POV: Calla
The dark was not empty.
I expected nothing. I expected the kind of black you get behind closed eyes. But this was different. This dark had depth to it. Like standing at the bottom of a very deep lake and looking up and seeing light far above but not being able to reach it yet.
I was not afraid.
That was the strangest part. I was somewhere I did not know, in a body that did not feel entirely like mine, and I was not afraid at all.
Then the first image came.
A forest. But brighter than mine. The trees were silver at the bark, not black, and the light between them was warm and gold. A woman walked between them with her hands trailing along the trunks as she passed. Touching each one. The trees leaning toward her fingers exactly the way they had leaned toward mine.
I knew her face before she turned around.
She turned around.
My face. But older somehow. Not in years. In weight. The kind of face that has held too many things for too long and learned not to show it.
Selene looked at me across the dream.
She did not speak. She only looked. And in her eyes was something I had no word for. Not sadness. Not joy. Something that held both and went further than either.
Then the image broke.
A room. Stone walls. Candles. A long table with men sitting around it. Old men mostly. Serious faces. Pack elders in old clothing, the kind no one wore anymore.
Selene stood at the head of the table.
One of the men was talking. Low and fast and his hands were moving. I could not hear the words but I could hear the shape of them. Urgent. Afraid. Persuading.
Selene was listening with her hands flat on the table and her face still.
Then she looked at the door.
A man stood there. Tall. Dark-haired. His face younger than I had seen it but unmistakable. He was watching her from the doorway and his face had something on it that he was trying very hard to keep off his face.
Kael.
He caught her eye. He shook his head once. Small. Just for her.
She looked back at the men at the table.
She did not listen to him.
The next image was fast and broken and I did not want to see it.
Night. The same stone room but the candles were out. Selene on the floor. Her hands pressed flat to the ground like she was trying to hold onto it. Light pouring out of her, silver and enormous, and men standing around her in a circle, pulling it out of her like thread from a spool.
Stealing it.
Her face was turned to the side and her eyes were open and she was looking at the door.
Kael was on the other side of it. I could hear him. He was trying to get through and something was keeping him out. He was hitting the door with his whole body and screaming her name and the sound of it was the most terrible thing I had ever heard because it was the sound of someone who knew they were too late and could not stop trying anyway.
The light went out of her.
The room went dark.
And I felt it. Like it happened to me. Like the floor came up and the world ended and everything that I was poured out into the dark and was gone.
I came back to the ceiling of the compound like surfacing from water.
I did not gasp. I did not sit up fast. I just opened my eyes and lay there and breathed and let everything settle back into place around me.
The stone ceiling. The fire. The smell of woodsmoke.
Different now. Everything looked the same but it sat differently in my eyes. Like someone had cleaned a window I had been looking through my whole life without knowing the glass was dirty.
I sat up slowly.
Kael was in the chair. He was watching me the same way he had been when I first woke in this place. Careful. Still. But something was different in his face now. A tightness around his eyes. His hands on the arms of the chair were not quite relaxed.
I looked at him for a moment.
"How long," I said.
"Since yesterday evening," he said. "It is morning now."
I nodded.
I looked at my hands. The faint silver glow from before was gone. But the warmth in my chest was still there. Bigger now. Steadier. Like something that had been a small flame before and was now a proper fire, low and banked, waiting.
"You saw something," Kael said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"Do you want to talk about it."
I thought about the room with the candles. The men around the table. The light being pulled out of her like thread.
"They killed her," I said. "The elders. It wasn't an accident or a battle. They planned it. They sat in a room and they planned it and they did it together."
Kael said nothing.
"You were there," I said. "You tried to get to her."
His face did not change. But something behind it did. Something deep and old and very tired.
"Yes," he said.
"You couldn't get through the door."
"No."
I sat with that for a moment. Three hundred years of carrying that. Being one door away and not being able to get through it. I could not imagine the shape of that kind of weight.
"I'm sorry," I said.
He looked at me. Something moved across his face so fast I almost missed it.
"You have nothing to apologise for," he said.
"She does," I said. "We do." I looked at my hands. "She didn't listen to you. In the room before. You shook your head and she turned away."
Kael was very quiet.
"You remember that," he said slowly.
"I saw it."
He stood up from the chair and turned toward the fire. He put one hand on the stone above it and looked into the flames and I watched his shoulders hold something in with great effort.
"She made her own choices," he said. "She always did."
"And you stayed anyway."
"Yes."
"For three hundred years."
"Yes."
I looked at his back. At the line of his shoulders. At the way he was holding himself together with what looked like long practice.
I knew things I had not known yesterday. I knew the layout of Selene's forest in the old days. I knew the names of the elders around that table. I knew the exact sound of the door that had kept Kael out.
And I knew one other thing.
A name. One word. Old and short and unlike any language the packs used now. It had come with the memories like a key comes with a lock. I did not know what it meant. I only knew it was his.
His real name. The one he had been given before exile. Before the centuries. Before the world forgot he had ever been anything other than a monster and a myth.
I had heard Selene think it in the dark behind that door. One last time. Like holding something precious before you let it go.
I opened my mouth.
"Kael," I said.
He turned.
"That is not your name," I said quietly. "Is it."
He went very still.
I said the real one.
One word. Old and soft. Four sounds.
All the colour left his face.
He stared at me like I had reached into his chest and taken something out of it. Like no one had said that word in so long that hearing it was almost more than he could stand.
"No living person knows that name," he said. His voice was barely sound.
I looked at him.
"I know," I said.