Menolly’s brow stays raised for a long beat. The flickering firelight makes her expression unreadable—half amused, half dissecting.

  “Be specific,” she says at last.

  Del exhales. “She’s part of this now. I can’t just walk away and leave her behind. So how do I deal with... the complications?”

  “You could be more discreet,” Menolly suggests her tone light, almost teasing.

  ‘Wouldn’t work,’ Misty says, stretching out her front paws before settling again. She lifts one, extends her claws, and inspects them idly. ‘She already questions everything. The coincidences. The strength. Me.’ Her tail flicks once. ‘She knows there is more than we let on.’

  Del nods. “She told me once about rare creatures—shapeshifters, legends. But none that speak. None like Misty.”

  Menolly regards him coolly. “You know she has a cuvat aligned to her. One meant to guide her path.”

  “I know,” Del says. “So maybe that path is here. With us. As part of this group.”

  Menolly’s eyes narrow. “Once again, Del. Be specific.”

  Del’s jaw tightens. The firelight paints hollow shapes on the underside of her face, catching the hard angle of her cheekbone, the mirrored gleam in her eyes. Not human. Not pretending to be. She never did.

  His mouth opens, then closes again. He glances at Elara—frozen in place, mid-breath, lips slightly parted, one hand hovering near the hilt of her blade. Caught like a figure in glass. Suspended in the moment before a question, before a decision.

  He’d seen her laugh. Cry. Snap at him. Save him. He’d seen her kill. He’d watched her sleep, brow twitching with some private dream. She didn’t know it, but she was his tether. The last part of this world that hadn’t warped beneath his feet.

  Del swallows.

  The words gather like a storm in his throat. Not because he doesn’t know them. Because he does.

  “I want her Awakened,” he says.

  The stillness seems to speak in more ways more real than anything. Even though there is no wind, no sound. The world echoes in unreadable understanding.

  Misty doesn’t speak. Doesn’t twitch. She just watches him, golden eyes unreadable.

  Menolly doesn’t blink. Then her irises begin to pulse—slow flickers of colour, blue to grey to blue again. Like warning lights in a deep facility, long abandoned, now blinking back into life.

  Del knows that look.

  She’s not thinking. She’s consulting.

  Up the chain. Across planes. Into places he doesn’t have names for.

  And while she does, Del waits—one breath, then another. Long enough to think maybe he’s asked the one thing he shouldn’t. That maybe they’ll say no.

  That maybe they’ll say yes.

  A full minute passes before Menolly rises and chair beneath her vanishes without sound.

  She crosses to Elara—each step deliberate, soundless, too fluid to be natural. Her gaze flicks once to Del as she passes, expression unreadable.

  The elf stands there, frozen in time, a statue caught in the last breath before the pause. A ripple of her hair still lifted as if caught in a forgotten breeze.

  Menolly stops beside her. Looks at her for a moment, as if examining something delicate. Ancient. Breakable.

  “There would be complications,” she says, softly.

  Del’s shoulders tense. “In what way?”

  Menolly doesn’t turn. “This would alter her path completely. She wouldn’t just travel with you. Wouldn’t just fight beside you. She’d be bound. To your momentum. Your choices. To the things you still haven’t seen.”

  Now she turns.

  Fixes Del with that cold, too-human stare.

  “Are you prepared for that? For someone else’s soul to be tethered to your own? Not by charm. Not by spell. By consequence.”

  Del meets her gaze, but inside, the weight drops. A tether. Not a leash—but still, something that could be tugged. Twisted.

  “What about her?” he asks, voice rough. “Do you think she’s ready?”

  Menolly tilts her head.

  “She would follow you into fire,” she says, “but that is not the same as choosing to become fire.”

  Del’s throat tightens.

  “Would she have a choice?”

  Menolly’s voice softens—barely. “Of a kind. If she agrees, we can Awaken her. If not…” She pauses. “She would be removed. Her memory... adjusted. You’d become a footnote. A faded dream of someone who helped once and disappeared. Nothing more.”

  Del doesn’t answer.

  The words don’t shock him—not really. He’s seen enough of their reach to expect it. But knowing a thing and feeling it are different animals.

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  He looks again at Elara—frozen mid-turn, one foot slightly lifted, jaw tense in a half-formed question she has yet to ask. The kind of pause a sculptor might capture in marble. Alive, but unreachable.

  He tries to imagine her walking away from this. Heading for Hybern. Taking the same trail—but without him beside her. Without remembering why her steps feel lighter. Why something inside her still scans the shadows for someone who isn’t there.

  Would she catch herself pausing at campfires, wondering what she’s forgotten?

  Or would it all be clean? Gone like smoke?

  He pictures her passing him on some future road—eyes skimming across him like a stranger’s. Maybe she nods. Maybe she doesn’t even look.

  That’s the part that lodges in his throat.

  Not the absence.

  The indifference. She’d forget the long nights. The close calls. The unspoken things. The sense that something in him had shaped something in her.

  “She wouldn’t remember anything?” he asks, voice rougher than intended.

  Menolly doesn’t flinch. “No.”

  Del draws a slow breath. This isn’t strategy, it’s loss, wrapped in mercy and it’s not his to decide.

  Del speaks again, more grounded now.

  “What about Naomi?”

  Menolly turns slightly, not surprised by the question.

  “If Elara declines, we remove her too. The girl would continue on to Hybern alongside Elara, placed with a suitable tutor. As far as Naomi is concerned, she would never have met you.”

  Del flinches at that. It sounds cold. Final. But he understands the logic. If they can erase him from Elara’s path, Naomi would be folded into that too—clean, simple, surgical.

  Still, knowing it makes sense doesn’t make it easier to swallow.

  ‘Can I do that to her?’ he thinks, staring at the still form of Elara. ‘Change her entire future without her knowing what it could’ve been?’

  Another voice rises, hot and sharp.

  ‘Come on, Del. You know damn well what she’d choose.’

  But he hesitates. ‘Do I? Do I really?’

  The questions spin in on themselves, looping tighter with every pass.

  ‘Enough, Del. She at least deserves the right to decide for herself.’

  And that settles it.

  Del lifts his head. “And Naomi—if Elara chooses to Awaken?”

  Menolly doesn’t miss a beat. “She won’t be a problem. Her path diverges from yours at Hybern regardless. Her mind is young. Curious, yes—but not burdened by scrutiny. Within days, you’ll be no more than a footnote in her memory. A character in a story she half-remembers from childhood.”

  Del nods slowly. There’s a tightness in his chest, but no argument left.

  “Alright,” he says. “Let’s ask Elara.”

  Time resumes without fanfare.

  Sound returns first—the whisper of fire, the settling of ash, the distant hum of night beyond the trees. Then breath—Elara’s sharp inhale as her body catches up to motion. She stumbles half a step back, knife in hand before thought can catch it. Her eyes snap between Del and the woman standing amongst the carnage, too still, too clean, too other.

  “What—who the fuck is she?” Her voice cracks high at the edge but steadies fast. She’s already shifting her weight, checking space behind her, looking for cover, for exit points, for sense in something that has none.

  “Del?” she presses. “What’s going on? Where did she come from?”

  Her gaze lands hard on Menolly—flicking from the strange sheen of her boots, untouched by blood, to the unnaturally pale skin, the eyes that seem to flicker from blue to grey and back. She doesn’t move like a person. Doesn’t breathe like one. There’s no scent to her. No heat.

  Elara’s grip on the knife steadies. Not raised. Not aimed. Just ready.

  Misty doesn’t move. Her tail curls slow arcs through the blood-slick mud, golden eyes half-lidded, unreadable.

  Del lifts one hand—open, slow.

  “Elara,” he says gently, turning to face her fully. “Look at me.”

  She doesn’t lower the blade, but she doesn’t retreat either. Her gaze locks on his, wide with the aftershock of confusion, the potential of a betrayal she hasn’t named yet.

  “That woman,” she says, voice controlled now, more deliberate, “She’s not… right. Either she’s not real, or she’s too real. But she doesn’t belong here. Del, she doesn’t fit.”

  “No,” Del admits. “She doesn’t.”

  “And you knew she was coming.”

  “Yes.”

  That answer lands heavier than a lie.

  The knife doesn’t drop, but it shifts in her grip. Her breathing calms—not because she feels safe, but because she’s trained herself to slow down when things stop making sense.

  “I need to tell you the truth,” Del says softly. “About Misty. About me. About everything.”

  A pause. The fire cracks behind them. Somewhere in the dark, a bird calls—but the sound comes too late, as if remembering it was supposed to cry.

  “You’ve seen things,” Del continues. “You said as much the other night. Too many close calls. Too much strength. You’ve felt it, haven’t you? That Misty’s not just a cat. That I’m not just a lucky bastard.”

  Elara glances at Misty.

  The feline blinks slowly. Nothing performative. No defence offered.

  “I have,” Elara says at last, voice low. “But I didn’t… I mean, I thought I was imagining it. Making up patterns.”

  “You weren’t.”

  Menolly steps forward.

  Her motion is wrong—not unnatural like a broken puppet, but too smooth, too calibrated. A person-shaped thing moving perfectly. Her boots make no sound on the wet ground. Her presence lands without weight.

  “It isn’t your imagination,” Menolly says, her tone neither cold nor kind. “And the path you now stand on does not allow for half-steps.”

  Elara’s stance hardens. “What do you mean?”

  Del shoots Menolly a look—ease up. But she only tilts her head, expression fixed.

  “You’ve seen too much to remain untouched,” she says. “You’ve crossed into something that does not forgive observation. The choice is simple. But it is not easy. Step forward, or step away.”

  Elara’s brow furrows. Her eyes shift between them.

  She turns slightly, enough to give herself space—not turning her back, never that—but adjusting her weight as if ready for either flight or something worse.

  Del hesitates. “There’s a choice,” he says. “To stay as you are—or to be Awakened.”

  She looks to Del, brow furrowing. “Awakened. What does it mean?”

  Del doesn’t answer immediately. He shifts his weight, gaze dropping to the blood-wet ground, then rising to meet hers again.

  “It means crossing a line,” he says. “One you don’t come back from. Not because someone stops you. Because you won’t want to. Not after you’ve seen what’s on the other side.”

  “That’s not an answer,” Elara says.

  “No,” he agrees. “Because I don’t have one that makes sense until you’ve lived it.”

  Her jaw tightens slightly. “So, you are saying it is something you can’t describe that will change something, but you don’t know how and based on all this wealth of knowledge, I have to commit or walk away?”

  Del can only shrug. “It’s a truth, raw and permanent. You’ll see things differently. Yourself. This world. Me.”

  A silence settles. She glances toward Misty—who, for once, doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. Just sits.

  Elara looks back to Del.

  “And if I hate what it does to me?”

  “Then you live with it,” Del says. “But it won’t break you. Not if you walk into it with your eyes open.”

  “And Naomi?”

  “She’ll be safe,” Del says. “And she’ll leave for Hybern, either way. This won’t touch her.”

  That seems to land.

  Elara’s shoulders drop half an inch. She closes her eyes, just for a heartbeat.

  “And what would you choose?” she asks softly.

  Del doesn’t hesitate. “I’d choose the truth. Even when it hurts. Even when it breaks you. Because once you know… you can’t unknow.”

  Another breath.

  Then she nods, and with conviction. “Then awaken me.”

  Menolly steps forward. Her hand rises, two fingers extended. She touches Elara’s forehead—no flourish, no ritual. Just contact.

  The air ripples.

  A thrum, deep and low, rolls outward like the toll of a buried bell, except it is something felt, not heard. Leaves tremble. The fire pulses. Misty rises to her feet.

  Elara’s eyes flare gold—then white—then roll back.

  She crumples, and Del catches her before she hits the ground.

  She’s limp, but not lifeless. Her pulse is steady. Her breathing slow.

  Menolly watches, impassive. “She’s yours now, Del. Don’t waste her trust.”

  And with that, she’s gone. No flash. No sound. Just absence.