Mirael gasps, her eyes wide as the warmth spreads. Her skin softens, the harsh lines fading, vanishing until only smooth, unbroken flesh remains. She touches her face with trembling fingers, her voice breaking.
“Thank you, sister.”
I smile, nod, then take Daed’s hand and we walk toward the village, every blade of grass seeming to lean towards me, every flower bowing, every branch reaching, as it would for the sun.
Daed’s hand is warm in mine, and I trace the jagged scar on his palm, the one the Archdruid carved the night we were married. His scar will never fade, but mine is gone. Yet I remember its sting. I remember every pain I have ever known. It is my curse now to carry them all. The ache of every wound, the echo of every death. The tremor of every creature’s last breath lives somewhere inside me. It should crush me, this weight, but it doesn’t. It humbles me. It reminds me of the cost of what I am.
A small price for what I have become.
For what I can do.
For the lives I can mend and now, it seems, the ones I can return.
I felt the rabbit’s death while I was still beneath the earth. I wasn’t dead. Not truly. But I wasn’t alive either. I walked the narrow path between. A place of stillness and shadowand soft, endless light. I don’t know if the Souls were testing me, weighing my worth or if the power to rise was always mine, sleeping quietly within, waiting for the moment I would finally listen.
But I remember that sound.
The soft thump of the rabbit’s feet on the soil. The sharp whistle of the arrow slicing the air. The crack of its tiny bones, the puncture through flesh and lung and heart. Its final breath, a thread snapping in the fabric of life and in that instant, even while buried beneath the roots of the world, I knew.
I could hear the silence where life had stopped and I knew how to make it move again.
So I woke.
But not into my beloved Grove as I remembered it. Not into peace or light or song.
I woke into war.
The scent of blood filled the air before I even opened my eyes. I felt the pain of every fallen beast, every dying man, every fading Fae. Hatred, sharp as iron, cutting through the song of the world I had just begun to hear.
I rose into a symphony of suffering.
When I was beneath the earth, there had been quiet. A stillness so pure it filled me with peace. No hunger. No hate. No grief. Only light.
I wanted to rest. I needed to rest. But I could not.
Something always pulled me back. His voice, maybe. His tears. Or perhaps it was simply my nature, this curse of always returning when I should fade.
I should have been grateful to breathe again, to see the stars. But I wasn’t.
I wanted to close my eyes and sink back into that silence, where I could no longer feel the weight of a thousand living hearts beating inside me. Here, everythinghurts.The earth hums with pain. The sky shudders with loss. Even the wind carries the sorrow of the dead, brushing cold fingers against my skin.
Daed walks beside me now, his thumb tracing circles over my hand as though grounding me, but even his touch feels distant, muffled beneath the roar of life. I want to tell him how the world sounds to me now. How it screams. How I can hear the roots mourning the trees cut from them, the rivers weeping for every drop of blood spilled in their waters.
I want to tell him that though I am alive, I do not feelliving.
I was somewhere… better. Not home, but peace.
And now I am here again, among men and monsters, where the soil is slick with blood and the stars turn away their faces.
The balance is broken and I reborn, remade, unwilling, am the one who must fix it.
Even if I no longer know how to live in this world that I was never meant to return to.
When we reach the vine wall, the whispers of my people strike like thunder. Every breath, every heartbeat, every tremor of emotion surges through me too loud. I hear their joy, their disbelief, their fear. Ifeelit, every heartbeat like a note in the song of the living, and it drowns me. My gaze drifts over them, their faces a thousand stories etched in skin and in each I sense a lifetime of love and pain.
As we pass through, I lift my hand. A flick of my wrist, and the earth obeys. Fresh vines burst from the soil, climbing high, twining thick and strong as they rebuild the shattered wall. Leaves unfurl, blossoms bloom, life mending what death had torn apart. The wall stands again, vibrant and alive, stronger than before.
Gasps ripple through the gathered crowd, half awe, half unease.
