And the sisters’ voices, they say, can still be heard—arguing in endless echo, forever frozen in time.
I flip to another chapter,carefully skimming through the pages. “This one doesn’t say embodiment outright,” I murmur, “but I think this poem is referring to it.” I start to read again.
There once lived a tide-born daughter,
born where rivers meet the sea.
She fell in love with a fisherman,
but with a love that could never be.
For he was land and she was water,
forever destined to be apart.
Her grief was so vast, it made the sea swell with tears,
nothing able to heal her broken heart.
She fractured into droplets,
dissolving into mist,
the rain now carrying her whispers,
every storm now holds her kiss.
Moving as one with the current,
ships vanishing beneath her wails,
her tempests destroying everything,
a lesson when love does not prevail.
I finish the page quietly.
Noa leans forward, elbows on his knees. “It says she dissolved into mist. That sounds similar to what you can do.”
I don’t answer right away. My pulse flickers. “She didn’t return to her body,” I finally say. “Can that happen?”
Noa’s gaze drops to the book. “Myths hide truth in plain sight,” he says slowly. A beat. “But yes—if this refers to embodiment,it reads like there is a point of no return.” He frowns, glancing down at the next page. “Here’s another: ‘The Heart Beneath the Mountain,’” he says, his voice cautious now.
It is saidthat where the mists coil through forests of iron and peaks of stone, where the bones of the earth rise to touch the stars—there, Sarn of the Iron Vale buried his heart.
A warrior born of mountain blood and battle cry. He feared no man, no beast. Only Time. For Time is the one enemy no sword can slay.
He wandered into the deep places of the world—beneath roots thick with forgotten magick, past rivers that ran black with memory—until he found a hollow, where the bones of the mountain meet the breath of the world.
There, he tore his heart from his chest and buried it beneath the stone, believing that without it, Time could never find him.
And for a while, it was so.
When he returned to his people, he was invulnerable—but changed. Skin hard as granite, so thick that no blade could pierce him. Eyes that no longer reflected light. A voice that echoed as if spoken from within a cave. Each step he took cracked the stone beneath him.
He was becoming too much earth, and not enough man. Soon, his blood thickened to shale. His breath turned to dust.
At last, afraid of what he had become, he traveled to the mountain, seeking to reclaim his buried heart.
