I wanted it to be over.
Gods, I wanted it to be over.
Caelovar was dead. His twins were dead. His lair was ash, blood, and broken stone behind us. We had children to carry home, survivors to pull from cages, and enough evidence in the wreckage to damn half a bloodline. Any sane war would have let that be one victory. Any sane god would have taken it.
Instead, I found notes.
Always the fucking notes.
Ledgers half-burned in collapsed cabinets. route markers hidden in coded draconic shorthand. References to “sister sites,” “transfer chambers,” “subject yield,” and bloodline branches spread across Faerûn like disease. Liliana had not raised a brood. She had planted an empire of cruelty and called it legacy.
So no, we were not done.
We brought the children back to Mirefen first.
There are mercies I still believe in, even now.
The village did not greet us with gratitude. It did not greet us much at all. When we returned the children, when Seraphine and I began removing the emotional curse that had left the adults hollowed and manageable, the truth of what had been done there hit them all at once. Some collapsed. Some screamed. Some could not look their children in the face. Some tried. Some failed.
The village elder never said a word.
Mira found her hanging in her hut before dawn, feet bare, body still turning slowly in the dark like the end of a bad prayer.
Darian cursed softly and cut her down himself.
“She should have had better than this,” he said, voice rough as he lowered her to the floor.
“No,” I said, looking at the rope marks on her throat. “She should have had justice.”
Seraphine closed the woman’s eyes.
Ilyon stood by the doorway, watching the village with that still, distant expression he wore when his anger had gone cold enough to become permanent. “They will not thank us for giving their feelings back.”
“They don’t need to,” Mira said. “They need to live with them.”
Darian shot her a look, not angry, just tired. “That’s easy to say when it wasn’t your child on a table.”
Mira’s face tightened at once. “I know.”
And because he was Darian, because kindness sat in him even when fury had carved the rest of him raw, he only nodded and went back to digging the grave.
We buried the elder properly.
More properly than most of the adults in Mirefen deserved after what they had permitted under the excuse of fear, but I had already learned that children pay dearly when the living are left with nothing. So we left them something. A scale stripped from Caelovar’s corpse, rich in power and worth enough to buy timber, stone, food, labor—whatever would keep the children fed and sheltered while the village remembered how to be human again.
I did not do it for the adults.
The next morning we bound wounds, patched armor, and set out east on foot.
I know what Maire would ask, because she has that maddening little habit of finding the exact practical question beneath every grand tragedy.
Why walk when we could fly?
The answer was simple. I no longer trusted the sky.
What I had felt in Caelovar’s lair had been divine—holy, even—but not mine, and not anything that should have been breathing through those chambers. If someone from the pantheon was aiding Liliana’s brood, then my true form would be a beacon. Mortal shape, at least, gave me the chance to move unseen. My companions understood without complaint.
Mostly.
By the end of the third day, Mira dropped onto a fallen log, glared at me, and said, “For the record, I support caution. I also support having wings, and I think we are insulting them.”
Darian, sitting on a rock while tightening the straps on his armor, grunted. “You complain like you’ve forgotten how mortals live.”
“I have not forgotten,” she said. “I just think they are insane.”
Ilyon looked up from the map spread across his knee. “That is because walking for three weeks to hunt illusion-drenched dragon laboratories through hostile forest is, in fact, insane.”
Seraphine smiled faintly over the fire she was coaxing into being. “And yet here we are.”
Mira pointed at her. “Thank you. That is the kind of support I deserve.”
“You deserve quieter misery,” Darian said.
That got a laugh out of Ilyon, and even I felt the corner of my mouth pull for a second.
We kept moving.
Gray Forest gave way, inch by inch, to older green. The road worsened. The rumors got stranger.
In one town a woman told us of a pale lady in the woods whose house could give a man back everything he had lost if he was willing to dream long enough. In another, an elf boy swore his cousin had followed music into the trees and come back three days later smiling at things no one else could see. Near the edge of Yuirwood, we found a hunter who told us half the local stories now ended the same way: with someone vanishing after insisting they had finally found the place where all their grief made sense.
Dream magic.
Entrapment.
Compulsion through ones desire.
Vesperyx.
The closer we got, the less anyone joked.
By the time Sunglade came into view, all of us were carrying our tension like another layer of armor.
It was beautiful in the way living elven settlements often are—woven into the land rather than built against it, bridges grown between trees, homes curved out of pale wood and vine, lanterns hanging like captured moons in the dusk. Children should have been running through it. Music should have lived there.
Instead, the place was too careful.
Too watchful.
We were met at the edge of the glade by armed elves and a single figure who stepped forward with the kind of stillness that was harder to mistake for fear than courage.
Aelthir Vaeloras.
I fixed the name in my mind then, unwilling to let grief or rage distort it later.
Tall. Lean. Bronze-brown skin. Dark silver hair drawn back with carved greenwood clasps. Pale amber eyes that held every movement in the clearing at once. He wore forest-green and muted gold layered over light leather, practical enough for war, elegant enough for command. He looked like a man grown from the Yuirwood itself—rooted, old, and not in the habit of wasting words.
“You arrive at an unfortunate hour, strangers,” he said. His voice was calm, but not soft. “That alone does not condemn you. It does mean I will believe nothing you say until I have reason to.”
Mira, naturally, stepped forward first.
“Good,” she snapped. “Then you’ve got enough sense to be embarrassed. Are you the chief letting your people get snatched by a psychotic dragon while you stand here posing against the trees?”
Darian closed his eyes briefly like a man praying for patience.
Ilyon muttered, “There it is.”
Aelthir did not flinch.
That, more than anything, earned my respect.
“It seems,” he said evenly, “you have heard enough rumors to judge me before hearing a word of truth.”
The word landed oddly.
Judge.
Fucking judge.
That was too deliberate.
And precise.
I saw Seraphine hear it too. Her head tilted only slightly, but I knew that look. She had caught the same note I had.
Mira bristled immediately. “If the word fits—”
I lifted a hand and she went still, though not happily.
“I mean no offense, Chief,” I said.
His gaze shifted to me at once.
“You may call me Aelthir,” he said. “And I am sorry, stranger, but I cannot allow you to linger here.”
His mouth said dismissal.
His eyes said something else entirely.
Just over his shoulder, beyond the edge of the glade, his focus flicked once—brief, deliberate—toward a northern tree with a knot grown low in the bark.
A warning. Or an invitation.
Perhaps both.
I inclined my head as though accepting the refusal. “Of course. We would not burden your people further.”
Mira stared at me like I had lost my damn mind, but she followed when I turned.
We moved through the glade under the watch of a dozen suspicious eyes, outwardly obedient, inwardly alert. I let the others pass ahead as I drifted close enough to the marked tree to slide my hand along the bark.
There.
A folded scrap tucked into the knot.
I palmed it cleanly and kept walking.
We did not open it until we were screened by trunks and shadow well beyond the settlement’s edge.
Ilyon took one look at my face and said, “That was not a dismissal.”
“No,” I said, unfolding the note. “It was triage.”
Seraphine stepped closer as I read.
The glade is already compromised.
Most do not know they are seeing lies.
Only a handful of elders still resist.
Do not speak openly.
The house moves.
Mira looked up at the trees around us. “Well. That’s awful.”
Darian’s jaw tightened. “How many of them are already lost?”
“Aelthir didn’t say,” I replied.
“He likely does not know,” Seraphine said quietly. “That may be worse.”
Ilyon read the note over my shoulder, then exhaled through his nose. “A moving locus of illusion and dream entrapment nested inside living woodland. Charming.”
Mira pointed deeper east. “Then we stop being charming and go find the fucking thing.”
We searched for a week.
A week of false trails, beautiful sounds that led nowhere, phantom lights in the trees, and dreams that pressed a little too sweetly against the edges of sleep. Even with our resistance, even knowing what Vesperyx was, there were moments when the forest seemed to fold in on itself and offer each of us something it knew we wanted.
I do not care to speak of what it offered me.
On the seventh day, we found the clearing.
It was too round. Too neat. Trees cut back in a circle no forest would make for itself. In the center sat a small house that looked, at first glance, almost laughably harmless—whitewashed walls, narrow windows, hanging charms turning in the breeze, ribbons and bones and glass gleaming softly in the afternoon light.
Mira took one step toward it.
Seraphine caught her arm hard. “Wait.”
We looked closer.
The charms hanging from the windows were not trinkets.
They were bottles.
Inside them floated tiny figures.
Elves.
Shrunken, preserved, smiling.
One swam slow circles as though it were a fish in a pond. Another clung to a bit of driftwood and blinked dreamily like some soft amphibious thing in a terrarium. A third pressed both hands to the glass and laughed at nothing I could hear.
Delusion.
Not sleep.
Something far crueler.
Darian swore first, low and murderous. Ilyon went so still it frightened me more than if he had drawn steel. Seraphine’s face lost every trace of softness. Mira just whispered, “Oh, you evil little bastard.”
I stared at that house and felt rage settle into me with a clarity I had not known in years.
Not hot or wild.
Just final.