But looking at Eamon’s face, the grey exhaustion etched into his features, I understood the reality. She had been writing a history.
He leaned forward, placing his hands flat on the table.
“We do not age as humans do, Selene. We walk the centuries, not the decades. That photo you saw in the Archives? It was taken when she was already centuries old.”
My head spun. Living for hundreds of years. That suddenly explained why he still looked at least a decade younger than the sixty-two he claimed to be.
“We lived in the quiet spaces,” he continued, his eyes unfocused, seeing a world I couldn’t imagine. “We had to. Our kind was powerful, but we were rare. And we were hunted. Not just by humans who feared what they couldn’t control, but by our own kind. Those who sought to consume power rather than share it.”
He looked at me, his expression softening into a heartbreaking vulnerability.
“And Liora… she was my wife. But she was also something far more vital. We were bound.” He looked down at his hands, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Our souls were threaded together, Selene. We were one entity across two bodies. Inseparable. In a bond like that, when one half is cut, the other unravels. The other follows.”
His gaze lifted, meeting mine, and for the first time, I saw the ghost of an agony so deep it had no name.
My heart stuttered. The logic was brutal. Clinical.
“If she is gone, why are you still here?” The question came out as a shard of ice.
Pain, pure and devastating, flashed in his eyes. “Because she didn’t let me. The moment before she died, she cut the thread herself.” He made a small gesture with his hand. A severing. “She tore away a piece of her own soul and forced it away from mine. She broke the bond so I wouldn’t follow. So I could stay. For you.”
The confession landed, and my breath caught. The scale of the sacrifice was too immense to grasp. He didn’t just lose her. He was forcibly left behind. For me.
All these years, he had been walking through the world with half a soul. A living ghost.
It made terrifying sense now why his appearance had aged so rapidly since I was a child, weathering far quicker than any normal Calysteri lifespan should allow. The severed bond was actively unravelling him.
“It shattered me,” he whispered, the admission costing him everything. He looked down at his hands, his scarred right hand curling into a fist. “It still does.”
The kitchen was silent save for the hum of the refrigerator. The room felt thin, the air brittle. My own body was a foreign country. Everything I thought was solid ground was quicksand.
I reached back, my fingers tracing the faded, silvery pattern on my left scapula, hidden beneath my jumper. The one constant in my life. A small, familiar imperfection. Another lie.
“The scar,” I said, my voice flattening into something brittle. “The one you said I got when the barbecue went wrong.”
Eamon’s head snapped up. The exhaustion draining himmoments ago was replaced by something sharper—grief edged with guilt.
“There was no barbecue accident, Selene.”
Of course there wasn’t.
“It appeared the night she died.” He spoke slowly, building the memory brick by painful brick. “That day, your magic erupted. A violent awakening. It would have burned you out from the inside. It would have been a beacon to every hunter in the city.”
My hand dropped from my shoulder. A cold numbness spread through my arm.
“Liora saw the fire consuming you, and she made a choice. A trade.” He met my stare, desperate for me to understand. “She was a catalyst. I had seen her contain vast amounts of power in the past. That day, she drew that awakening out of you and into herself. But there was too much power. She couldn’t just extinguish it. She had to seal it.”
He gestured to the brand. “The act of forcing it back inside you… it burned through her. That mark is where she poured the last of her life into saving yours.”
The kitchen shrank, suddenly too small.
My scar wasn’t a scar. It was a tombstone. It was the lock on a cage. It was my mother’s final act, branded into my skin.
The phantom ache in my joint ignited, a fierce, live-wire burn that vibrated in time with my heart.
“She kept you hidden,” he continued, his voice rough. “Contained. Your power, your presence… all of it, locked away behind that seal. She made me promise I wouldn’t tell you. Not until it was vital. Not until the seal began to fail.”
He looked at me, and his eyes widened. A new fear dawned on his face, supplanting the old grief. “Selene…”
