Chapter 174 Third Epilogue

Chapter 174 Third Epilogue
Aodhan
I sing to her when I feel her on the other side.
There have been years when it has opened only enough to taunt me. Pale mushrooms push through salt-bitten grass on our small island in the middle of the mortal sea, their circle perfect, their doorway useless. I have stood above it with bare feet in the dirt and the ocean raging below, singing until my throat tore, until my voice cracked against the air, until every song my court still remembers turned to nothing in my mouth.
No one answered.
No one ever answered.
Until her.
The girl with root in her blood and roads beneath her skin.
The girl who smells of rosemary, lavender, mortal sunlight, and Hollow Hill.
Rowan.
Her name came to me through the ring on the day she was born, a tiny thread of sound beneath the waves. I was standing on the western rocks then, watching another storm crawl over the sea, when the air opened for half a breath, and I heard a child cry in a world I could not reach.
The sea went still.
So did I.
Since then, I have felt her in pieces.
A laugh through the ring when she was small. Bare feet in grass. A child’s hand hovering too close to the mushrooms before another voice pulled her away. Her mother’s warning. Her father’s fear. The warmth of a garden that somehow has become the only place in any world I know by heart.
Don’t enter the fairy ring, Rowan.
I have heard those words too many times.
But then I hear the woman who speaks the warning, and I cannot hate her for it.
Her mother says the words with love, not cruelty.
I know the difference.
My court has been here too long not to know the sound of cruelty.
The island is small, jagged, and half-swallowed by the sea. Black cliffs rise along the western edge, slick with spray, while caves twist deep beneath the rock, filled with tide pools, old shells, and fae who were never meant to live beneath a mortal sky.
We are Deepwater.
Or we were.
Once, my great-grandfather says, our court moved through tide roads as easily as Hollow Hill moved through roots and shadows. We crossed between seas, between worlds, between moonlit shores no mortal map could hold. We sang to open passage, to call storms, to soothe the drowned and wake sleeping currents.
Then the roads closed, and the borders shattered. Our tide road was cut while most of our court was travelling through the mortal sea, and the way home was sealed behind us with a sound my great-grandfather still wakes screaming from.
I was born after.
Born in exile.
Born on this island, beneath gull cries and mortal stars, with stories of a realm I have never seen braided into every song I know.
They tell me our waters are silver there, that black coral rises from moonlit bays, and our halls sing when the tide comes in.
I have never seen any of it, but I have felt it.
The ring grows near the western cliff, where grass gives way to black stone and the sea throws itself against the island below.
No mushroom should grow there. The soil is too poor. The wind too harsh. The salt air kills almost everything soft. Still, every year, the pale caps push through the grass.
Every year, we gather.
Every year, we fail.
The magic here is not strong enough. Not alone. It needs an answer from the other side. It needs root and road. Mortal blood and fae blood. A voice that belongs to both worlds and is claimed wholly by neither.
It needs her.
Today, the ring wakes before dawn. I feel it in my bones. The air changes in the caves, the pools flatten, and the sleeping children stir. My mother, who has not allowed herself to hope openly in years, lifts her head from where she sits near the wall.
“Aodhan?”
I am already moving.
By the time I reach the western cliff, the sea has gone quiet. The waves gather below without breaking, dark and high, held back by something older than the tide. Wind hangs motionless over the grass. Even my court seems to hold its breath as they gather among the stones.
The mushrooms glow faint silver at the edges… And there she is. A girl standing in a sunlit garden, basket at her hip, hair loose around her shoulders, one hand still lifted from the herbs she meant to gather.
Rowan.
She is older now.
She stands tall enough to look the doorway in the eye, with her mother’s wildness in the line of her mouth and her father’s silver stare fixed on the circle between us.
She feels me. I know she does.
So I sing for her.
The words leave my mouth and move through the ring, trembling across the air between our worlds.
A plea.
A road-song.
A drowning court’s last hope.
Rowan leans closer, and the ring brightens.
I sing again, letting the longing carry where force never could. I do not command her. I do not reach for her mind or twist the air around her. I could not, even if I wanted to. The ring would not allow it. This magic does not open for theft.
Only answer.
Then Rowan sings back.
The sound nearly brings me to my knees.
Her voice is lighter than mine, mortal-warm and root-deep, threaded with something that makes the island itself shudder. The grass bends toward her song. The mushrooms flare. The sea draws back from the rocks in one long breath.
My court hears her, and all around me, faces lift with hope.
Old warriors. Frightened children. Mothers with babies held tight. Those born here, and those old enough to remember what home used to taste like.
She sings, and at last, the ring does not feel like a wound.
It feels like a door.
I lift my voice to meet hers.
Our melodies twist together above the mushrooms, hers green and bright, mine dark and salt-worn. The space between us pulls tight. The air thins until I can see the shape of her garden.
The sea roars.
The mushrooms burst with silver light, and the space between our worlds tears open at last.
Rowan lifts her foot, and the sunlit garden vanishes.
Water rises between us.
And the girl who has haunted every song I know falls through the doorway and into the mortal sea below.
I leap from the cliff.
Cold closes over my head, dark and endless, but she is brighter than anything beneath the waves. Hair streaming around her. Eyes wide. Mouth open in shock as the sea takes her.
It should drown her, but it does not, because the water knows her.
So do I.
I catch her before she sinks too deep, one arm wrapping around her waist, and the moment my hand touches her, the ring above us sings with every road my court has lost.
Root-born girl.
Road-blood child.
Wild little saviour.
The world has not sent me a door.
It has sent me her.