Chapter 140 Redeemed
ARYA
The third dream was the one that changed things.
I was in the corridor again. The old stone one, torches without proper shadows. But this time I wasn’t stuck at a distance. This time I was moving toward my grandmother, and she was facing me.
She was exactly as I’d last seen her. The way she’d been in the last months of her life, when I’d been too young to understand that she was dying and that the world would be different after, that the person who’d sung to my wolf in the dark would be gone and I’d spend years not knowing what I’d lost.
She looked at me with an expression that contained too much for me to hold at once.
“You’re growing into it,” she said.
“Into what?”
“What you are.” She looked past me, briefly, at something I couldn’t see. “It’s coming faster than I expected. Faster than the last one.”
“The last what?”
She looked back at me. “There was one before you. Centuries ago. The last Moonborne to carry both.” A pause. “She had less time than you. Less foundation. She didn’t have—” A gesture that seemed to indicate everything around us and beyond. “What you’ve built.”
“What happened to her?”
My grandmother was quiet for a moment. “She learned too quickly. The boundary couldn’t hold the pace.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means the voices became louder than the living.” She looked at me steadily. “You asked what not yet meant.”
“Yes.”
“It means the full opening is coming. I can feel it developing. The integration of everything you are with everything that is.” She paused. “Make sure your roots go deep enough before the storm.”
“What storm?”
“The moment when what you’re becoming becomes fully what you are.” She reached toward me, and for the first time in these dreams there was the possibility of contact. Her hand extended, and I extended mine.
And stopped.
Because standing behind her, at the far end of the corridor where I hadn’t been able to see before, was a face I recognized differently. Not of the person I knew and loved.
Someone I’d killed.
Theron Nightshade, standing in the corridor of the dead with a different expression from the one he’d had in the Moonwell dream. Not watching now. He was looking at something specific.
He was looking at me.
And behind him were more faces. People I didn’t know. Shapes in the torchlight that had the specific quality of presences that were aware.
“Not yet,” my grandmother had said.
I pulled my hand back.
“How do I make the roots go deep enough?” I asked her.
“You already know,” she said. “The question is whether you’ll let it be that simple.”
Then I gasped awake.
\-----
LUCA
Arya jerked up with a start. The room was dark but I was already awake. She’d been restless in her sleep, which translated to me being restless in mine. My body had woken me up before I could control or stop it.
“What did you see?” I urged gently. Pulling her into my arms. She rested her head against my chest.
I listened without moving.
I breathed out when she finished. I didn’t like what I was hearing, and so I wouldn't worry her, so I forced myself to remain calm. She didn’t need to be overprotective right now. “Did Theron say anything?”
“No. He was just there.” She was looking at the dark window. “There were many others. I don’t know if they were people I’ve affected. People from the battles. The Reclaimed. Coalition members.” She shook her head. “I don’t think they were threatening. I think they were just there the way the land is there. Part of what everything includes.”
“Your grandmother said the full opening is coming.”
“Yes.”
“What do you think she meant?”
She was quiet for a long moment. Outside the wind was moving through the estate grounds and the ward network registered it as familiar harmless pressure.
“I think,” she said slowly, “that the land connection isn’t just to the living land. I think it extends to everything that’s ever been real in it.” She looked at me. “The world carries its history. Everything that’s happened leaves a trace in the land. The magic, the people, the—” She paused. “The dead.”
“And you’re developing the ability to read that.”
“I think I’m developing the ability to feel it the way I feel the ward network. Not hear it exactly. Not see it. Just know it’s there. Most of the time it’s in the background. But when I’m asleep and the filtering is down and—”
“It comes forward,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Your grandmother said make the roots go deep enough,” I said. “And you asked how, and she said you already know.”
“Yes.”
“What do you think she meant?”
She turned to look at me. In the dark her eyes were silver-pale, the Moonborne light that appeared when her power was close to the surface, and behind it was the expression that was purely her.
“You.” She said, “The work. The Institute. The people.” She paused. “The baby.” Her hand moved to her stomach, the gesture that had become instinctive over the past weeks. “The present. All of it is rooted in what’s real and alive and happening now.”
“So the roots are already there.”
“The roots are already there,” she said. “The question is whether I trust them.”
I took her hand and intertwined our fingers.
“Do you?” I asked.
She looked at our joined hands for a long moment.
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
“Then let it come,” I said. “Whatever it is. We’re rooted.”
She leaned against me. I put my arm around her and felt the winter settle around us and the ward network hum and the world be very present in all its living dimensionality.
“Bardon is going to be extremely interested in this,” she said.
“He’s going to write several papers.”
“He’s going to want to be present next time it happens.”
“He absolutely is.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Luca.”
“Yes.”
“Theron, he…” She paused, like she was searching for the right word. “He looked like someone who understood, finally, that he’d been wrong. Not reformed. Not redeemed. Just—” She exhaled. “Like he could see the shape of it from where he was. The thing he’d been fighting against being the thing that made it possible for him to be anywhere at all.”
“Does that change anything?” I asked.
“Not practically. He still did what he did.” She looked at the window. “But in the dream it felt important. Like whatever comes after, it’s not static. It’s not just what you were when you died.”
“There’s still development.”
“Maybe.” She settled more fully against me. “Or maybe I’m projecting the hope that nobody is permanently what they were at their worst moment.”
“That might be true,” I said. “Or it might be a dream.”
“It might be both.”
“Yes,” I said. “It might be both.”