she is. It would still pull her under.
And the thought of losing her that way, because of me, was violence I could not bear.
“There was a prophecy,” I said at last; the words ripped from my ribs. “One spoken before I was born.”
Her inhale was small and sharp.
“And what did it say?”
I hesitated.
And it broke something in her.
Her face didn’t crumble, but something inside her shifted, hardened, set.
“Atlas,” she said, voice beginning to shake with fury she was holding too tightly, “tell. me.”
