Page 117 of Unravelled
Danlea’s gaze was not merely sight, it was a soft pull, a current leading not to drowning but to something else. Mira felt herself drawn into it, the ground slipping away, her body weightless.
There was no fear. Only quiet. Only peace. Her pulse slowed, the thunder in her ears fading to a soft rhythm, like the lull of waves against the shore. Her limbs felt light, as if the burdens of truth and lies, of rebellion and loyalty, had been lifted from her shoulders.
The Queen’s face remained the only anchor, her expression filled with understanding, with an unspoken promise.
Mira’s knees buckled.
35
Mira opened her eyes to silence. Not the hush of a stone chamber, but real silence. Vast and alive. The ground beneath her was glass, smooth and cold, stretching into infinity. Beneath it, stars pulsed like the heartbeat of some slumbering giant, their light flickering softly, steadily, as if waiting for her to move. Above her, only blackness. Not empty. Not dead. But watching. Endless.
She stood barefoot, her breath fogging slightly in the chill that wasn’t air. The quiet pressed close around her shoulders, familiar now. Too familiar. Danlea was already there. She stood some paces ahead, robed in starlight that shifted like silk in a current. Her face was calm, lined not with age but with knowledge.
When she looked at Mira, her milky eyes were clear.
"Torvyn is gone," Mira whispered, her voice barely holding. Tears streamed down her face, hot and unrelenting, as the words hung in the silence like a final breath.
Danlea didn’t flinch. She only nodded once, as if acknowledging not just the death, but the wound it had left behind.
Mira took a staggering step forward. Her feet slid slightly on the glass, and her hands opened helplessly at her sides.
“They took him from me,” she said, voice cracking.
Guilt churned in her chest like broken glass. She had been too late. Always too late. Her hands trembled. The glass beneath her feet seemed to pulse with her grief, each flicker of starlight echoing the tremor in her chest.
“I didn’t get to choose,” she said. “He didn’t get to choose.”
Danlea’s silver gaze softened. “There were many possible choices,” she murmured. A thread of sorrow wove through her voice. “But in all of them, your brother was lost at this point.”
Mira clenched her fists. Her nails dug into her palms as her knees buckled.
Her voice was nothing but breath, the ghost of all the things she couldn’t say.“He died alone.”
Danlea stepped forward. She knelt, her starlit robe pooling across the glass, and lifted a hand, not to touch, but to gesture.
"He did not die alone.” Danlea pointed to a single glowing point in the threads beneath their feet. Danlea’s hand hovered above the tangled strands of gold.
The light pulsed beneath her fingers. In that glow, Mira saw him. Torvyn. A flash of him in the moment just before the end. She saw him being welcomed by celestial hands as the light faded.
“He was welcomed with open arms,” Danlea whispered. “His name is written in the stars. Not as a soldier, or a traitor but as a brother. As your brother.”
Her palms pressed to the stars beneath her. The guilt bled out of her. Mira wept, her shoulders trembling as her breath caught over and over in her throat. The ache in her chest was endless. A hollow cavern too vast to fill.
Danlea rose and extended a hand. “Come,” she said gently. “We’ve lingered here long enough. Even here, I can feel Ren's concern rolling off you."
Mira hesitated, still cradling the ache that would never quite leave her. But slowly, she reached up, her fingers brushing Danlea’s palm. The Queen’s hand closed over hers. Threads ignited like dawn, and the black above cracked open, just a sliver, letting something brighter pour through. And the world shifted.
???
Mira surfaced slowly, dragged from the depths of something vast and unknowable. Her body felt like stone, weighted and cold against the smooth marble floor of the observatory. The dim candlelight flickered at the edges of her vision, casting long, skeletal shadows that stretched across the walls like watching figures.
Voices drifted around her, muffled, distant. Echoes through water. She lay still, unable to move, her limbs numb, her thoughts sluggish. The weight of the other place pressed down on her, and yet the moment she had lived above the stars was already slipping away, retreating like the tide.
“Truly, I am sorry for the dramatics,” Queen Danlea’s voice wove through the murmurs, smooth as silk. “It appears Mira’s mind could not withstand the intrusion. Some are simply too delicate for such direct sight.”
A lie. Mira’s eyelids fluttered. She had not crumbled. The Queen had not torn through her mind at all.
“She did not know of her brother's death until it occurred. She has done no wrong.” Danlea declared.
