Chapter 115 Chapter 115
Chapter 115 Chapter 115
Epilogue
Mara’s POV
People said the lake was cursed. That was the first thing the old woman at the inn told me when I asked for directions. She leaned across the counter, eyes wide, voice dropping to a whisper like she was afraid the trees outside might hear. “They say it burns blue under moonlight,” she said. “And if you listen close enough, you’ll hear a woman’s voice calling a name that no one’s supposed to say.” Of course, that only made me want to see it more.
I’d been wandering the countryside for months by then half historian, half idiot with a notebook chasing old stories about angels and demons, fallen gods, and forbidden love. The kind of tales scholars rolled their eyes at but secretly read by candlelight when no one was watching. The one they called Anarchy was my favorite. A Queen of Fire who’d once ruled Hell and then burned it down. Who loved an angel so much she made Heaven itself bleed. Who vanished with him into the cracks between realms, leaving only silence behind. A myth, obviously. But a beautiful one.
So when I heard whispers of a lake that never froze and glowed with its own light, I packed my bag, bought a map that looked older than my grandmother, and went looking. The path was rough half buried under roots and moss but the closer I got, the more the air changed. It felt heavier, thicker somehow, like breathing through memory. Even the birds were quiet. When I finally broke through the last line of trees, I stopped breathing altogether.
The lake stretched out before me, wide and perfectly still. The surface shimmered faintly not blue, not gold, but something in between. The kind of color you couldn’t name without poetry. The air hummed, low and steady, like the world was alive beneath my feet. There was no shrine, no temple, nothing to prove anyone had ever worshiped here. Just a circle of standing stones around the water’s edge, carved with marks that time couldn’t erase. I brushed a hand across one, tracing the strange, looping symbols. They pulsed faintly under my fingers, like a heartbeat.
“Not cursed,” I whispered to myself. “Just forgotten.”
I sat down on a smooth rock near the water and pulled out my journal. The pages were already filled with half-baked notes and sketches, but this place… this felt different. It didn’t need studying. It needed remembering. The sun started to set, spilling fire across the surface of the lake. And then, for the first time, I saw it just for a second. A flicker of wings in the reflection. One white as light, the other streaked with shadow.
I blinked hard, but it was gone. The ripples faded, leaving only the faint hum in the air. My pulse was racing, and for reasons I couldn’t explain, I wanted to cry.
I thought maybe it was exhaustion or the cold creeping in. But then I heard it soft, almost too quiet to be real. A woman’s laugh.
It came from across the water, light and distant, like someone remembering happiness. I stood without meaning to, my eyes straining to find her. The lake stayed still, but the air shimmered faintly, and for a heartbeat, I swore I saw them.
A woman with hair like living fire, standing barefoot at the shore. And beside her, a man with grey wings and eyes that looked like storms breaking open.
They weren’t looking at me they were looking at each other. Smiling. Whole. And then the vision broke apart, scattering into light. I stumbled back, breath catching. My skin prickled, my heart pounding. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a ghost story. It wasn’t a myth. It was memory, replaying itself for whoever still cared to look.
I dropped to my knees and touched the water. It was warm. The hum grew stronger for a second, then faded.
I sat there until the stars came out, the sky so clear it looked carved. The air smelled faintly of ozone and smoke, and the grass around the stones glowed faintly under the moonlight. That’s when I noticed the carvings weren’t random they were names. Or fragments of them. Etched in languages I didn’t know but somehow understood.
Azya. Daya. Michael. Gabriel. Baltazaar. And two in the center, worn almost smooth: Geminia and Azrael. I traced them with my fingers. The letters shimmered faintly, like the stone itself remembered their touch.
The stories had it wrong. They didn’t vanish because they were punished. They left because they’d done what the rest of us never could they found peace.
And the world, somehow, remembered. A soft breeze stirred the trees. The water rippled once, twice, and then I heard it again two voices, overlapping, one low and rough, the other soft but fierce. It wasn’t words this time. Just feeling. Warmth. Love. Home.
I smiled, tears stinging my eyes. “You’re still here,” I whispered. “Aren’t you?”
The air shimmered again, and a spark of gold light flickered above the water, small as a heartbeat. It drifted toward me, hovering in the air for a second before sinking into my open palm. It didn’t burn. It pulsed. Alive. And then it was gone.
The next morning, when I woke, the lake looked different. Smaller, quieter. But the air still hummed faintly, like the last note of a song that refused to fade. I packed my things, but before I left, I tore a page from my journal and placed it on one of the stones.
On it, I wrote:
“The flame still burns.
The light still listens.
Love outlasts everything.”
As I walked away, I looked back once. The surface of the lake shimmered under the rising sun, gold bleeding into red. For a heartbeat, it looked like two figures stood there again, hand in hand, watching me go. Maybe it was just light. Maybe it wasn’t. Didn’t matter. I believed anyway. Some stories don’t end they just wait for someone to remember them. And I’d remember.