Nick and I love each other to death. We’re twins—cut from the same bloody cloth, bound by the same heart-wrenching losses, shaped by the same violence. Whatever broke our family did so unevenly, splintering us in different directions, but thefractures, those uneven edges in our souls, still fit together perfectly.
It’s impossible to stay in the same room for long without colliding when every disagreement taps into something older, deeper, and unresolved. We argue because we care too much, because neither of us ever learned how to disagree without feeling like we’re betraying the other.
E hovers in the doorframe. “Just check under the floorboards,” he says.
Nick blinks. “Under the floorboards?”
A faint, unmistakable edge of pride slips into E’s voice. “Near the bed. That’s where Devi keeps the important stuff.”
I drop to my knees in the area he indicated and press my palm against the boards, running my fingers along the seams. Most are solid, unmoving. I test another, then another, tapping lightly with my knuckles, listening for the hollow note beneath the wood.
My pulse jumps as one plank shifts ever so slightly under my hand.
I wedge my nails into the narrow gap and pry it loose. The piece of wood lifts with a soft creak, revealing a dark rectangular hollow, and I reach into it carefully.
A few glass vials clink together, and my fingers brush a stack of papers and several plastic bags filled with dried herbs.
“Anything interesting?” Nick asks.
“Wait.”
I adjust my stance and dig deeper into the hole.
Nestled in one corner is a slender length of metal.
As I reach for it, the air snaps with an uncomfortable burst of static electricity, and my fingertips sting. I fish it out with reverence, drinking in the sight of it.
Fae runes wrap around the spindle in steady, deliberate patterns, their lines smooth and continuous as they curl around the whorl and up to the needle.
The artifact is made of solid gold, but something darker stirs beneath the surface. A fiery glow moves through shallow channels carved into the metal in slow pulses, gathering in the grooves before thinning again, as if heat circulates through a living, beating core.
Nick whistles under his breath. “I can’t believe it. The Spindle of the Gods.”
A faint vibration tickles my skin as the runes shimmer with a hint of fire, leaving my fingers cold, as though they’re drinking something from me in return, and I grip the spindle tighter.
A treacherous warmth pools low in my stomach.
I feel dizzy. Breathless.
What mortal hasn’t yearned for immortality? Not just to keep pace with time, but to step beyond it. Free from decay. Free from death.
Even the Fae can’t escape the void.
This artifact might, yet I know what that hunger cost.
The search for forever nearly tore Faerie apart, burning through entire realms, forests, and cities alike, all reduced to ash so no one would ever come searching for eternity again. This spindle is the most dangerous kind of promise. Every smooth curve is steeped in sacrifice, in lives traded and futures erased. Whatever power hums against my skin was paid for in blood.
I push to stand and roll the spindle in my palm. “Mabel used to say not all wheels spin all yarns. She said it to remind me that not every problem can be solved with the same tools. But standing here with this relic in my hand, I wonder if she was trying to make a point.”
“It’s smaller than I thought it would be,” E says.
Nick smiles from ear to ear. “All right, Casper. You’re not all bad.”
He looks like he did on Christmas morning, wonder written all over his face, his grin a little too wide. I know that look. Beneath the excitement, his mind is already moving, testing angles, weighing outcomes. Thinking about leverage. I feel the same pull, the same dangerous curiosity, and it unsettles me how quickly it comes.
The small, treacherous hope I’d carried—that this could somehow bring E back to life—shrivels under the weight of reality.
When something exists in only one copy and promises eternal life, everyone will find a justification to use it. A cause worth fighting for. Worth killing for. I glance down at the spindle in my hand and wonder if touching it was a mistake.
