Shadows and Secrets

Elara did not sleep.

This was not unusual. What was unusual was that for the first time in as long as she could remember, the not-sleeping was not about dread. She lay in her bed with the ring on her finger and the lamp still burning on her desk, and she stared at the ceiling and thought about three hundred years.

Three hundred years of the same soul being split and reborn and split again. Three hundred years of waking up as Elara—frightened, confused, losing hours she could never find—while somewhere else the other half of her woke up as a queen and remembered everything and could not reach her.

She pressed her palm flat against her sternum.

I'm always here, the note had said.

She had read it four times. She had read the postscript about the rolling pin twice, and both times something had moved in her chest that was not quite laughter but was adjacent to it—the involuntary response to finding something unexpectedly warm in the middle of something terrifying.

At some point in the small hours, she got up and wrote back.

N—

I don't know what to call you. I don't know if "you" is the right word. You're me. I'm you. The grammar of this situation is a disaster.

I'm not running. I want you to know that. I'm scared, I think I'll be scared for a while yet, but I'm not running.

I have questions. Too many to fit here. Tomorrow, I suppose.

—E

P.S. I told Mira about the rolling pin. She looked at it with a different kind of respect. I think she might actually love it now.

She left the journal open on the desk and went back to bed and lay there until dawn came and brought with it a note under her door in handwriting she was already learning to recognize as Kael's—not warm exactly, not cold either, precise in the way of someone who had learned that precision was a form of consideration.

If you're willing: the Whispering Woods, two hours after sunrise. Bring practical clothing. Mira may come.

—K

There is something I need you to see.

She told Mira over the bread Mira brought at half past seven, and Mira's response was to eat an entire pastry in two bites while processing and then say, "What counts as practical clothing for learning you're a three-hundred-year-old shadow queen?"

"I have no idea," Elara said honestly.

"Boots," Mira decided. "Always boots. And something you can move in." She paused. "I'm bringing the rolling pin."

"I assumed."

"Good."

They reached the Whispering Woods at half past nine, which was when Elara noticed two things: first, that the woods had always made her vaguely uneasy in a way she had attributed to their name and never examined more closely, and second, that in the morning light with Kael standing at the tree line looking like something from a story she now understood was not entirely fictional, the unease had changed character entirely.

It was not fear of the woods.

It was the feeling of approaching something true.

He was wearing dark clothes, practical in the same way hers were—boots, dark trousers, a coat that had clearly been worn enough to stop being new. His hair was back. He looked at her when she approached with that particular quality of attention she was going to have to get used to, the kind that did not move.

"You slept," he said.

"Eventually." She stopped a few feet from him. "You read journals?"

"Your other self told me you would sleep. She was right."

Elara absorbed this—the idea that Nyx and Kael had spoken about her, had discussed her, that there was a whole context to this she was only beginning to enter. It was strange in a way she did not entirely have words for. Strange and oddly not unwelcome.

Mira planted herself on a fallen log immediately upon entering the clearing, rolling pin across her knees, and announced that she would be available in a supervisory capacity.

"Very good," Kael said, without irony.

"I thought so," Mira agreed.

He turned to Elara.

"Before we begin," he said, "I want to be clear about something. What I'm about to ask you to do is reach for power that has been locked away from you your entire life. It will feel strange. It may feel wrong. Some part of you will try to pull back." He held her gaze. "Don't. Pulling back is not the same as stopping—it just makes the magic harder to direct."

"What does it feel like?" Elara asked. "When it works?"

He was quiet for a moment. "Cold, at first. Then, like something that was always there, deciding to introduce itself." A pause. "Your other self described it once as finding a room in your house you had somehow never opened."

The accuracy of that landed somewhere specific.

"Alright," she said. "What do I do?"

"Close your eyes."

She did.

The woods were immediate around her—birdsong, the specific smell of trees and soil, and the faint something-else she had never been able to name that hung in the air of the Whispering Woods more strongly than anywhere else. Under her boots, the ground felt solid. In her chest, her heartbeat was elevated, and she acknowledged it and let it be.

"There is a place," Kael said, from several feet away—he had given her space, which she appreciated, "behind where you normally think from. Deeper than thought. It has been there your entire life, and you have been walking past it."

"That's not particularly specific instruction."

"I know. Some things resist specificity." A brief pause. "Think about the ring. About what you felt when you first put it on. The memories—don't go into them, just touch the edge of them. There is power underneath those memories. Power that is also yours."

Elara thought about the ring.

About the crack of light she had felt, the sudden expansion, the sense of something vast and hers.

She reached.