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“The final line I can see ends in fracture,” he says carefully. “Half a word that appears to be ‘lives’, and half a name.”

Ellen’s chair scrapes as she moves closer.

“What name?”

Mannie doesn’t answer her immediately.

Then—

“Lugh.”

The name enters the room like a living thing.

“But the line is incomplete. The phrasing… vague. Conditional.”

He exhales slowly.

“Whatever Amergin carved did not end here. It continued beyond this break.”

His eyes move from face to face.

“I do not believe she will rise alone.” There’s no levity left in him at all.

James exhales slowly. “How could you possibly know that?”

Mannie doesn’t look offended.

“There was a time,” he says, voice low, “when I could feel his power without trying. In the long stretch of summer, in the gold on the fields, in the first bite of warmth after winter’s teeth. Then, one day, there was only silence.”

He turns the basalt slightly.

“But this… this carries him. Faint, but true. Touching this feels akin to standing between two great friends once more.” A fond smile ghosts across his mouth.

“We must hope the remainder—the portion meant to complete that line—has fallen into hands that understand what they hold,” Mannie says, his voice low and unadorned. “And not into the keeping of our enemies.”

The relic no longer feels as though it answers the unknown.

Nor does it sit before us as some triumph of proof, neat and pathbreaking, to be examined and set aside.

It feels like a summons.

A beginning. Not for one of us, but for all.

And worse still… it feels right.

I don’t know why that certainty takes root so deep in my chest. Only that, for the first time in months, something in me is less hollow—less scraped raw by grief and doubt. The noise that has haunted my thoughts—the ceaseless churn of what if and what now—falls away, as if a door has been shut.

And in that hush, the truth ceases to feel distant. Not a relic of elder days, confined to hill and legend. It’s something present. Tangible. A truth with weight. A turning of the age—something long patient rousing, at last, to meet me.

And though I keep my face unchanged, though I give no voice to the stirring within me—I know, with a certainty that unsettles me more than fear ever has, that the road opening before us was laid long ago.

And we were meant to find each other on it.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ELLEN

Ilast no more than a quarter hour inside the house.