“I’m a wanderer, not a motivational speaker.” He turns those ancient eyes on me. The grin fades. I get the impression I’m really seeing Veil right now. In this very moment. The true him. “But that’s not really the question, is it?”
He steps closer.
“You’re about to walk into the place where identity goes to die. Where gods forgot their own names. Where the most powerful beings in existence looked in the mirror and saw strangers.” His voice drops. “So I need to ask you something, Ashlynne Moonshadow. And I need a real answer.”
The use of my full name rattles my chest. He’s putting power into using my name. As though he’s summoning me.
“What are you going to remember?”
What am I going to remember?
When the place that unmade gods reaches for my identity the way everyone has always reached for it—Graves rewriting me into a weapon, Amarantha claiming me as property, the military filing my humanity under acceptable losses. Not power. That’s the first thing they take. Not destiny. That’s just another word for someone else’s plan. Not even my name. That was given.
Orion’s laugh. Kieran’s shadows curling around my ankles when he thinks I’m not paying attention. Finnian’s hands on my face, amber eyes choosing every version of me. Whispen’s gold glow in the dark when everything else goes out.
My girls? Pepper burning down a building because someone looked at Sabina wrong. Or Vanessa threatening to eat someone if they look at me wrong.
It doesn’t live in me. It livesbetweenus.
“Everything that matters,” I say. “Every single person who made me want to stay.”
Aengus looks at me for a long time. Long enough that the thorns under my skin stop flaring and start settling. Long enough that the cold in the corridor eases, just slightly, like the building itself exhaled.
“Finally,” he smiles. Then he just steps aside.
The door doesn’t open. Not yet.
Orion makes a desperate sound I’ve never heard from him. I turn too fast and the world swims. “Orion?” He looks okay. Until he slams his fist against his chest, causing him to cough. Then he does it again. And again.
The strands of his ginger hair burst into white flames before puttering back out.
“I’m fine.” He’s not fine. His voice comes through gritted teeth. Sweat runs down his temples. The fire in his hair flares and dies in that wrong rhythm, going from red to white. “It’s not, it’s not pain. It’s?—”
“It’s remembering where it came from,” Aengus says quietly, his usual irreverence gone entirely. What’s left is a god watching something happen that he’s been waiting millennia to see. “The real question is whether it wakes up what’s in there, too.”
Orion straightens. He sets his jaw but it costs him. Then he rolls his tongue across his teeth and looks back at me with that roguish smile. But it’s a performance. He is clearly not okay.
He looks at the door.
He looks at me.
“Ladies first is off the table, yeah?”
“Guardian first,” I tell him. “Same as always.”
His mouth twitches. The smirk that saysI know exactly what you’re doing and I love you for it.
Aengus puts his hand on the door. The symbols carved into the stone light up in sequence, gold chasing gold, until the entire frame burns with the same light pouring from Orion’s chest.
If I didn’t know any better I’d say Orion was a key.
I can’t see beyond the door. There’s nothing. Just a shimmer that hints that something exists there but the doorway will never reveal its secrets.
Orion walks through.
56
Kieran
