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-Present Day-
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Time moved strangely between the two halves of my life, and I had stopped trying to explain it to anyone who hadn't lived it. A single evening in the Veil could swallow a week in Aurelios whole. A single afternoon with Siera could pass in the space of what felt, on my end, like a held breath. I'd learned to stop keeping precise count of the gap and simply trust that whenever I stepped sideways back into the mortal world, however long it had been for her, it would never feel like long enough.
Some weeks I saw her every evening. Some weeks the mist pulled me under for what I later learned had been the better part of a month, and I'd return to find new tapestries in the hall, a new season already turning, Siera's hair a finger's width longer than I remembered it.
It never once cost us what I feared it would.
If anything, the distance had sharpened things between us rather than worn them thin. Every return felt earned. Every reunion had teeth to it, an urgency neither of us bothered pretending not to feel. She'd stopped asking how long I'd been gone. I'd stopped apologizing for it. We simply met each other where we were, every time, and let that be enough.
Maren made that possible more than anyone.
She stood at my right hand now the way she'd promised she would, and in the time since her rising she had become something I genuinely could not imagine governing without. She wore, still, the shape of a maid, because it was the shape she'd chosen and the shape that suited the terrible efficiency underneath it. But there was nothing soft left in her, if there ever had been. Her hair fell dark but there was no face beneath it to hide, only a void, seamless and black, as though the dark had simply forgotten to finish her. The only thing that ever looked back out of it was a single lens, catching what little light reached her, and it was somehow worse than a face would have been. Visitors to the throne room learned quickly to look anywhere else. At her throat, where the collar of her uniform gathered into something more armor than fabric, a small core pulsed soft white, a piece of the same essence that had remade her, still faintly alive against her skin.
She had been a maid for three generations, and what I had not fully understood, that first night in the mist, was precisely what that meant. A house like the one she'd served didn't merely employ servants. It trained them, quietly, thoroughly, in the arts a noble family needed and never wanted attributed to itself directly. Maren had learned to move without sound before she'd learned to properly curtsy. She had learned which pressure points ended arguments permanently and which merely ended them for the evening. She had learned to disappear into a room's edges so completely that men twice her rank forgot she was present at all, right up until the moment it mattered that she wasn't seen leaving it.
I'd asked her once, gently, whether she minded that I knew.
"You are the first person who has ever asked instead of simply using it, Goddess," she'd said, and there had been something almost amused in the flat certainty of her voice. "I do not mind."
I summoned her to the mortal side twice in that stretch of time, once to shadow a delegation from the Coin King's court that Elara didn't entirely trust, and once simply because Siera had woken from a nightmare about the abyss and I hadn't been able to step sideways quickly enough to reach her myself. Maren had been standing at the foot of the bed before I finished arriving, silent, still, present in the particular way that made rooms feel safer rather than smaller. The Coin King's men never noticed her at all. Which was, of course, the entire point.
"She terrifies me a little," Siera admitted once, watching Maren cross the courtyard below without disturbing a single petal of the roses she passed through.
"She terrifies me a little," I said, "and she part of me."
Siera laughed at that.
Aurelios itself had grown into something I was, quietly, enormously proud of.
Siera wore the crown outright now, no longer Regent standing in for a throne that hadn't been officially hers, but Queen in full. The coronation was held on a bright autumn morning, with more of the population in attendance than the old square could comfortably hold.
When she finally took her seat upon the throne, I watched the blessing stir the way it always did, a slow gathering warmth rising up through the gold, the same recognition I had felt the day the dome first answered me. For one long breath the entire square went still, waiting to see if the throne would accept a second queen the way it had accepted the first.
It did.
Light bloomed soft and golden around her, threading through the crowd in a ripple that drew gasps from every corner of the square. Siera sat through it with her chin lifted and her hands steady on the arms of the throne, and when the light finally settled, she looked out at her kingdom as though she had always belonged there. Which, I supposed, she had.
Later that night, in the quiet of our chambers, she told me something she hadn't said in front of the crowd.
"Hera came to me," she said softly, turning her new ring slowly around her finger. "While I was sitting there. I felt her the way you feel a hand on your shoulder before you see who it belongs to."
I waited.
"She granted me a boon." Siera looked up at me, something unreadable moving behind her eyes, warm and private and not quite ready to be shared. "I'll tell you what it is one day, Veil. I promise you that. But not yet." She reached for my hand and pressed it against her chest, over her heart. "It isn't time."
I studied her for a long moment. Whatever she was carrying, it didn't frighten her, that much I could see. If anything, there was a quiet certainty in the way she held it, the look of someone guarding something precious rather than something dangerous.
"Alright," I said simply, and kissed her knuckles. "Whenever you're ready."
She smiled at that, small and grateful, and said nothing more.
The magick spire prepared to open its doors properly come fall, Headmaster Gavin overseeing construction of the new dormitory wing personally, insisting on inspecting every enchanted beam himself before he'd sign off on it. Lexia had already begun drafting her curriculum for the incoming term, three separate tiers of potions coursework, and had cornered me in the hallway for an hour the previous week purely to argue about whether the advanced tier needed a prerequisite in theoretical alchemy or not.
It was, all of it, exactly the kind of life I had once assumed had died with Alex on that hillside two thousand years ago.
I was standing with Siera on the east balcony, when Jonathan arrived with the letter.
He held it out at arm's length, the way he held out anything he suspected might ruin someone's afternoon.
"From Valenford, Your Majesty," he said. "Sealed with the royal crest."
Siera broke the seal herself, scanning it fast, and I watched her expression shift from mild curiosity to something flat and furious in the space of two lines.
"They're crowning a new king," she said. "Coronation this weekend. All allied and neighboring courts invited to attend."
"And who," I asked, though something in me had already guessed the answer before she said it.
"Leon."
She crumpled the parchment in one fist, hard enough that Jonathan actually flinched and took a discreet step back toward the doorway.
"After everything," she said. "After what he did to you. They're putting a crown on him and expecting the rest of us to smile and applaud."
"We should go," I said. "We should accept."
She turned to stare at me like I'd suggested we set the palace on fire for entertainment. "Veil!"
"Accept it," I said again, quieter, and walked past her toward the balcony rail.
"Why." The word came out sharp, more hurt than angry now. "Why would you want to sit in a room and watch that man crowned."
I looked out over Aurelios, the spire, the markets, the whole living breathing thing we'd built out of grief and stubbornness, and I felt a smile settle onto my face that I hadn't felt myself make before, not once, not in this life or the one before it.
"Because if we refuse," I said, "it tells Valenford we're afraid of them. It hands them exactly the excuse they want to call us hostile, to close the borders, to point at us as the reason for whatever comes next." I turned back to face her. "If we attend, smiling, gracious, entirely unbothered, it takes that excuse away from them completely."
Siera studied me for a long moment, and I watched the anger in her slowly fold itself into something more careful, more calculating, the particular expression she wore when she was doing the math of statecraft in her head.
"You have something planned?"
"I have several somethings planned."
"You're not going to just kill him." It wasn't quite a question. "Right?"
I crossed the space between us and stroked her cheek with the back of my fingers.
"No." I let the smile widen, just slightly. "Oh, my sun. No." I leaned down until my forehead touched hers. "Something far worse."
She let out a long breath, the fight draining out of her shoulders even as her eyes stayed sharp, considering.
"Fine." She shook her head slowly. "Fine. It's this weekend. I'll tell my father to make sure we're properly prepared." She pressed a brief, hard kiss to my mouth. "You are going to explain this to me eventually."
"Eventually," I agreed.
She left to find her mother, already composing wardrobe requirements in her head, muttering under her breath about Valenford's insufferable sense of occasion. I stayed on the balcony alone, and let my focus slide the way it did now so easily, sideways and outward, toward Valenford, toward the palace already dressing itself in banners for a coronation that hadn't happened yet.
I found him without trying very hard.
Leon stood in a training yard I could see as clearly as if I were standing in it myself, sparring against men who weren't nearly fast enough to touch him anymore, and threaded through him, visible only to eyes like mine, were the strings. Dozens of them, fine as spider silk, dark as the space between stars, running from somewhere deep and hungry all the way into the center of him, feeding something into his blood that had never once come from any training yard.
Essence. My domain. The particular flavor of it that only bled from souls who'd fallen through the crossing before their time, forgotten, fractured, consumed rather than gathered.
Your strength, Leon, I thought, watching him drive a mortal soldier to his knees without any visible effort at all. Who would have thought.
It's from my own realm.
I'll let you borrow it...For now.