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In stars and skies we delight.

Truth and wonder, corruption to sunder.

We are the winged ones.

We are the seraphim.

I sang it to the melody of the harp, violin, and piano back at the fading garden.

“I haven’t heard that one before,” Medusa said.

My vision swam with starlight, the room melting away, a different place taking shape. A doorway, lost in the dark, buried beneath endless rock out in the water. Calling me, ready to be opened.

“Where?” I asked, my body swimming with the heartbreak of the fallen seraphim, and the hope this would lead to…something.

Hawthorn Isle.

What. The. Fuck.

Silv’s sanctuary?

Waves crashed around me, dark and violent. I plunged through the house into the rock toward the doorway. Down, down, down, cutting through a labyrinth of complex tunnels and caverns. Deeper, deeper, passing through a doorway into the frozen world of the frostbrood, caught between Quintrealm and Selene Haven. I zipped through ice, everything a blur of glacial blue.

This was below Silv’s island all this time?

There…

I slowed, coming face-to-face with a doorway, sunlight glimmering around its edges.

“Selene Haven,” I sang, floating in icy darkness.

The door opened, revealing a blinding explosion of light. It sucked me forward, taking me to a world of blazing sunshine, the heat instantly unbearable.

But I saw a face. A woman with similar pale beige to Silv’s, eyes scarlet, her auburn hair messy and matted. She huddled in the shadows away from the sunlight, deep underground, emaciated, harboring a secret inside a cage.

There was an angry gold mark on her neck in the shape of a key, red and raw around the edges. Put there by Aidan, hidden beneath her flesh.

She was a prisoner, held by the terrible humans who lived in this world.

Her name was Princess Camilla Clarence, sister of the late King Lucius Clarence, and King Silvanus. And she had the key to get to The Wheel of Beginning.

Oh. Shit.

The vision collapsed, a series of nasty coughs tearing from my throat killing my song. I hunched forward, heart and mind racing. I was sweaty again, temples throbbing with agony.

That was it. That was the answer I’d been waiting for.

Medusa rubbed my back. “Easy there, sugar.”

“I have to… I have to speak to⁠—”

Before I could speak my lover’s name, Lia began to laugh. The sound was familiar, the voice sending chills everywhere.

I turned my head, rubbing my chest.

Lia’s eyes were lavender, her silver now purple.

She’d pulled an Aidan.