Chapter 161 Months Later

Chapter 161 Months Later
\- Several Months Later -

EYSA -

Eysa had thought she'd known pain. She'd known chains, hunger, and the ache of being made small. She'd known what it meant to survive.
None of it had prepared her for the way her child fought her way into the world.
The birthing room smelled of boiled cloth, herbs, and candle smoke. Rain tapped against the windows, carried by a Southern storm that rattled the shutters. The fire burned high, but Eysa still shook beneath the damp cloth that was pressed to her brow.
Dax knelt beside the bed with one hand wrapped around hers. She could feel his tremor even if he tried to hide it. He'd tried to be Alpha and command the room, but the moment Eysa cried out, all that control had brought him to his knees.
"I'm here," he said.
Eysa turned her head enough to glare at him through the pain, but she stayed silent.
The midwife shifted near the foot of the bed. "Again, Luna. When the next pain comes, you push."
Eysa wanted everyone out of the room, with no noise to pull her from her focus of pushing, but the moment the pain rose, her body tensed and Dax's hand became the only solid thing she recognized.
"Push," the midwife ordered again.
When she did, the sound that tore from her throat didn't feel like her own.
When she thought she couldn't push any more, Dax bent over her hand, his forehead nearly touching her knuckles, and his voice broke around her name. "Eysa."
It gave her strength enough to push again, and the room blurred around the edges. The next pain came harder than the others. Eysa bore down with everything left in her.
Then the pressure was gone, and for one long moment, there was only silence.
Dax's hand squeezed around hers as the midwife bent over the small, slick body in her hands. A servant offered a cloth as another whispered something under her breath.
Eysa tried to rise, but her body wouldn't obey.
“Show me,” she breathed, her body straining toward the sound that had not come yet.
Then it cried, and the sound tore through the room, thin and furious and alive. Dax folded forward as if something inside him had finally broken. Eysa wasn't sure if the sound she made was a laugh or a sob because the cry of her child filled every hollow place in her chest.
The midwife wrapped the baby quickly and turned back toward the bed, her face beaming.
"It's a girl."
The words struck Eysa harder than the pain had. Then the baby cried again, only the sound stretched thin through the room.
It pulled through candlelight, through rain, and through Dax's hand still wrapped around hers. The walls blurred, and the fire bent awkwardly. Even the rain against the windows faded until it sounded like waves breaking against stone.
"Eysa?" Dax asked.
His voice came from far away, and the room fell out from under her.
When she opened her eyes, she was inside her Soul Chamber.
Silver light moved across the black water at her feet. The pillars rose around her, carved with names that blurred when she tried to read them.
The baby's cry echoed through the chamber. Eysa turned in a circle, one hand pressed to her emptied stomach before she remembered the child was no longer there. Panic flooded her insides.
"Dax?"
Only the water answered, and then the silver surface darkened.
Wind tore across it, carrying salt instead of smoke. Eysa looked down and saw waves crashing against a black stone coast beneath a sky heavy with foreign stars. Across the water stood a fortress, its towers rising from cliffs like broken teeth. Dark banners snapped from the walls, marked with a sigil she didn't know.
The chamber pulled her closer.
She stood in a hall of dark stone. Torches burned along the walls, but their light gave no warmth. Open arches looked out over waters so vast that they made the world she knew feel suddenly small.
A young woman stood at the far end of the hall, and Eysa forgot how to breathe.
The woman was grown, perhaps twenty or a little older, with Dax's proud stance and the sharp lift of his chin. But her eyes were Eysa's. Not only the color, but the fire behind them. The refusal to bend. The promise that fear would not have the final say.
Dark hair moved around her face in the sea wind, and blood marked her lower lip. Her gown was torn at one shoulder, and one hand clutched a blade too large for her hand.
Eysa's soul knew her as daughter before any other thought registered.
The young woman turned as if she'd heard Eysa, and for one impossible breath, her eyes met Eysa's across the vision.
"Mother?" she whispered.
Eysa stepped forward, "I'm here." But the girl's gaze drifted past her.
Footsteps sounded beyond the hall, slow and certain. The torches leaned like the air itself had changed, and a man appeared in the archway behind the young woman.
Someone beyond the arch whispered, "Dominik is coming." The name moved through the Soul Chamber like a bell being struck.
Eysa couldn't see all of him at first. Only his broad shoulders, dark hair touched by the wind, and a face cut with the kind of beauty that knew cruelty rather than kindness and love.
He stepped into the torchlight, and Eysa's body went cold.
He wasn't Landis, but Landis's blood lived in the shape of his mouth, in the arrogance of his stance, and in the old wound behind his eyes.
Her daughter lifted the blade.
Eysa reached for her daughter, but black waves surged between them. The hall broke apart with the sound of sea wind, and the echo of a newborn cry.
Suddenly, she was back in the birthing room.
Dax was bent over her, one hand against her cheek and terror stripped bare across his face. The baby cried nearby, alive and furious.
"Eysa," he said. "Look at me."
When she did, the room swam around him, but the Soul Chamber's salt wind still clung to her lungs. The midwife tried to place the baby in her arms, and Eysa looked down at the tiny red face and closed fists.
Her daughter.
The image from before came back of her daughter grown and bleeding in a hall across the sea.
Eysa's arms closed around the newborn carefully. The little body pressed hot and living against her chest, and the future pressed cold and piercing against her skin.
She lifted her eyes to Dax.
"It wasn't a dream," she whispered. "I've seen her future."
Dax went still, and the baby cried against her heart. Eysa held her tighter as the warning settled into her bones.