Chapter 62 Chapter 62

Chapter 62 Chapter 62

Twilight's POV 

“Which is why we've come seeking your help.” I added and then waited for him to speak.

The inside of the druid settlement smelled like burnt cedar and something sweeter underneath it that I couldn't name. It wasn't unpleasant, it was just unfamiliar, and I made a mental note to stop letting unfamiliar things make me tense. We were here for a reason and I needed to stay focused on that.

The elder had already welcomed us in and was speaking in that slow, measured way that people who had lived for a very long time tended to speak. Like every word was chosen carefully and placed down gently. I was listening but part of my attention had snagged on something else.

The servant girl that held Isla’s hand before she zoned out.

She had been moving around the edges of the room since we came in, refilling things, adjusting things, doing the small background work that people like her were usually invisible doing. I would not have looked twice except for the way she kept looking at Isla. Not the curious kind of looking that strangers did. Something else. Something that felt too deliberate for a girl who was supposed to be focused on her work.
I watched her for a moment longer than I should have.

There was something about her face. Something I couldn't land on properly, like trying to read words through frosted glass. She was beautiful, almost unusually so, and her eyes were calm in a way that didn't match the energy in the room. The kind of calm that isn't natural. The kind that is practiced.
I had seen that kind of calm before and it had never meant anything good.

"Twilight." Isla's voice was low, right beside my ear.

"I see her." I said quietly, not wanting the elders to suspect anything.

"Something is wrong…I think-” she started.

"I know." I said. "But look at where we are Isla. We didn't walk two days to turn around because of a feeling." I answered her.

Isla went quiet beside me but I could feel her, the way you can feel a storm before it arrives. She wanted to say more and she was holding it in and I appreciated that she trusted me enough to hold it even when everything in her was pulling the other way. Isla was never someone who kept quiet easily. The fact that she was doing it for me meant something.

Devonye leaned in from my other side. "Are we good?"

"We're good." I said.

"You sure? Because Isla looks like she's about to flip this entire table."

"Nobody is flipping anything." I said. "We're fine."

I pulled my eyes away from the servant girl and put them back where they needed to be. On the elder. On the process. On the reason we came here in the first place. On Isla and the thing that had been missing from her since the day we found that grave empty, the piece of her that walked around like a wound that hadn't closed properly because the person who could have closed it was gone.
Then it happened. Just briefly, just for a second. A voice moved through the back of my mind like smoke curling under a closed door.

“You are not alone in this.”

I knew that voice. I had heard it before, in that space between sleeping and waking, in the moments after a fight when everything went quiet all at once and I was left standing with my blade in my hand and nothing left to fight. One of the guardians. They had said those exact words to me before and I had never been fully sure what they meant by it. Whether it was a comfort or a warning dressed up as one.

I pushed it to the back of my mind.

Not now.

I had spent enough time listening to warnings that led nowhere and enough time doubting myself when I should have been moving forward. Isma's grave had been empty. The druids were here and they were real and Devonye had done the research and I trusted Devonye with my life and with Isla's which was worth even more to me. This was the closest we had ever been to actually getting something back that had been taken and I was not going to let a whisper and a strange looking servant girl talk me out of it.

I would not do that to Isla.

"Can we begin?" I asked the elder, stepping forward slightly.

She looked at me with those deep set eyes that made me feel like she was reading something written behind my face. 

"You are eager."

"I have someone waiting." I said simply.

Something shifted in her expression, not quite a smile but close to it, and she nodded once. 

"Then we begin."

The others in the room began to move into position. There were five of them altogether including the elder and they arranged themselves around a low stone platform in the center that I hadn't paid much attention to when we first came in. 

Now that I was looking at it properly I could see the markings carved into it, thin lines that curved into each other in patterns that made my eyes want to follow them around and around without ever finding where they ended.

Isla stepped up beside me and I felt her hand brush mine. Not holding it, just touching, just there, the way she did when she wanted me to know she was still with me without making a moment out of it.

"You okay?" I asked without looking at her.
"Ask me again when this is over." She said.
Fair enough.

Devonye stood just behind us, arms crossed, eyes moving around the room the way they always did when she was storing information quietly.

She didn't say anything but I could feel her paying attention to everything and I was glad she was here. Devonye noticed the things I missed when I was too locked onto what was ahead of me. 

The elder began to speak in a language I didn't recognise. Old sounding, the kind of language that felt like it belonged to the ground rather than to people, like the earth itself had spoken it first and humans had learned it by pressing their ears to the soil. The others joined in one by one and the sound built slowly, layering on top of itself until it was less like voices and more like a vibration that lived in the walls and the floor and the base of my throat.

I felt something move in my chest. Not fear. Something older than fear. Something that recognised what was happening even if my mind didn't have the words for it yet.

Isla shifted beside me.

"Twilight." She said.

"It's working." I said. "Just let it work."

"That's not what I was going to say."

"Then what?"

She didn't answer right away and I finally looked at her. She was staring at the servant girl again who had positioned herself near the back of the room, just outside the circle the druids had formed. Her hands were folded neatly in front of her and her eyes were closed and her lips were moving slightly, just barely, in a way that looked like she was saying something under her breath that she didn't want anyone to hear.

Something about that made my stomach tighten.
But the sound in the room was reaching something now, I could feel it, a crescendo building slowly that made the air feel dense and heavy and alive with something that didn't have a name I knew. 

The markings on the stone platform were catching light that didn't seem to be coming from any of the torches, glowing faintly in thin gold lines that traced the carvings exactly and made the whole platform look like it was breathing.
I had never seen anything like it in my life.

"It's working." Devonye said softly from behind me and even she sounded a little undone by it.
Then the sound stopped.

Complete silence, the kind that pressed against your eardrums and made the room feel twice as small, and then the curtain at the far end moved and a figure stepped through it slowly.

My chest stopped, my breath hitched.

She looked like Isla. The same face, same build, same way of holding herself that I had memorized without meaning to because I had spent so long watching Isla that the details of her had become part of me. Standing there in front of us was a version of that face that I had only ever seen in the portrait Isla kept folded carefully inside her coat like something sacred.

Isma.

Isla made a sound beside me that I felt more than heard. Something small and cracked open and completely unguarded that she would never have let out if she had been thinking clearly. She took one step forward and then stopped like her legs had forgotten what to do next, like her body couldn't decide whether to run toward her or stay still and protect itself from being wrong.

"Isma." She breathed.

The figure looked at her and smiled. "Isla."
Everything in me wanted to feel relief. Wanted to let the tightness in my shoulders finally drop and breathe out properly and feel like we had actually done something right for once. Like all of it, the walking, the waiting, the hoping, had actually been worth it.

But the servant girl at the back of the room opened her eyes.

And she was looking directly at me.

Not at Isma. Not at the druids. Not at the moment unfolding in the center of the room that everyone else's attention was completely swallowed by.
At me.
And she was smiling.
Not the way people smile when something good happens. The way people smile when something is going exactly the way they planned it.
Devonye's hand closed around my wrist from behind, slow and deliberate, the way she did when she needed me to stay still and pay attention without making it obvious that we had noticed anything.
"Twilight." She said very quietly. "Look at her eyes."
I was already looking.

The servant girl's smile didn't move. Her eyes were completely steady on mine and there was something behind them that didn't belong to a girl who poured water and adjusted curtains for a living. 

Something old. Something that recognised me the same way I was beginning to recognise it. Something that had been alive far longer than this body it was wearing had been.

My hand found the hilt of my nyx blade before I had made the conscious decision to reach for it.
"Tell me I'm wrong." I said to Devonye under my breath.

Devonye said nothing.

And that was the only answer I needed.