I would not be lost.
Not to history. Not to this curse. And certainly not to myself.
The texts spoke of no ending. But there had been a beginning. Someone had walked this path before me. If they had drowned in the dark as I am now, then maybe, just maybe, they had found their way back to the light.
My dread must have been written across my forehead, because Elva’s face softened as she looked at me, giving me one of her sympathetic smiles. “Do you want to talk about it?”
She meant the snake. The one I’d lost.
I cleared my throat, skimming the titles strewn across the table. “No.”
Yes.
Her hands rubbed together, folding against her lap. “Verena…”
I reached for the nearest book, cracking the spine and pretending to read. “I’m fine.”
I’m lost.
All I wanted was to be rid of the curse. From the moment I opened my eyes and felt its nails rake into my skull. And now a fraction of it is gone and I was suffocating.
She stretched a hand over the edge of her chair, fingers drifting in the air, waiting to find mine. “It’s okay to share what you’re feeling. It’s just me.”
A few pages shifted under my fingers as I blew out a slow breath. “I am feeling nothing but an oncoming headache, Elvira.”
I feel broken.
Her hand fell back to her lap, her gaze following it. “I might know a thing about a part of you that should be there—”
She flinched as I snapped the book closed.
“No, you wouldn’t. Because your magic has always been this way. It’s all you’ve known.” I hadn’t wanted to throw the words at her, but once they tasted my mouth, they didn’t stop. “I had something,” I lowered my voice to a rasp. “A weapon that made me feel likemaybethis curse was not the worst possible fucking thing that could have happened to me. A defense I could pour that anger and never-ending resentment into.” Her eyes welled, grief brimming. My own voice fractured. “And it was taken from me. Never to exist again.”
She swiped a tear from the corner of her eye, as if I hadn’t already seen it. But I had. And gods, I hated myself for it instantly.
None of this was her fault. Not her magic’s half sleep. Not her endless patience. She was only reaching for me, trying to build a bridge across the dark. Trying to make me feel less alone.
But that was the wound at the heart of it all.
The snake had been my mask, my fangs, my vessel for everything I couldn’t voice—resentment, rage, the ache. It bared its teeth, so I didn’t have to. Now it was gone.
And what remained was raw, unfiltered, me. And I’d turned that wreckage on the one person who had never deserved it. Shame coiled in my stomach like a second curse. My head dipped, heavy, my braid slipping forward as if to hide me.
“I’m sorry.” That I meant.
Elva sniffled, not looking up, blinking away the tears as if they’d never been there, the way she always did. Letting it roll off her heart like it didn’t leave cracks. She never gave grief time to take root.
But me? I would carry this moment like poison in my lungs. I would remember how I’d made her feel, forever.
“V, look at this.” Elva’s fingers ghosted across a brittle spine, the gold script almost faded into nothing:
Gods and Creations.
We were still here. Hours gone. Buried in this godsdamned archive, begging dead pages for truths no one thought to write down.
She continued, “It says five hundred years after the six Gods gave Selvarra the three kingdoms, a darkness fell. Brief. But it swallowed the continent whole.” Her finger traced the passage. “Some believed the galaxies shifted, causing a temporary blindness. But others…others thought it meant only one thing—” The pause stretched. I leaned closer. “That one of the Gods had fallen.” Her breath caught. “They exist as one, Verena. Without all six, life unravels.”
A beat passed. Then another.
