Page 153 of Blade of the Nightking

The pendant swung. Back and forth. Back and forth.

“We need one from before the Sundering,” she said quickly, almost breathless. “Before the Dusklands were cut from Elantis. Back when it was still one with the continent.”

My pulse hammered wildly. I pressed both hands over my face and drew a slow, steadying breath before peering through my fingers at the passage again in disbelief.

“We can find the gates,” Levinica said, almost laughing. “Elowen—we can actually find them!”

“Levinica—” I turned to look up at her.

My gaze caught on the pendant hanging from her throat, exposed for the first time. Something small swayed gently from the leather cord only inches from my face, darkened and withered by time, dried but still horribly, undeniably… My stomach lurched.

Back and forth. Back and forth.

A severed ear.

It swung between us like a grotesque pendulum, measuring out the passing years as memories crashed together in my mind.

Dannis. Eyes wide with terror and pain, screaming as he reaches desperately for his mother, little hands outstretched while blood pours down the side of his face where his ear has been cut away.

Then—

A bloodied body draped over a fallen log. The stark white curve of an exposed spine. A dead Rask lying in the underbrush.

The pendant swung again—back and forth, back and forth—and with sudden, sickening clarity, I knew.

Quick, practiced hands skinning rabbits by the fire. A cheerful smile. A ragged edge where his ear had been—Neeken.

Gods.

Gods.

Aedric. He'd kept him close all these years under another name, tucked within his innermost circle the entire time. That final flash between us, just before I'd lodged Rìan's power deep inside him... Was that what he'd been trying to show me? Had he been trying, in the only way he still could, to tell me the truth?

That Neeken wasn’t Neeken—he was Dannis.

The little boy he’d stolen from his mother.

The child Levinica had never stopped searching for.

No…

No!

“Elowen, what⁠—?”

Slowly, painfully, my gaze dragged up to hers, and her voice faltered as she took in whatever she saw written across my face. I watched understanding settle over her in terrible increments, watched her excitement sharpen into fear. Into knowing.

Her smile faded, her chest rising and falling in uneven gasps. Her eyes filled with tears.

“No,” I breathed, shoving back from the table so hard my chair nearly toppled. I didn’t even know what I meant by it. No, don’t ask me. No, I can’t say it. No, please—please don’t…

Before I could rise, her bare hand shot out and seized mine. Pain bloomed through my fingers. Her grip was impossibly strong. White-knuckled. Trembling with desperation and grief honed over centuries. The kind of terrible strength only a mother could summon for her child.

Her eyes glazed at once, the milky film swallowing them whole. Inside me, I felt her magic unfurl—that vast, all-seeing eye opening deep within before turning its terrible gaze upon me.

Searching. Seeing.

And I couldn’t stop it.