The mark had long since become part of the landscape of my body – a thing I no longer noticed until it stirred, low and smouldering beneath my skin. It didn’t ache like a wound or pull like a scar, rising and receding on its own terms. Some days it went untouched, no more than a faint warmth curling beneath the shoulder. But other times it flared without warning – not with pain exactly, but with pressure, as if something beneath the surface remembered its purpose and meant to remind me.
Maeve never commented on the birthmark and never reached for it directly. But the next time she peeled the fabric away, I saw it again – the flicker that passed through her gaze, the brief hold of breath before her hand resumed its careful path. She slowed as she passed over the mark, her fingertips brushing across it with a focus so precise it felt more like study than care. I began to watch her more closely when she came, not just for the work she did, but for the way she moved around that single spot over my shoulder – the way her attention caught on it, again and again.
That night, the wind died early. Even the gulls – ever restless in their circling cries – had gone quiet, as if some unspoken pact had been struck between sea and sky. The fire in the hearth had burned down to its last faint core. I lay back on the pallet, the rough weave of the blanket drawn up to my neck, one hand folded across my chest, the other curled in the space between my ribs and hipbone. The rope sat untouched in the corner. The bolt had slid into place long ago. There was only the hush of the night and the warmth still lingering where Maeve’s salve had been worked into the skin of my wrists. My eyes closed without resistance. And in the dark behind them, my thoughts scattered like falling leaves before sleep took hold.
It came gently at first—not with fire, pain, or a sudden cold, but with the absence of all those things. As if the world had slipped its tether, and I’d gone with it, drawn into a current I never learned to fight. Timethinned. Weight shifted. And when I opened my eyes again, the roof beams were gone. The salt-damp walls, the coil of smoke, the faint creak of wind through stone – all gone. I was no longer in the ruin but somewhere else entirely, somewhere entirely wrong.
The air struck me first, thick and rancid with old iron and scorched stone, sinking down the back of my throat. The light came next—if it could be called light—dim and pulsing and blood-warm, casting long shadows that moved not with the flicker of flame but the slow, unblinking drag of something alive. I was standing, not lying, not dreaming – standing, awake and aware in a place that stank of memory and ruin, and I knew, with the certainty that lives in the marrow and nowhere else, that I should not be here.
The chamber breathed around me – not with air, but with a weight that settled low in the chest, as if the walls themselves were watching. Slick with shadow, they seemed to close inward with every blink, each surface pressing tighter, resentful of being seen.
And then I saw her.
She lay at the centre of it all, crumpled on the floor, like something discarded after use. Her nightdress was torn and soaked dark through the middle; blood pooled thick beneath her hips and belly in heavy arcs, as though her body had tried to claw its way back from whatever had taken it and failed. Her fingers twitched—barely—where they pressed against her midsection, and the breath that raised her ribs was shallow and ragged, still tethered by the cruel grip of something unfinished. And standing above her, still as a monolith, was the Queen Mowgara. My Mother. Her hands were coated to the wrist in blood that gleamed in the firelight like lacquer, her expression hollow of triumph or regret, her presence swallowing the air like gravity. But it was what stood behind her that made the breath catch raw at the back of my throat.
They stepped forward one by one—five of them all together—not women, not exactly, but their memory, carved in smoke and shadow.Their faces blurred, flickering at the edges, as if the chamber itself refused to recall them clearly. Yet their presence was undeniable, and they were radiating a fury so ancient and absolute it felt less like rage than reckoning. Shoulder to shoulder, they watched. Not Mowgara, not the woman bleeding out on the floor, but me. The living intruder in a room built to hold only ghosts.
A pressure gathered behind my eyes, mounting with each heartbeat. The air tasted of rust and ruin. Firelight crawled across the chamber in slow ribbons, bending the walls into shapes that shouldn’t hold. Even my own form felt altered – stretched, uncertain, no longer wholly mine.
Then the air shifted – not in the fire, not in the room, but beside me.
It bent, almost imperceptibly, like the pull before a storm breaks. I turned, heart jolting, drawn by a pressure that hadn’t been there a moment before. And standing there, no more than a few paces from where I stood, was Mathias.
He looked as out of place as I felt. His coat was the same he’d worn that evening by the fire. His boots still carried the grime of the trail. And his face… his face held the kind fixed in disbelief that mirrored my own. For a moment, neither of us moved. He stared at the Queen. At the blood. At the woman on the floor. Then his eyes found mine.
Something flickered there – not fear of pain or death, but of the knowing we were bothhere, trulyhere, in flesh and breath, where no living thing belonged. He stepped toward me, slow and cautious, as if unsure the ground would hold. I reached out without thinking, fingers brushing his hand – and felt it. Not the blur of a dream or the weightless shimmer of a vision, but the warmth of him, solid beneath my palm. The chamber did not shudder to cast us out. It held us, vast and watching, as if still deciding what to make of us.
The space shifted—subtly, soundlessly—and the air seemed to draw taut around us. At its centre, the woman in the nightgown began tostir. She moved not as visions do, nor with the haze of dreams, but with the slow, dragging effort of a body pulled upward by pain itself. Blood clung to her jaw, her neck, her chest – thick and dark where it soaked the shredded fabric. One hand stayed pressed to her belly, fingers trembling where they gripped the torn cloth. But it was her eyes that stopped me.
Her gaze moved with quiet intent – not drifting, not lost, but precise. It passed from Mathias to me, pausing on each of us in turn, as if measuring what part we had come to play. There was no fear in her expression, no plea. Only a kind of recognition so deep it felt like memory – ancient and intimate, and unbearably close.
Her mouth parted. She shaped words with it, careful and deliberate, but no sound reached us. The chamber held its heat, unbroken but for the slow crawl of fire along stone. Something inside me tightened with each passing moment. I took a breath and felt it stutter. She was speaking to us, but I could no more catch the meaning than I could still the pounding in my chest.
Beside me, Mathias moved – not toward her, but slightly forward, a step of protest or panic or both. His voice cracked as he called out to the space between them. “I can’t hear you,” he said, louder now, something raw threading the words. “I don’t know what you’re saying—”
But she didn’t stop. Her lips kept moving, insistent now, the shape of the words unchanged. Again. And again.
And then the world broke around us.
It wasn’t sound as I knew it. Nothing stirred the air, yet something split the chamber wide – a force so sudden it left the world gaping. Like cloth torn down the centre, reality gave way, and through the rupture, came her voice.
“I am her mother.”
It didn’t echo. It didn’t rise. It settled – heavy and absolute – behindmy eyes, in the hollow of my chest, where it burned like a brand, searing through thought and breath alike.
“I am her mother.”
My hand clenched around Mathias’ without meaning to. His gaze was still locked on the woman, face drawn tight, as if that single sentence had torn something in him open.
“I am her mother.”
And then the veil tore fully, as the chamber unravelled around us, light and blood and stone collapsing into dark as it surged to cast us out.
I woke choking on air that wasn’t there—the scream already in my throat, ragged and sharp, as my body convulsed against hands I didn’t recognise. For a beat, the world was still the chamber – heat and fear and pain – until the broken roof of the temple swam into view, and I was back. Back in the dark. Back in my own skin.
Mathias held my shoulders, his voice a whisper somewhere near my ear, his lips so close to my skin I could feel their warmth: “Come back. Come back to me.”
Maeve was crouched close, one hand braced at my back, the other gripping my wrist to still its trembling. I could feel the terror in them—not loud or frantic, but contained and focused, like soldiers who’d seen something impossible and were still trying to make sense of it.
