Chapter 137 Signature
ARYA
I was in a corridor I could not remember reaching. It was just a stretch, with no beginning or end.
One moment there was nothing, and then there was stone — older than anything I’d walked before, over centuries old. Torches burned along the walls with shadows pooling in places the light should have touched, as though the dark here operated by different rules.
I didn’t question it and kept moving slowly. Wondering what the hell this was.
A sound got my attention and I lifted my head, or I started seeing more clearly. I didn’t know which.
There was a figure at the end of the corridor, a woman stood with her back to me.
I squinted, trying to get a better look. I moved to speak but my lips remained shut, like they were glued. Something squeezed in my chest. And somehow, I knew even before my mind fully registered anything.
I knew it the way I knew my own heartbeat.
My grandmother.
My mouth parted this time, but no sound made it out still. I tried to move. My legs wouldn’t. They did not feel frozen, but it seemed the distance between us kept increasing the further I went. Like the hallway was growing just to keep us apart.
My eyes burned, frustration gnawed at my insides and I wanted to scream. To shout and force the sounds to be out. I needed— I need…
The thought cut off halfway.
Please. I didn’t know if I said it or only felt it. Please, just let me.
“Grandmother.” I managed to whisper.
Her head turned just slightly so that I could see she had heard me. It gave me a little hope and I kept trying harder.
“Not yet,” she said. Her voice that soft timbre i remembered.
Not yet? I wanted to scream, wanted to reach through whatever this distance was made of and grab hold of something, anything, because there were so many things I needed to say, so many questions I’d been carrying since before I even knew I was carrying them, and not yet was not enough, not yet was the cruelest possible answer.
“Grandmother!” The scream echoed in my mind and it felt like I imploded on myself from the pressure caving me in.
When my eyes opened, I was no longer in the hallway. I looked at The Moonwell in confusion, only to become more lost when I noticed there was something wrong with it.
It was still. The clarity it had held since the cleansing, bright and living and responsive wasn’t there. This was something else. A surface that reflected too perfectly, that held my gaze in a way that made looking feel like being looked at.
I didn’t want to look away from it. I didn’t want to keep looking.
And then I wasn’t alone.
I felt his presence and immediately became on guard. A cold shift in the air made the hairs on the back of my arm rise in attention. I turned, and my whole body went tight with something that took me a second to name because it arrived mixed together with too many other things. Fear and grief and anger and something underneath all of it that I had no word for. The real horror of seeing a face that had no right to exist in front of me anymore.
Theron Nightshade.
He looked exactly as he had the last time I saw him. That expression I’d carried with me ever since. The look of a man whose certainty had been the whole of him, and who had watched it leave.
My hands were shaking. I noticed this distantly.
He didn’t say anything. He was just standing there, suspended or waiting for something? I didn’t know but it was somehow worse than if he’d been attacking or getting ready for a fight.
“You’re dead,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt.
“Yes,” he said. Then he laughed.
The sound made my hands tremble a little. His amusement meant bad news for me.
“Then what—” I stopped. “What are you doing here?”
He looked at the Moonwell. “Watching. Seeing what comes after.”
“There’s no what comes after for people who—”
“Die?” He looked at me. Something in his eyes I couldn’t name. “You’ve been in the void. You know it’s not that simple.”
The Moonwell’s surface rippled. Nothing had touched it. I looked down into the reflection and saw —
My body jerked up, a loud gasp tearing out of me before I was fully conscious of making it.
Luca was already upright beside me, his hands finding my arms in the dark.
“What happened?” His voice was immediate, alert. “You’re distressed—”
“I had a dream.” I was breathing too fast.
I looked around me. The room was real. The walls were the same. And the sky was still a little dark with that pre-dawn blue through the window. But some part of me was still in that chamber, still looking at that face.
“It was just a dream.” I didn't know if I said it for my benefit or his, but Luca frowned.
“Your reaction is too strong for just a dream, Arya.” He was scanning the room, not satisfied yet. “What did you see?”
I opened my mouth. When no words formed, I closed it. Pressing my lips into a thin line.
“Theron,” I swallowed.
Luca went very still.
“He was in the Moonwell chamber. He was just standing there. He didn’t even threaten me. He said he was watching.” I heard how it sounded. “It was a dream,” I said. “It was just a dream.”
“Yes,” he said. Staring at me with a worried expression.
I looked at him. “Say what you’re thinking.”
“This is not the first dream, Aeliana,”
“How did you know about the first one?”
“You made a sound in your sleep that I’ve learned means something is different. And I could feel your distress, it wasn’t hard to deduce it wasn’t a good one.” He was watching me with the specific attention he kept for things that concerned him. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
He didn’t need to ask twice before I started narrating everything I saw in the dream.
Not yet. She had said.
What did it mean?
He was quiet for a moment. Then she breathed out. “It has to be the baby,” he said finally. “Bardon mentioned that Moonborne power sometimes intensifies. Something about the additional—” He paused. “The additional magical presence.”
“The baby has magic,” I said. Everything falling into place in my mind.
“Even this early. Bardon said the indicators suggest a significant magical signature.” He looked at me. “Your power has been developing for months. If it intensifies further—”
“I might start receiving information I’m not equipped to filter yet.” I felt the ward network, still humming at the edge of my awareness. No anomalies. Nothing unusual. “The land connection.”
“Could it extend to—” He stopped.
“To other states of being,” I said.