The road ahead no longer felt real.

  Time unraveled slightly at the edges, each hour stretching or snapping back in place with jarring irregularity. The closer they moved toward the pulse of the Rift, the less the world obeyed its rules.

  The landscape before them stretched into the Shifting Verge, an imaginal region of swamps, stone, and tangled roots where geography folded, and thoughts echoed back wrong. Paths vanished mid-step. Shadows moved against the light. Even the birdsong sounded like distant voices caught in a loop.

  Aurora walked carefully, her staff guiding her like a blind woman’s cane.

  “Are we being watched?” Lili murmured, eyes scanning a stand of glass-leafed trees that shimmered between green and rust.

  “Yes,” Alora answered, not looking. “But by the past.”

  A silence followed, then came the lake. The flames barely pushed back the cold that coiled around their camp like a living thing.

  ***

  Aurora sat cross-legged near the fire, a heavy woolen cloak wrapped around her shoulders. Her staff lay within arm’s reach, an old habit, not easily unlearned. Her green eyes reflected the firelight, flickering like emerald flames.

  Alora sat opposite her, polishing the worn head of her staff with slow, methodical movements. Her silver hair, unbound for once, caught the firelight in ghostly highlights. Her sapphire eyes were distant, lost in thought.

  Between them, Lili poked at the fire with a stick, her honey-brown eyes hooded, the usual bounce in her compact frame dulled by fatigue. None of them spoke for a while. It was the silence of survivors, of sisters who had faced death side by side and lived to see another dusk.

  The fire snapped, sending up a spray of sparks that twisted strangely in the air before fading. For a moment, Aurora thought they had spelled themselves into a constellation, a pattern of stars that didn't belong to their sky.

  She rubbed her eyes, but she didn't believe it.

  “The Veil doesn't want us here,” she whispered, mostly to herself.

  Alora didn't answer immediately. She finished running her cloth across Graveblooms' thorned head, then set it across her knees. Her fingers lingered along the haft as if to anchor herself.

  “The Veil doesn't want anyone here. It's the world scar tissue. A place where the wound never healed, just twisted.”

  Lili huffed softly, blowing a strand of hair out of her face. “That's the most cheerful bedtime story I’ve ever heard.”

  Aurora glanced at her. ‘You're usually the one telling the cheerful stories.”

  “Yeah, well.” Lili jabbed the stick into the flames, watching embers catch and flare. “Even I run out of jokes when the ground breathes under my boots and the trees argue with themselves.”

  That earned her the faintest curve of Alora’s mouth, there and gone like a ghost.

  The silence stretched again, but it wasn't empty. The fires' glow painted them in shifting gold, softening the hollows under their eyes, turning the grime of the day into something almost ceremonial. They looked less like wanderers in a ruined world and more like three points of a triangle, fragile but connected.

  Aurora exhaled, drawing her cloak tighter. “We will make it through. The Veil bends, but it doesn't break. Neither do we. We just need some rest.”

  Lili tilted her head at her, expression softening. “You practicing speeches, or do you actually believe that?”

  Aurora smiled faintly, though her hands tightened in her lap. “Both.”

  That night, as they slept fitfully, Alora dreamed. They gave her no warning, just a name.

  Alora Bodari was sixteen the first time the Citadel let her perform a solo binding. The others whispered about it, the quiet Bodari girl, with the silver-ringed eyes and the voice like winter.

  The corpse was no one special, a soldier who had died during a failed glyph deployment. Clean body. Mangled soul.

  She drew the circle with careful hands, copying every detail from the Codex of Closure. No one helped. That was part of the test. One must perform the full binding alone, or not at all.

  The moment she lit the last rune, the room went cold. And the spirit screamed.

  It clawed at the Veil, panicking, its last memories flooding her mind like blood through the bandage: a brother, a wife. A dog named Fen, the joke left unfinished. Alora’s hands shook. She sealed the soul anyway.

  Afterward, the instructor praised her precision. “You did not hesitate.”

  But she had. And she never forgot the sound of the man screaming. Begging to be sealed away to find his loved ones on the other side.

  That night, she carved the spell into her palm, not to punish herself, but to remember. Death was never clean. But she would make it precise.

  Alora awoke with a start. What was that? A dream or a memory? Her magic was thin, worn ragged from the journey. But something deeper gnawed at her tonight: the dreams, the memories.

  The Rift tugged at her when she slept, peeling back the armor she wore while awake, exposing her heart to things she could not fight with a blade or spell. She drew the cloak tighter around herself. Too many memories have passed them as the journey grew longer, painful, and happy. Of what can be, of what was. It was getting to be too much.

  Alora sat up slowly, her breath shallow, the fire nothing more than a sullen glow. For a heartbeat, she thought she still heard the soldiers scream echoing, stretching, as though the veil itself had swallowed it whole and replayed it for her in the dark.

  She pressed a hand to her palm, half expecting to feel the fresh sting of the carved rune. Only the old scar remained, cold and faint, but tonight it throbbed as though it had been written anew.

  “Dreams,” she whispered, though the word tasted wrong. The Veil made memories fluid. She looked across the fire. Aurora slept peacefully, brow furrowed even in rest, lips moving as if speaking to someone long gone. Ymir perhaps. It was always Ymir.

  Lili tossed another stick into the fire.

  “If you start screaming again, try not to set the woods on fire,” she teased, but her smile was tired, and genuine worry was in her eyes.

  Alora nodded sullenly. “I’ll do my best.”

  She rose stiffly, moving to the bedroll they’d laid out near the fire’s warmth. Aurora woke and turned her head to see what the movement was. Ready to leap into battle if needed. Lili shook her head as Aurora rolled over and tried to sleep once again.

  The earth was uneven and damp, but she barely noticed as she sank down deeper into sleep. The smell of the salty air clung around them like a blanket. Sleep came reluctantly, dragging her into darkness inch by inch. For once, Aurora prayed for dreams, not nightmares.

  Aurora could never remember the exact moment she fell in love with him. But she could remember, vividly, the first time she wished he’d fall off a staircase, Ymir of House Serath.

  Second son to a noble line with more land than influence. His father was a second son, cousin to the King of Velmoura. A boy raised among banners and ballroom blades, who threw it all aside to become a knight. A protector of the realm.

  He’d claimed it was for honor. Aurora always suspected it was because no one in his house could tell him what to do with a sword once he picked it up.

  He came to the Aetherial Academy not for healing or diplomacy like most nobles did, but to study battle theory, combat magic, and strategic command. He was good, too good. The kind of good that came with a smirk and a reputation before he stepped through the door.

  Aurora had arrived at the Academy a season earlier, there as a guest speaker, a healer chosen to share new advancements in light weaving and wound magic. She had come to teach, to learn, to improve.

  She had not come to be pestered by boys who thought calling her “sunbeam” was charming. Their first meeting was in the west study hall, during a joint symposium on magical application in wartime. Aurora was reviewing her notes, seated alone, with crisp robes, hair braided neatly, and a staff resting against her knee. The doors flung open like a theatrical performance. And in walked Ymir. Tall, smug, and unbuttoning his collar like the room was too small for him, and both formalities.

  He walked straight past the professor, dropped into the seat beside her, and grinned like they were old friends.

  “Is this seat taken, or do you only allow the wounded near you, Healer Aurora?”

  She didn’t look up.

  “I allow anyone with silence and a spine. You seem short on both.”

  He laughed. That laugh. Full-bodied, loud, unbothered. She hated it. She would remember it forever. He passed her notes for the rest of the session.

  Sarcastic commentary on the professor’s hair, poorly drawn diagrams, and the likelihood that the older noble next to them had died and no one noticed. She didn’t respond. He took it as a challenge.

  Days passed. He kept appearing, not just in class, but in the library, in the mess, once at the stables while she was feeding a wounded griffin.

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  “I’m beginning to think you’re following me,” she said one evening, not looking up from her work.

  “I think the wind’s just in my favor,” he replied.

  “Or your ego.”

  “They’re the same thing, sunbeam.”

  He called her a sunbeam because it annoyed her. He smiled too widely and stood too close, but never crossed the line. Slowly, she started to smile back. He wasn’t just charming, He was sharp. Fiercely observant.

  Willing to listen to her lectures and ask the right questions to keep her talking.

  He challenged her ideas because he wanted to understand, making her defend them, not from doubt. Early morning training resulted in bleeding hands for him, which she had started to heal instead of sending him to the other healers. He studied late into the night; he helped her carry texts without being asked. His laughter came when she was too serious.

  One day, when she had been too tired to argue and he’d been too quiet to joke, she sat beside him in the candlelight of the old library, just silence, and something warm.

  That was the moment she knew, not when he kissed her or said her name like it was the first time. But when he sat beside her and stayed. She hadn’t expected him to be her beginning. But he was.

  When the Rift took him… It wasn’t just love that was lost. It was everything that had ever begun with him.

  There was sunlight. High above, pale and endless. A spring-blue sky scattered with drifting clouds, too lazy to cast shadows. And beneath it, him. Ymir stood in the tall grass, sword slung across his back, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, smirking like a wolf who already knew the hunt’s outcome. Aurora faced him with her boots dug into the soil, arms crossed, eyes narrowed.

  She didn’t have her staff. She hadn’t needed- or so she claimed.

  “You’re not going easy on me today, are you?” she asked, breath already high in her chest from the sparring drills.

  Ymir tilted his head mockingly.

  “Without that staff, you’d be leaning on me for every fight, sunbeam.”

  She narrowed her eyes.

  “One more time, and I’ll plant that sword in the next tree.”

  He laughed, that damn laugh. All sun, confidence, and the sound of someone who believed they were invincible.

  “That’s the spirit. But until then,”

  He lunged, quick and light. She dodged, swept low, and threw a punch into his ribs that made him grunt and stagger.

  “Ha!” she barked, triumphant. “Who’s leaning now?”

  He coughed and grinned, holding his side dramatically.

  “Abuse! This is abuse. Call the healers!”

  She tried not to smile and failed. He closed the distance and gently tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, the moment quieting like a held breath.

  “You’re getting better,” he said, voice low.

  She looked up at him, at the boy whose storm-colored eyes softened when they found her.

  “Or you’re getting old.”

  He laughed again, head tilted back, and gods, she loved him, not for the jokes. Not for the fighting. But for this, the calm, the closeness, the belief that nothing could touch them out here. The field whispered with wind, and A bee buzzed lazily past. Ymir kissed her softly, like an afterthought. You are always my Sunbeam.

  Aurora woke with tears on her cheeks. They were quiet, already drying in the morning breeze, but still there, like ghosts of the dream that clung to her. Ymir’s voice still echoed in her bones.

  You are always my sunbeam.

  The fire crackled nearby. The scent of herbs and charred root vegetables filled the air, warm and oddly comforting. Lili sat cross-legged beside the flames, stirring a pot with a wooden spoon and humming off-key.

  Alora was nearby, perched on a stone with her legs tucked beneath her, the book open across her lap. A cup of her nightshade tea steamed beside her. She didn’t look up, but Aurora could tell she’d noticed.

  “Bad dream?” Lili asked casually, without turning.

  Her voice wasn’t teasing. Not this time. Just… gentle, knowing.

  Aurora sat up slowly, brushing her hair from her face.

  “Not really, just some memories that hurt.”

  Alora didn’t speak, but she flipped the page of the Book softly, a small nod that said I understand.

  “You were talking in your sleep,” Lili added, now definitely smirking. “Something about swords, sunshine, and something else that started with s’… but I was too polite to listen.”

  Aurora let out a quiet laugh despite herself.

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Lili said, flicking a sprig of wild thyme into the pot. “I just assumed you were having either a romantic or aggressive dream. Or both.”

  There was a pause. Then Aurora softly said,

  “It was the dayI knew I loved Ymir.”

  Alora closed the Book. Quietly. She said nothing, but shifted closer, settling in beside the fire, handing Aurora a cup of tea from the warming rock next to the fire.

  The silence that followed was warm, not heavy. And eventually, Aurora spoke again.

  “Do you ever think about it? What will we do after this? If we win.”

  Changing the subject. The pain of the dream is still fresh in her mind. Alora stared into the flames, then nodded once.

  “I think about silence. About not having to carry so many names. Maybe… a garden. Something small. Something alive that doesn’t speak in riddles.”

  Lili snorted. “You? Gardening?”

  Alora raised an eyebrow. “I raised a grove of bone-birch trees from the skulls of the forgotten. I think I can handle some vegetables.”

  Aurora smiled faintly, her gaze distant. “I see a cottage. By the sea. White stone, blue shutters. Ymir is chopping wood badly. I’m fixing it when he’s not looking.”

  She paused, voice soft. “A small room filled with sunlight. And maybe, someday, laughter.”

  Lili wiped her eyes with her sleeve, exaggeratedly. “Oh no. You’ve gone full ‘storybook ending.’ Next, you’ll tell me you want a goat named Moonbeam and a fence made of love.”

  Aurora laughed, wiping a tear. “It’s stupid, I know.”

  Lili shook her head. “No. It’s not.”

  Then she grinned. “You know what is stupid, though? My mother thinks I’m still marrying some druid lord from the Spine Song Grove.”

  Alora raised an eyebrow. “The ones who only speak in forest riddles?”

  “Yep. That one. Last time I visited, he tried to bless my elbow. I told him if he touched my ribs, I’d turn him into a houseplant.”

  Aurora choked on her tea. “What did your mother say?”

  “She said that if I didn’t accept the binding, I’d be cast from the tree-blooded line of the Verdant Order. So I planted mushrooms in her bed and left.”

  They were all laughing now. A rare occurrence. The tension slipped away, not forgotten, but folded gently between them like an old blanket.

  Alora smirked. “Maybe we should help.”

  Aurora tilted her head. “Help?”

  “Find Lili a more acceptable fake husband. Someone convincing. Someone terrifying. Like a prince or maybe a dark stranger?”

  Lili paled. “No. Absolutely not. He’d try to seduce the trees and insult the furniture.”

  Aurora chuckled. “How about Ymir? He’s polite and could probably pass as a forest noble if we smeared moss on him.”

  Lili pretended to gag. “I love you, but that would be so awkward. Imagine our wedding. You’re the ex. Alora is the high priestess of the Shadows. More bloodshed would be rushing from my mother’s face than any battlefield.”

  The girls laughed hard. Aurora doubled over, holding her sides. Silence fell again, softer this time. The fire popped gently. The wind rustled the leaves. Aurora reached out, tossing a small twig into the flames.

  “Still… whatever happens. I think I needed to see that dream. The cottage. The light. It reminded me why we’re doing this.”

  Alora nodded. “So we can choose what comes next.”

  Lili, quieter now, “Let’s just hope the cost isn’t more than we can pay.”

  The fire was small, not because of the lack of wood, but because none of them wanted to draw attention. Flame danced low, casting long shadows against the crooked stones around them.

  Aurora sat nearest to the heat, absently rotating the fourth feather stone in her hands. It shimmered under the firelight, not golden like the others, but a strange, shifting hue between iron and ember. Neither light nor dark.

  Balanced. Or undecided.

  Alora watched from across the flame, her gaze sharp. “Do you ever wonder,” she said quietly, “if memory is more dangerous than ignorance?”

  Lili looked up from where she was coaxing a root to coil into a makeshift stool. “Only every time we nearly die from something history forgot.”

  Aurora raised an eyebrow. “You’d rather not know the truth?”

  “No,” Lili said. “I’d rather the truth wasn’t so… sharp.”

  Alora’s voice softened. “Sharp cuts clean. Memory lingers. It festers. It bleeds into everything.”

  Aurora stared at the feather. “So what? We forget and move forward?”

  “No,” Alora replied. “We carry it. But we don’t let it become us.”

  That struck something in Aurora. “I think I did,” she said. “Let it become me. Ymir… what I lost. It became everything. I don’t know who I am without it.”

  Lili reached over, gently tapping her boot with her own. “You’re Aurora. You’re a Guardian now. That’s more than the past.”

  Aurora looked into the fire for a long time. The realization hitting her. They were, now and until the end, the new Guardians. It was no longer a rescue mission; it was them against the Rift. They now and always will be the protectors of the people.

  Then she whispered, “I suppose it's up to us now to protect everyone. It won't matter where we started, the tragedy that came before. That's a lot to take in.”

  The girls nodded in silent acceptance. Lili didn’t talk much about where she came from. Not because she was hiding it, but because most people didn’t know how to listen when a story sounded like laughter but ended in silence. She was nine the first time the forest spoke her name.

  It was in the northern Groves, old places where the trees bent toward the moon and the wind carried its own opinions. She had wandered too far chasing a blackbird, half-drunk on sunlight and stubbornness.

  The grove had been quiet. She didn’t hear the voice at first. Just laughter, soft, almost familiar, echoing around her like breath in a bottle. Then the roots moved.

  Not much. Just enough to trip her. Just enough to remind her she wasn’t alone. She stood, scraped and dizzy, and laughed back.

  “If you’re going to eat me,” she’d said, “do it after lunch. I’m not seasoned yet.”

  A flower bloomed at her feet. Bright. Yellow. Laughing. It only bloomed in groves that approved of you. Or pitied you. Or both. She sat beside it and sang a song she didn’t know the words to until dusk came. When the elders found her, she wasn’t afraid. She was smiling.

  “The Grove laughed with me,” she said. “Then it warned me.”

  Years later, she would ask a druid-master what it meant.

  The master said only this, “The land listens best to those who don’t pretend to own it.”

  Now, years and ruins later, Lili still didn’t call herself a druid. She wasn’t calm. Or balanced. Or wise.

  But the Grove still laughed when she walked by. And sometimes, she laughed back. Because the Rift screamed, but deep down in her sap-stained bones, Lili knew that laughter could be a shield too.

  The girls chatted into the night. Sharing stories of home and the future they wished for. Chuckling at some and drinking their tea. It was long into the night before any of them had felt like the weight on their shoulders was lifted. It was almost like they felt normal for a brief moment. Forgetting for a moment that tomorrow they would have to start the journey into the unknown again.