“Who was she?” My voice cracked. “Who was my mother?”
His gaze dropped to the photograph. He didn’t look surprised. He just looked exhausted, having waited twenty years for this specific moment.
“Selene, please. Sit down.”
“No.” I shoved the table, rattling the silverware. “I’m done sitting. You told me she was human. You told me she died young.” I stabbed a finger at the date printed on the page. “This book is three centuries old. She looks exactly the same in this photo as she did the day she died. How?”
He closed his eyes. A long, heavy breath escaped him. “It’s complicated.”
“Try me,” I snapped. “I’ve spent my life believing I was a half-blood question mark. That my mother was a fragile human woman. But she’s in a history book, and you are a brick wall of secrets. So I’ll ask you again. Who are you? Who was she? And who the hell am I?”
The quiet stretched, taut.
He finally met my stare. The weariness in his eyes was profound. “Your mother wasn’t human.”
The air left the room.
“What?”
“And I,” he said softly, “am not Calysteri.”
My head spun. The kitchen, the smell of basil, the radio—it all tilted. If she wasn’t human, and he wasn’t Calysteri… then the math of my own existence dissolved.
“What are you?” I whispered.
He didn’t answer immediately. He just watched me, his face a mask of regret.
A new question formed, the worst one of all. It clawed its way out of my mouth before I could stop it.
“Am I even yours?”
The pain that flashed across his face was real. “Not by blood,” he admitted, his voice thick. “But by choice. Always by choice.”
The words hit like a physical blow. He wasn’t my blood. But he was the one who taught me to ride a bike. He sat up through every fever, who cheered the loudest at my graduation, patched up scraped knees and broken hearts. He had chosen me every day for twenty years. And he had lied to me for every single one of them.
“Then whose am I?” I took a step back, the distance between us suddenly infinite.
The question tore open a wound I hadn’t realised I was carrying. For years, I’d felt like a glitch. Other half-bloods I knew were stable, their magic a manageable hum. Mine was a riot—chaotic, overpowering, and always on the verge of spilling over. I had spent my life thinking I was just wrong. A genetic mismatch. A strange, volatile anomaly in a world of orderly magic.
But if the lie was the foundation… maybe the chaos wasn’t a defect.
“What am I?” I whispered, the fear finally catching up to the confusion.
He slumped against the counter, the fight draining out of him. “Sit down, Selene. I will tell you everything.”
The legsof the kitchen chair scraped against the floor tiles as he dragged it out for me. A gesture he’d made a thousand times—an offer of tea, biscuits, a peaceful moment. But tonight, it was an order. A command to brace for impact.
I sank into the seat, my body moving on autopilot while my mindspun in the vast, silent vacuum he had created. He sat opposite. The table lay between us like a chasm.
“To answer that,” he began, his voice rough with the weight of the truth, “you have to understand your origins.”
He took a breath, the sound rattling in his chest. “Liora and I… we belonged to a different time. A different nature. The old stories called us Aetherkind.”
Aetherkind.
The word resonated, pulling a specific memory from the back of my mind.The Tides Beyond the Veil—the deep-blue linen volume currently sitting on the bookshelf in my room upstairs. I had read that exact term only yesterday, buried in a passage about figures shaped from mist and moonlight walking the tide-paths.
A folklore book. A gilded story she invented with magic creatures.
