Rory stood at the base of the mountain with his neck craned all the way back, staring up until his eyes watered.
Far above them—impossibly far—the Great Tree of Avalon emerged from the mist like something the world had built before it learned restraint. Its immense trunk was barely visible from here, a dark column shimmering faintly through layers of drifting cloud, its roots coiling down through the mountainside like the veins of something ancient and still breathing.
"It's up there?" Rory squinted. "There's no path. No stairs." He turned to the nearest villager. "What, do we just grow wings?"
A few of the villagers chuckled softly.
Then, without ceremony, they stepped forward.
Cloaks slipped from their shoulders.
Wings unfolded.
Not sudden, not violent—just natural. The way a person stretches after sitting still too long. Membranes spread wide: obsidian and bronze and iridescent hues that caught the morning light and threw it back in fragments. Some bore the pale lines of old scars; others were smooth and pristine. They flexed them with casual familiarity, a loosening of stiff muscles before a long climb, and tilted their faces toward the summit.
Rory's jaw dropped all the way open.
"That," he said, "is the coolest thing I have ever seen in my entire life."
Bryce glanced down at him. "I have wings too, Rory."
Rory turned on him with an accusing expression. "Then why have you been walking this whole time?"
Bryce opened his mouth. Closed it. Seemed to decide this was not a battle worth fighting.
Shawn had taken a very deliberate step backward, his hand tightening on the grip of his iron shield with the focused calm of a man deciding which way he intended to die. His brow had settled into a deep, entrenched line.
"I'll stay here," he announced.
Elise finished checking her gauntlets without looking up. "You'll do no such thing." She reached over and nudged him—firmly—toward the nearest winged guide. "Come on, Lieutenant."
"No," Shawn said flatly.
"No, what?"
He gestured skyward. The gesture communicated everything. "That. Flying. I'll stay here and guard—"
"Guard what? The dirt?"
"Strategic positioning," he said, with the dignity of a man who has committed fully to a position. "Someone has to hold the ground."
"Someone is afraid of heights," Elise said pleasantly.
"Someone is being tactically responsible—"
She laughed and shoved him again, lightly, toward the guide. He went, making the face of a man being led to his execution, and she fell into step beside him with the expression of someone who is very much enjoying herself.
---
Selene didn't hesitate.
She turned to Bryce, and he offered his hand with a steadiness that she had not expected from him even two weeks ago—amber eyes calm, the gold shimmer of scales along his forearms catching the light. She took his hand. He swept her upward.
The world dropped away beneath her.
Mist swallowed them whole in seconds, cold and sharp and tasting of ice. The wind hit next—tearing at her cloak, pulling at her hair, roaring in her ears until thought itself felt difficult. Around them, wings beat in a deep rhythmic pulse—thud, thud, thud—a sound less like flight and more like something structural, the mountain itself generating a heartbeat.
Lyra flew close. Her eyes moved to Selene and stayed there.
Always.
Below, Avalon dissolved into abstraction—greens fading to greys, rivers thinning to silver threads, the distant lands beyond flattening to shadow and haze. The scale of it was not frightening so much as it was simply incomprehensible, and Selene found that her body was processing this before her mind caught up.
She clung, at first. Bryce's grip was steady and did not comment on the tension in her hands.
Then, by degrees, she let go.
Not all at once. First her shoulders. Then the death-grip of her fingers, loosening to something more like holding than clutching. Then her breath, which had been coming in short controlled measures, evened out.
"You all right?" Bryce called over the roar of the wind.
The wind took the words before she could form them. She nodded instead. Her green eyes were wide, taking in the impossible scope of the world laid out beneath them—the forests and ridgelines and the faint dark gleam of water—and something in her face shifted. The fear didn't disappear. It simply made room.
Wonder moved in alongside it.
It's beautiful, she mouthed into the wind, more to herself than to anyone.
Bryce glanced back and caught it. Something passed across his expression—quiet, briefly unguarded. He looked forward again without speaking, but the slight ease in his jaw said enough.
Then the clouds parted.
The summit appeared.
---
They landed on a vast terrace carved into the mountain's upper face. Ancient and weathered, its stone smoothed by centuries of wind. But alive in a way that the lower paths were not—alive in the way that truly old things are alive, the kind of life that is less about movement than about accumulated presence.
Runes glowed faintly beneath their feet, a soft pulsing light like slow breath caught in stone. Towering pillars rose around them, etched with draconic symbols that hummed just barely against the skin—not quite sound, not quite sensation, but something in between.
The air was different here. Warmer than it should have been at this altitude. Heavy with the smell of ozone and ancient wood.
At the far end of the terrace, reclining on a bed of woven branches and thick furs, lay the Grand Elder.
He looked like a man unmade by time—silver hair spilling across robes threaded with gold, skin as translucent as wax held near a flame, each breath a shallow, rattling thing like dead leaves stirred by wind. His hands lay still across his chest. He might have been sleeping. He might have been very nearly something other than sleeping.
The villagers who had guided them up knelt without prompting. "The Grand Elder," one murmured. "Keeper of the Old Blood."
They exchanged a quiet word with the group—they would wait at the terrace's edge, give them space, return when Bryce came for them—and withdrew.
Lyra stepped forward. Her eyes moved over the Elder the way they moved over any terrain: assessing, cataloguing, measuring the distance between what was visible and what was likely true. She had learned long ago that frailty and danger were not opposites. She glanced at Selene, and gave a small, affirming nod.
Selene knelt beside the old man. Her voice, when it came, was barely above a murmur. "He's weak. I can help him."
The Elder's eyes opened.
They were not the eyes of a dying man. They were deep and still and impossibly old—the eyes of someone who has watched a very great deal and chosen carefully what to let show.
"A Moon Weaver," he rasped. The words came slowly, with effort—or what sounded like effort. "After all this time. The light returns."
Selene reached out. The silver glow bloomed in her palms—liquid and soft, the same light that had calmed the beast in Bryce, the same light that had brought Elise back from the wrong side of breathing. It rose through her arms and spilled outward, wrapping around the Elder's frail frame in a gentle, encompassing warmth.
The runes on the floor flared bright blue in response.
The group held still.
The silver light poured into him. Around him. Through him.
And slid off.
Selene's brow tightened. She drew deeper—felt the familiar surge of it, the instinct that had never yet failed her—and pushed again. Her eyes shifted, the irises blooming into vivid, luminous green.
The same power that had healed.
That had restored.
That had reached into a man reduced to a monster and found the person still inside.
It had to work.
She gave it everything. The light flared so brilliantly it threw shadows backward across the pillars—
And then, quietly, guttered out.
Selene drew back. Her hands were trembling.
For the first time since she had woken with no memory and no name to put to her own face, her gift had simply failed. Not resisted—not been refused—just failed. She stared at her own palms as if they were someone else's.
"You're still weak," she said, voice caught somewhere between confusion and distress. "Why can't I—why isn't it—"
"Your magic is gentle," the Elder murmured.
He had not moved. His expression was perfectly, disturbingly calm.
"But wasted."
The words landed like a blade dropped from height.
Selene recoiled slightly—just a breath, just a fractional withdrawal. "Wasted?" she echoed.
Lyra moved. One step forward, closing the distance to a point where her body was positioned between Selene and the old man—not a dramatic gesture, just the automatic placement of someone who has decided that a thing will not go further.
Her voice came out low. "Careful."
The Elder's gaze moved to her, unhurried. "It is not an insult," he said, his voice barely carrying. "It is truth."
Selene looked down at her hands again.
Still glowing faintly. Still alive with the power that had become the only reliable thing about herself.
Just—useless here.
"It is all right, child," the Elder said, something in his tone shifting into something almost gentle. "Perhaps you cannot heal everything."
Shawn and Elise exchanged a glance across the terrace—the stunned, carefully neutral expression of people processing information that does not fit the framework they'd been using. They had both seen what Selene could do. All of them had witness what Selene could do.They had both built a certain understanding of her power around what they'd witnessed.
The Moon Weaver—healer of what could not be healed—standing before a dying man with her hands emptied.
The plateau was very quiet. The Grand Elder closed his eyes again.
And none of them had answers yet.