I swallowed. The words didn’t feel like judgment—they felt like unchanging truth. The sun shone, and I was small and weak. Mymother loved me, and I was small and weak. “I wasn’t thinking about courage.” That was a truth, too.
“What were you thinking of, child?”
Unbidden, flashes of that night replayed before me. The crater, the destruction, Dorian’s shadowed face, the last sight of?—
“Your mother,” the stag said. “You were thinking of her.”
I had not chosen those memories; the stag had chosen them for me. It had entered my mind, had drawn them out of me. I should have been terrified or furious, but I was neither. The act had felt as natural and as coaxing as soft hands stroking my hair.
Tears came to my eyes. My nose prickled. A modicum of the grief I felt rose to my consciousness, and my legs began to shake.
Dead. They were all dead, and I…
I was alone. Here. Withhim, with these monsters.
“You would kill them,” the stag said. “Wouldn’t you?”
Them.Dorian. Rhiannon. Any one of those fuckers who had invaded my kingdom, slaughtered my people.
My teeth stayed gritted while my lips moved. A tear slipped down my cheek. Already I sensed a rule: we only spoke truths in this place. “Yes.”
“Do you wish to have that power?”
I blinked against tears. The part of me I’d kept under tight guard rose unwilling to my lips—the words I sometimes thought but never spoke. “I have no power. I’m small. I’m useless to everyone.”
“And yet…”
And yet. And yet…
“Yes,” I said, my voice serpentine and sharp. “I want it. I want that power.”
And not just because of them. Not just because of the attack, the crater, my mother. If we were speaking of truths, then here was mine:
I was a real daughter of scorn. The acid hadn’t just rained on me—it had sculpted me. For twenty years, it chiseled my hunger into something precise. Something immutable.
I had always wanted to be more. I had always wanted—wanted—wanted.
The sunlight’s warmth passed over my head, warming it like a hand set to my crown. A pulse of heat moved through my scalp, through the bones of my skull, into the hollow of my chest. It acknowledged me. Who I was, and who I wanted to be. It saw me like no one else had, the dark crevices even my mother didn’t know about.
It saw potential in me.
“Power is not granted. It is taken,” the stag’s voice said. “So take it.”
The words sank beneath my skin like seed into soil. The warmth deepened, threading into sinew. My eyes slipped shut under the weight of that invisible hand, and the tears carved hot paths to my neck. I dropped to my knees, as I had that night in the crater. But now, the vision sharpened: I saw both the fractured stone and the spiritstag, superimposed. Clear water welling from rock. Smoke curling into sunlight. A world cleaved open and reborn.
Agony lanced through me. A radiant ache, like being burned and filled all at once. For a moment I forgot my name. My life. I forgot the girl I’d been, the daughter and night guard of scorn.
All that remained was the knowing:
The stag had spared me. It had offered me a choice.
A soft sigh emanated from above, from below, enveloping me. “In you resides a rare and marvelous thing. You do not see it now, but you were never meant to. When you lose what you thought was yours, then you will begin to see who you truly are.”
I didn’t—couldn’t comprehend?—
“Eurydice Waters,” the stag whispered, its voice fading to nothing. “Did you ever wonder at that name?”
The warmth ebbed, and once again clouds passed over the sun. I was left with my eyes shut, breathing hard, tears wetting the neck of my tunic. The world opened up, comprehensible again.
