Her name in his mouth was a benediction.
Behind them, the veil shimmered, a live and luminous boundary waiting to be crossed. It pulsed like breath. Like welcome. Like recognition.
She took his hand.
In the end, she found being unbound not to be damnation, but akin to deliverance: duty dying and belonging at last to herself.
And so, entwined, they slipped into the silver hush beyond the Veil.
Part IV
Where the fire dims, you will rest.
Where the water stills, you will wait.
Where the stars gather, you will be known.
The night will name you without speaking.
It will call you by what you have done,
what you have lost,
and above all,
what you still dare to hope for.
And you will stand
finally
beneath the holy light
and feel yourself belong
to something vaster, lovelier than pain.
Epilogue
The Sanctum breathed a different silence now.
No chanting. No guards. No fire. Just dust and ivy climbing through the cracks in the stone.
Hanna sat cross-legged on the floor of the old room, her room once, but Ilys’s first. The walls were bare now, the veil hooks long rusted. A shaft of late afternoon light filtered through the broken shutters, falling in golden strips across her lap.
Morrigan lay beside her, chin resting on his paws. His coat had gone gray at the muzzle, the years softening him into gentleness. He had followed her here without being called, padding silently through the corridor as if guided by instinct alone.
When the wind shifted, he lifted his head, ears pricking. He gave a soft, restless whine, then turned toward the door, scraping a paw against the stone—the same sound he used to make when Ilys went out of sight and he wanted her back.
The sketchbook lay open in Hanna’s hands.
She turned the pages one by one, the thin paper whispering against her fingertips. Faces looked back at her, not perfectly drawn, but alive with motion. Beck and Baron. Grim with his mouth set in warning and love. Rowenna, half-smiling. A rabbit. A sword.
And Ilys, a self-portrait, over and over.
Sometimes veiled.
Sometimes not.
