Perhaps because I yearned for the answer too much. Or perhaps because, despite everything, I still trusted him more than I should have.
My hand lifted almost without my permission, drawn towards the painted surface, as though something within it called to me. I closed my eyes and reached out with my magic, gasping as I was met with a hum of power stronger than anything I’d ever felt before. An immense, ancient magic lay coiled within the mural. Waiting.
“Careful,” Evander said, unable to fully sense what I could. “You may not like what you discover.” The warning came more softly this time, more an urgent plea than caution.
I hesitated only a moment before I reached out towards that power, careful this time not to make contact after what had happened the previous time. The instant my fingers hovered over the painted surface, the enchantment woven into each brushstroke answered.
The world shifted—not all at once, but slowly unfolding, as though reality itself were adjusting to accommodate something it could no longer conceal. The distant castle seemed to draw nearer, its edges sharpening as though no longer bound by the illusion of distance.
My breath caught as one of the painted turret windows darkened, then deepened—not with shadow, but withrealness, as though the illusion had finally given way to something that had been waiting beneath it all along.
A faint, not fully formed memory stirred—a certainty that I had stood here once before. Not in this world of dreams, but in the real one before I’d been imprisoned in slumber.
The awareness settled over me. Not as something imagined, but as something remembered that had begun to awaken within me the last time I touched the mural, an extension of the awakening spell from the last time I’d dreamt of the real world.
As though the memory itself acted as a key, the magic within responded to my recognition. A low, resonant strain filled the air, vibrating through the stone beneath my feet. I stepped back instinctively.
“This is a door.” The realization had already taken hold before the words formed. Evander didn’t respond, but the certainty in his expression when I turned to him struck something deep within me. “You knew.”
He held my gaze, and for a fleeting moment I thought he might deny it. Though he hesitated, he didn’t. “I suspected.”
Understanding came not as a sudden revelation, but as a quiet, devastating alignment of everything I hadn’t yet allowed myself to see. “Which was why you warned me the last time I touched the mural.”
“I didn’t want you to come back here,” he whispered. “But now…” He couldn’t seem to make himself finish, but his resulting silence was confirmation enough.
Something tightened in my chest, though it wasn’t quite anger—at least, not in the way I’d expected. I had been betrayed before and knew the shape of that feeling, the sharp, all consuming pain. But this was different—the slow, aching realization that somewhere along the way…I had begun to trust him.
“You were leading me here from the beginning,” I said, my voice quieter now, though no less steady. “Every answer, every question all brought me back to this room.” I edged back from the mural as though it might reach out to pull me through.
Still, he didn’t deny it. “I needed you to find it,” he said at last.
His honesty should have made it easier to hate him. Instead, I found myself studying him more closely, searching for the man I had come to know beneath the truth he had just revealed.
I now knew that the charm hadn’t been entirely false, but neither had it been entirely real. It had been constructed anddeliberate, designed to draw me in without ever allowing me to get too close. And yet…I had seen the cracks in it, just enough to know they existed.
He wouldn’t meet my eyes, averting his gaze with a pained expression. The distance between us remained, but not with the careful control he usually maintained. This felt fractured, as though something inside him had already begun to give way.
A quiet unease curled in my heart. “What is it?” I asked softly.
For a moment, he said nothing, his expression tightening as though whatever answer he might give would cost him more than he was willing to pay. Then, almost as if the decision had been made for him, he stepped forward. I barely had time to register the movement before his arms closed around me.
It was not sudden or forceful, but careful, deliberate, as though he were committing the feel of me enfolded in his arms to memory. My breath caught and I went still in his hold, as though some part of me sensed the weight of the moment, even if I did not yet understand it.
“This is wrong,” he murmured, the words unraveling even as he spoke them. “I should have done it before you realized.”
“Done what?” I asked, my voice barely more than a breath.
His grip tightened to hold me closer, too close…and yet somehow not close enough. “I promised you I would,” he murmured. “Despite my fierce resistance to the idea, I wanted to give you what you asked for.”
A flicker of something stirred deep within me. Not a memory, but the echo of one:His hand clasped tightly in mine, the steady, unyielding warmth of his hold I refused to let go. “Promise me.”The words weren’t spoken aloud here, yet I heard them all the same, felt the desperation behind them.
“What promise?” I asked slowly, but even as I spoke, the question stirred another buried memory deep within me.
“You made me promise,” he continued, his voice strained. “Before everything was taken from you…before you forgot what it would cost.”
Fleeting, disjointed fragments surfaced—a room I did not recognize, and yet knew.The weight of something terrible pressing in from all sides, the unwelcome yet undeniable knowledge that there had been only one way to end it. My voice, shaking but resolute: “If it comes to it…you have to choose the kingdom.” His devastated silence, followed by his reluctant promise.
I pulled back slightly, searching his face. “You remembered this…all this time?”
