Page 219 of May: Bloom & Bane

You’re staring, Sage mumbles.

I’m supervising.

The riddle is sitting on the porch table in front of us, weighted under our empty cup. For the last three days, it’s all we’ve talked about.

Start at the top, I tell him. Slowly. We’re missing something.

We’ve been over it a hundred times, he sighs.

Then we go a hundred and one, I counter.

The seed that withered in the frost, still remembers what was lost.

That one’s easy, I say. You’re the seed that rose from the soil. And you said when you get pulled into those visions, it’s somewhere covered in snow, right?

Right, he agrees. In every life, beneath the sun, the hunter’s chase was never done. He pauses. We’ve lived before. More than once. And in every life we were... hunting. Chasing something.

My eyes drift back to the yard where Eden is currently throwing her head back, laughing as Penelope successfully swindles Droot. The sight of her warm, freckled skin under the afternoon sun sends a sharp pang through our chest.

We spent every lifetime trying to find her, I rasp. But our chase was never done… which means either we never caught her… or we couldn’t keep her.

But the next line, Sage counters, You chased a mirrored light. A phantom spark beneath the night. What does that mean?

I don’t know, I mutter, my skelva rubbing over Sage’s knuckles. A reflection.

A phantom, he agrees. Something that only looked like what we wanted.

A sister’s shroud, a borrowed flame, to find the hearth that knows your name. A shroud is for the dead, I murmur. Someone’s sister died? I don’t like the shape this is making. And a borrowed flame. Borrowed. Not ours. We took fire from somewhere that was never ours to take.

To find the hearth that knows your name, he whispers. A hearth. A home. The only place we actually belong.

So we kept chasing a fake light, and a stolen fire, I say, trying to find our way home. But we never got there. Not in any life yet.

I sit with the cruelty of that. How many lifetimes have we lived, reaching for the wrong thing? Sage, this is the saddest gods-damned thing I’ve ever heard, and I don’t even understand it yet.

Last section, he says. You hunted where the echo stayed, by one small piece of soul betrayed.

A breeze moves through the yard. Eden smiles and waves at me.

An echo, I say.

Ashán, Sage drawls.

No. Listen. My fingers still over his knuckles. An echo isn’t a person. An echo is a copy of a sound. A piece of something real, carried somewhere it doesn’t belong. The splinter under my ribs turns, and turns, until it finally bites. The woman in the snow. The one you keep chasing. What if she has something to do with this?

The moment my shadow reaches for the riddle, the whole table disappears. The yard, the sunlight, the sight of Eden waving at us from the clover, all of it is ripped away as the floor drops out from beneath our feet. It’s a bone-snapping plummet into a pitch-black abyss. But for the first time in my existence, I’m not left behind while Sage goes under. I am dragged right down into the throat of the memory beside him. When the world finally comes into focus, cold bites through my feet, and for one disorienting moment I don’t understand what’s happening, because I have feet and a body of my own. Not a stitch of Sage to be seen. Actually, I don’t feel him at all.

“Ashán?”

My head snaps up, eyes fixating on the man six feet away. He is not Sage. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, with thick dark hair falling into his eyes. No wings or vines or gold magic. Just a mortal man. I’ve never seen him before, yet looking at him makes the nameless ache in my chest vanish.

“Ashán, where are—” The stranger’s mouth moves and Sage’s voice comes out. “I felt you come with me this time. But I can’t see you. I—it’s happening again. I can feel it happening, don’t let me⁠—”

“I’m here.” I move toward him through the snow. “I’m right here, Sage. I’m looking at you⁠—”

He turns involuntarily, his movements jerky and stiff, as if something else is steering him where it wants him to go. A woman runs past us, her long, dark hair whipping wildly in the wind. She glances over her shoulder, frightened as she searches the trees for whatever she’s fleeing from.

“There you are,” Sage rasps, a familiar hunger rolling off him.