Page 136 of Spoils of war
Will called out first. “See? Told you.”
“Shut up,” Aran snapped, not even looking at him.
I pulled myself up beside him, breath still uneven. “You good?”
“Fine,” he muttered. “Just not going back in there.”
Night settled softly.
The fire behind me had burned low, nothing but a sleepy flicker now. I sat at the edge of the water, knees tucked to my chest, watching the stars shimmer across the surface like they were trying to speak to me.
I glanced back once.
Aran was already out cold, sprawled on his side, snoring like thunder. Will lay still by the fire, curled slightly. The light touched his cheekbones, catched in his hair, and he looked so peaceful.
Beautiful.
He made me feel things I wasn’t sure I could still feel. Safe. Wanted. Like there was still something soft left in me.
I tore my eyes away.
Sleep wouldn’t come. My mind was loud, pacing circles.
I hadn’t taken the moon drops that evening. Maybe that was it. The waters ahead glimmered beneath the moon, silver and quiet.
I thought of the glow. That strange pulse inside me. The moment it vanished, I’d felt hollow. Like a part of me had gone with it, and I needed to understand. Why it came, what it meant, and what it had changed.
I couldn’t let it go.
The water called to me.
So I rose, slow and careful, making sure not to stir the boys. The cold water crept higher with each step, climbing my legs, wrapping my waist, pressing against my chest until every breath felt heavier and theworld behind me slipped away. I looked back once to where the boys lay curled in sleep, before I dove and cut through the surface.
Below, the silence was complete. The kind that presses in on your skull and makes the blood in your ears louder than anything else. Fish darted past in quick shadows, and the current slipped its fingers through my hair.
The water pressed close, alive with something I couldn’t see, and the cave loomed ahead, its entrance barely visible in the murk. I reached for the wall, my fingers brushing stone and the uneven edges of crystal. Then came a pull. A hum. Like something inside me was stirring awake.
I closed my eyes and let it draw me in, stretching my hand forward as if the current itself might take it and led me. And when I opened them, the darkness was gone.
Around me, fish drifted through the glow like living shards of glass. I didn’t move. I only floated, weightless, while they circled me with wide, unblinking eyes. Ribbons of lakeweed swayed slow and gentle, the whole place moving as though it breathed. Light wound through me, curling in my chest like a second heartbeat before spilling into the water. It wasn’t fire. It wasn’t pain. It didn’t burn or ache.
It was warm. Soft. Golden.
And then I saw a shape on the cave floor.
It didn’t swim, it didn’t stir the water. It simplywas. Slipping through the depths like it belonged there, like it had always been there, waiting.
Light didn’t touch it, and the world warped in its presence as it rose. Something unseen closed around my ankle, pulling me down, and I knew what it was. Not because I had felt it before, but because I had seen it, through her, through the Seer.
In that moment when her eyes turned black and her lips shaped a warning she couldn’t force out, when her trembling hands wrapped around the dagger and dug into her flesh.
That hadn’t been her, it had never been her, and I knew it. It was the shadow, whatever it was. A god, a spirit, a demon.
Had it lured me there?If it was a god, it would be smarter than all of us combined. And crueler.
And it had come for me because she failed, because I was what was left, unfinished business, something dangerous it couldn’t allow to grow.
Some of them want me to kill you, to protect the rest of the world.
