Chapter 22: Into the Caves
Sasha POV
I wanted to ask her what she had meant by that. But I didn’t get a chance. Some answers break you before you get to test them. The forest swallowed me. The world shrank to grain and bark and the soft whisper of my boots plotting each step. The ironwood trunks rose like pillars, holding up a roof of green so thick the afternoon dimmed to a private twilight. The air was cooler here, older, as if it had been breathed and rebreathed by the same ghost for a hundred years. The path narrowed and then opened into a low ravine where stones leaned together like conspirators. At the far end, the cave waited. It wasn’t grand, the mouth barely came to my shoulder when I stood at the threshold, but the weight of it pressed on my skin the way a storm does before it breaks. I paused with my palms on the stone. It was damp, slick with a thin skin of moss. My crescent warmed under my sweater as if the rock recognized me.
“I’m not here to be brave,” I told the entrance. “I’m here to end something,” I breathed in deeply as I waited. At first, nothing out of the ordinary happened. And then the cave breathed cold air into my face. I ducked and went inside. At first, I could see nothing. The dark was complete. The kind of dark that made you feel like you had opened your eyes inside a closed fist. I stayed still until shapes found themselves, low ceiling, uneven floor, a seam of stone running like a spine through the center. Farther in, the passage widened. The air hummed with a familiar note, the same low thrumming from my dreams, from the night the window shattered, from the moment the forest carried me where I didn’t want to go. My mark pulsed in time with it. The cave opened into a chamber so quiet it felt like a held breath. Standing stones rose from the floor, four of them, each no taller than my shoulder. There were carvings etched into their sides, lines and curves I almost recognized. When I took a step closer, faint light bled from the grooves as if the symbols had remembered they were meant to glow.
Remember.
I reached out and hovered my fingers just above the nearest stone. Heat bled into my hand without touching it, not fire-heat, but life-heat. The hum under my skin matched it beat for beat until I couldn’t tell where I ended and the rock began. A vision knocked against me. Not with hands. With light.
Ronan and I stood in this chamber, bound wrist to wrist by a strip of cloth stained darker than dye. Our older selves looked different, but I knew the set of his shoulders, the shape of my mouth. The elders lined the wall like shadows that could speak. Kade stood near the entrance, cheeks hollow, fists clenched. Ronan kissed my knuckles and whispered something I couldn’t hear. My eyes in the vision closed as if the words hurt in a good way. Then the cave shook, only a tremor, the kind that makes dust fall in thin streamers. The elders stepped forward as one. The cloth at our wrists tightened on its own, and the mark at my hip burned so bright I thought it might split the skin. I knew what this was. It was the choosing ceremony. Ronan and I, together as mates. Fated and destined.
I gasped, and the vision stuttered. The chamber returned, empty except for me and the stones and the quiet buzz of my blood.
Remember.
The wind breathed through the crack behind me. No breeze reached this deep; still, I felt it.
“I am trying,” I whispered. “Show me all of it!” I suddenly demanded. My outburst was met with silence, and my frustration grew. I didn’t understand any of it, and I was losing patience. But then, there was another sensation. Stranger than the first. It was as if someone else breathed in the dark. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t the cave. It was a presence that unfolded at the edge of the chamber where the shadow was thickest. Not footsteps. Not the scrape of lather. It was just the unmistakable weight of a body that wasn’t mine. “Thelma?” I called out softly. I knew it wasn’t her, but I was too afraid. The hum sharpened. The symbols on the stones brightened by a hair. I took a step back, then another. “Ronan?” but there was only the small sound of water somewhere deeper that was dripping slowly. I could feel the presence that moved with me. It kept its distance, but it never let me forget it was there. My skin prickled in the way it does when a storm descends upon the earth.
Remember.
“Hello?” I called out as I ignored the incessant wind. “Who is there? Show yourself,” the dark seemed to press against me, and the chamber held its breath. And then the shadow near the far wall lifted its head. I froze as I stared. It had no face that I could name. It was only the impression of one. Where its mouth was supposed to be was nothing. And then it looked as if the skin was being torn and ripped.
“Sasha,” the voice called out of that opening, and I wanted to scream. I wanted to run. But I was frozen. Possibly in fear.
“Oh…oh, oh, oh,” I whispered.
“Sasha,” it called again.
“I’m…I’m here,”
“Sasha, you have to remember,”
“I’m trying,” I answered as I stared at it. I felt as though the darkness was playing tricks on me. At first, the presence was one, then two, then one again. But I already knew I wasn’t alone. Was I surrounded?
“Sasha,” the voice said again, and there was something about it that was strangely familiar. Familiar and ancient.
“How many…” I paused and took a deep breath as I stood a bit straighter. “How many past lives…?” I finally managed to question. I was met with silence, but I knew it was still there. But would it answer me?
“Many,”
“Seriously? Many? That is the answer?” I shot back angrily. Many could mean five, or ten, or fifty.
“Enough,” it whispered, and then suddenly the cave filled with light, and I knew that the moment had passed. I didn’t hesitate as I made a run for it.