Holly

  Holly froze.

  For a heartbeat, the grove seemed to respond to her, falling into a heavy quiet.

  Saga’s words echoed once, then again, but refused to arrange themselves into meaning. They slid through Holly’s mind like loose glass, cutting without settling. The name itself lodged behind her eyes, cold and wrong.

  Gloymr.

  She stared at Saga, waiting for something—correction, qualification, anything that would make the word less real. Nothing came.

  The air in the grove felt thicker, heavy with the scent of sweet sap and the slow pulse of leaves overhead.

  Holly forced a shallow inhale, then another.

  When she spoke, her voice was very quiet. Too quiet. The kind that came from years of holding back.

  “What did you just say?”

  Saga did not look away.

  Her form flickered, light thinning at the edges like a candle guttering in a draft, but her eyes stayed locked on Holly’s. There was no evasion in them. No divine distance. Only sorrow, old and deep.

  “The song was calling to Gloymr,” Saga said again, softly.

  The words fell between them and did not break.

  Holly searched Saga’s face with the intensity of someone who had learned, painfully, how people could lie with their expressions and their mannerisms. She looked for the telltale shifts. Omission masquerading as mercy, truth bent for comfort.

  She found none.

  Her throat tightened. Her next breath shook.

  “Why,” she asked, the word trembling despite her effort to steady it, “would a song calling to him hurt her like that?”

  Images surged unbidden: black liquid slipping from Ariel’s nose, from the corners of her eyes; fire choking into tar; Ariel’s voice breaking as she told Holly to stay back.

  “Why would it pull that… that ichor out of her?”

  Saga took a cautious step forward, hands lifting slightly as if approaching a wounded animal.

  Holly stepped back.

  Her spine straightened. Her jaw set. Anger, long banked and starved of air, began to glow.

  She held Saga’s gaze, unblinking.

  “Tell me.”

  Saga drew a breath that sounded heavier than it should have, as though it had weight.

  “The night Ariel died,” she said, “her soul was not merely wounded. It was torn.”

  The grove seemed to lean in. Even the leaves stilled, their faint glow dimming as if listening.

  “I was there,” Saga continued. “So was Hlin. We reached her as the boundary thinned—when breath leaves flesh and the Pattern decides whether a thread is cut or knotted.”

  Holly’s fingers curled into her palms. She did not look away.

  “For a moment,” Saga said, and something like grief cracked her voice, “we won. We drove Gloymr back. Ariel was shielded. Held. Safe.”

  The word safe struck Holly like a blow.

  “Then,” Saga said quietly, “he called his Acolytes.”

  The light around her shuddered.

  “They are not worshippers,” she went on. “Not servants in the way mortals understand. They are demi-gods; remnants of a primordial age, when existence itself had not yet learned to endure. When worlds were born and died in the span of a single breath.”

  Saga lifted her eyes fully to Holly’s now.

  “Against them, Hlin and I could not hold.”

  Holly felt something give way in her chest, a hollow opening that swallowed sound.

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  “They broke our line,” Saga said. “And in that instant—just one—Gloymr reached Ariel.”

  Holly’s vision blurred. She swallowed hard, tasting metal.

  “He latched onto her soul,” Saga continued, relentless now. “Not fully. Not then. But enough. Enough to begin feeding. Enough to leave a wound that would never close on its own.”

  Holly shook her head once, small and sharp. “No,” she whispered.

  Saga did not soften her voice.

  “In desperation,” she said, “Hlin and I called upon the Pattern itself. We summoned its light to unmake Gloymr. To erase him utterly.”

  A pause.

  “We were almost successful.”

  Holly’s heart hammered painfully against her ribs.

  “Almost?” she echoed.

  Saga’s gaze dropped for the first time.

  “Myrkrún,” she said. “In the final instant, before the Pattern’s light could fall, they cast a binding rune on Ariel. It allowed Gloymr to merge with her soul, shielding what remained of him from destruction.”

  The implication landed with sickening clarity.

  The song.

  The ichor.

  A call answered by something already inside.

  “That,” Saga said softly, lifting her eyes again, “is why the song harmed her. It was not calling to Ariel.”

  Her voice dropped to a near whisper.

  “It was calling through her.”

  Silence followed, thick and suffocating.

  Holly stood rooted to the mossy earth, every word Saga had spoken colliding inside her skull. The story tried to assemble itself: gods clashing over Ariel's soul on that terrible night, something vast and ancient fastening itself to Ariel like a leech, but her mind rebelled, sliding away from the scale of it.

  Her hands trembled at her sides. She clenched them into fists, nails biting into skin, grounding herself in the sting.

  “And you just… left it there?” Holly asked at last. Her voice came out hoarse. “You let that... that thing stay inside her?”

  Saga’s light dimmed further, as though the accusation itself weighed on her. “I did not leave it,” she said quietly. “I contained it. Or I tried to.”

  She drew a slow breath, eyes drifting briefly toward the heart of the grove, as if seeing something far away.

  “When I brought Ariel here, I could see the damage spreading,” Saga said. “Her soul was burning itself apart under the strain. Gloymr could not be removed without destroying her. So I sought the only beings capable of altering the substance of a soul without unmaking it.”

  Holly’s brow furrowed. “The smiths,” she said faintly. “The ones in the volcano that Ariel told me about.”

  “The Myndsmíer,” Saga confirmed. “They forge truth and memory into form. Fire into purpose. I asked them to do the unthinkable; to take flame and bind it into Ariel’s soul itself.”

  Holly’s breath caught. She thought of Ariel’s wings, of the fire that had saved and destroyed in equal measure.

  “It would not kill Gloymr,” Saga said. “But it would cage him. Starve him. Buy time. Time for Ariel to heal, and time for me to find a way to excise him fully.”

  Saga’s gaze lowered. Shame rippled through her light like a shadow passing over glass.

  “But time was the one thing I did not have.”

  She looked back up, meeting Holly’s eyes again.

  “When the Acolytes found the path to this world, I knew they would come for her. I placed Ariel within the Eiranth, where her soul could be mended slowly, safely. And when they attacked… I used what power remained to shield this forest and seal her away from them.”

  The glow around Saga flickered violently, then steadied.

  “It broke me,” she admitted. “I was reduced to my most ancient form—the Wisp. No memory. Barely any will. Only instinct, and one truth I refused to lose.”

  She held Holly’s gaze, voice barely above breath.

  “That Ariel was the key. And that I had failed her.”

  The grove seemed to sway.

  Holly stood there, staring at Saga, at the dimming light of a goddess who spoke of failure as if it were the weather. The words piled up inside her chest until they pressed against her ribs, sharp and unyielding.

  Something in her finally snapped.

  “It wasn’t enough,” Holly said.

  The words came out flat at first, almost calm. Then they began to shake.

  “You failed,” she went on, her voice rising despite herself. “Hlin failed. Because Ariel—my wife—was taken by a fucking song.”

  Her breath hitched. Rage flooded in behind it, hot and unstoppable.

  “I watched it,” Holly said. “I watched her fall apart in front of me. I watched her tell me to stay back like she already knew she was being taken away again. For the second time.”

  She laughed then; a short, broken sound that held no humor at all.

  “I’m so sick of the universe pretending it cares,” she said, tears burning at the corners of her eyes. “So sick of destinies and Patterns and gods talking about keys while it keeps tearing us apart like we’re expendable.”

  Her voice cracked, fury bleeding into raw pain.

  “Thirteen years,” Holly said. “Thirteen years without her. And when I finally get her back, you give us—what? A day? Less than a day?”

  She shook her head, jaw clenched so hard it ached.

  “I don’t believe in destiny,” she said. “I don’t believe the universe gives a damn about me or Ariel. And I don’t care what any of you planned centuries ago.”

  Her eyes locked onto Saga’s, blazing.

  “I couldn’t save her when she died,” Holly said, voice trembling with the force of it. “But I can do something now. And no one—not you, not Hlin, not Gloymr, not any god—is going to stand in my way.”

  She turned sharply, the motion scattering motes of light.

  Fornaskr moved without a word, stepping in behind her. Shika padded close at her heels.

  “Holly—” Saga called after her, desperation finally breaking through her composure.

  Holly did not slow.

  “Please,” Saga said, her voice cracking. “Take the Eiranth from the statue in the village. Its power can help you.”

  Holly kept walking.

  She did not answer…

  …And she was done looking back.