Page 125 of Ashes to Ashes

My vertebrae stretch and realign with sounds like snapping steel cables, spine lengthening by inches as royal genetics assert themselves. My bones elongate and reform, muscles tearing and rebuilding with wet sounds that make Davis flinch. My skull reshapes itself with pressure that makes me bite through my own tongue, jaw structure shifting to accommodate pointed teeth designed for tearing.

This isn’t just revealing what was hidden—this is becoming something else entirely.

The face I’ve seen in mirrors for twenty-eight years melts away like wax under flame. Features I’ve never seen but that feel more real than any reflection emerge from dissolving glamour—higher cheekbones, larger eyes, skin that glows with its own internal light. My ears shift to elegant points that frame a face that’s mine but never was. My height increases until my clothestear at the seams, fabric unable to accommodate the royal frame being revealed.

“Impossible,” Lady Amarantha breathes, her assault faltering as she stares at what’s being revealed. Light wavers around her form as shock disrupts magical control.

But the worst part isn’t the physical transformation. It’s the realization that everything I thought I knew about myself was a lie. The woman I’ve been, the face I’ve worn, the body I’ve lived in—all of it false.

Who am I if nothing I remember about myself is real?

Existential terror carves through my reforming bones worse than any physical pain. I’m not just changing—I’m dying. The person I was is being erased, replaced by something ancient and terrible and true.

And it’s killing me.

Power floods through my system faster than my reconstructed body can process. Magic tears through neural pathways never designed to channel forces this intense, burning new channels through my brain like lightning carving paths through trees. My heart stutters, stops, restarts with a rhythm that doesn’t feel human—too slow, too strong, too deliberate.

I’m drowning in my own transformation, suffocating on power that demands more than flesh and blood can give.

“ENOUGH.”

The word detonates through the chamber with authority that makes stone walls tremble and my reforming bones vibrate in harmony. Dust rains from the ceiling as ancient magic recognizes something even older and more terrible.

The Morrigan stands in the doorway—not the one from the Wild Court tribunal, but the real thing. Ancient beyond measure, power radiating from her form like winter wind and burning stars. Reality doesn’t just bend around her presence—it kneels.

Stone walls develop hairline cracks that spread outward from her position. The temperature drops twenty degrees in an instant, frost forming on surfaces that were blazing hot seconds before. Light itself dims in her presence, as if illumination fears to approach too closely.

The three-court assault stops instantly, magical energies recoiling from her presence like startled animals fleeing a forest fire.

Relief crashes through me so intense it scrapes my throat raw with released screams. The magical pressure releases like a dam bursting, leaving me gasping on the chamber floor in a body that feels foreign and familiar all at once.

Blood pools beneath me—not just from injuries, but from the fundamental reshaping of everything I am. My new hands, longer and more graceful than they should be, shake as I try to push myself upright.

“You dare,” she continues, voice carrying the weight of eons and the fury of every storm that has ever raged, “attempt forced glamour removal on Wild Court royalty without informing the one who cast the protection?”

The revelation hits like iron spikes through my chest, driving the last breath from my reconstructed lungs. She cast the glamour. She’s been protecting me my entire life.

“You?” I breathe, though speaking makes my rebuilt throat burn like I’ve been screaming for hours.

“Twenty-five years ago, I wove concealment into an infant’s very essence,” she says with fierce pride that makes the chamber walls hum in recognition. “Not mere glamour, but survival magic. Protection spells woven into your very DNA to hide royal nature from those who would hunt it to extinction.”

Her ancient eyes hold depths of time I can’t fathom, starlight and shadow and things that existed before language had words for them. “But you were not born from flesh and blood, child.You were born from the earth itself—the final gift of parents who loved their people more than their own lives.”

Metaphor,my rational mind insists desperately, even as my transformed body screams evidence to the contrary.Ancient Fae poetry. Symbolic connection to nature.

But Lord Malachar’s shadows recoil as if burned, his voice carrying shocked recognition. “The earth-born. We thought it was legend.”

“Legend?” Lady Amarantha’s composure cracks completely, light flickering around her like a dying star. “The soil-sung child? That’s not possible?—”

“Possible enough that three courts felt the earth sing when she manifested,” the Morrigan interrupts with grim satisfaction. “Did you think royal power awakening would go unnoticed? The very ground beneath your feet announced her heritage.”

No.My military training rebels against accepting the impossible, even as evidence mounts around me.There has to be a logical explanation. Scientific. Rational.

She kneels beside me, her voice dropping to something like reverence that makes flowers bloom in the stone cracks around us. “When the last Wild Court royals fell, they gave their bodies to the ancient groves, trusting the earth to birth their heir when the time was right. Millennia passed. I waited. Watched. And then the soil sang with new life, and there you were—perfect, powerful, and far too precious for this broken world.”

“Impossible,” I manage, though my voice cracks around the word. “People aren’t born from dirt. That’s not how biology works.”

“Fae biology,” the Wild Court representative says quietly, her bark-textured face holding something like awe, “follows older laws than human science. We felt the earth’s song twenty-five years ago. Felt the birth-magic that hasn’t been seen since the first courts divided.”

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