Page 7 of The Shattered Rite
Eliryn’s laugh came out cracked and empty. “Then beg harder. There’s still time.”
“Some truths,” her mother murmured, “stay fixed.”
“I didn’t want to believe it,” Eliryn whispered. “Not until the Flame chose me. And then I knew. I felt it in my bones, in my blood. I just didn’t want it to be real because… because if it was—”
Her voice splintered.
Her mother cupped her cheek with blood-slick fingers. “Then I would die. Yes. I know, my firefly. I’ve known for years.”
The world narrowed to heat and her mother’s pulse under her palm—slowing, slipping. Eliryn tried to speak but nothing came.
“You have her spirit,” her mother said, voice paper-thin. “Your grandmother’s. Stubborn as stormlight. Gentle as smoke.”
“I don’t want her spirit,” Eliryn choked. “I want you.”
“There’s more waiting for you,” her mother breathed. “He waits for you. The bond. You’ll know it when it comes. You’ll feel it like a second heartbeat.”
“He—?” Eliryn’s brow furrowed, but her mother’s eyes were already drifting, glassing over, seeing something beyond the rafters and firelight.
“Trust the bond when it comes,” she murmured. “And never mistake kindness… for love.”
Her chest stilled. Her fingers slipped from Eliryn’s cheek.
Silence.
Eliryn pressed her ear to her mother’s ribs, straining for even the faintest whisper of breath.
Nothing.
“No,” she whispered, shaking her. “No, no, no—”
The hearth spat a spark. Somewhere outside, the wind rattled the shutters. But in here, the world had gone still.
And Eliryn knew—whatever came next, she would never be the same.
The world didn’t end with her mother’s last breath. But it did pause—like the moment between thunder and its echo, stretched so thin it hummed in her bones.
Eliryn knelt in that hush for what felt like hours, her forehead pressed to her mother’s shoulder, her palms sticky with blood cooling too fast. The armor lay beside them, dim and waiting, a silent witness to the final chapter of a woman who should have worn it in her prime.
Not a warrior in the eyes of the village. But in her daughter’s eyes?
A legend.
When at last Eliryn rose, the pendant at her throat burned with quiet heat, the warmth of a presence that had not left with her mother’s breath. Not comfort. But…awareness. As if something now stirred fully awake, no longer dormant.
She almost tore it off. Almost. But instead, she clenched her fist around it until her palm stung.
She moved through the house in silence, each step guided by memory and the press of grief. She cleaned her mother’s wounds with gentle hands, as she had done for countless others.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, over and over. She wasn't sure what she was apologizing for.
Eliryn dressed her in a linen shift, simple but clean. She chose the cloak her grandmother once wore—the one her mother kept folded at the back of the trunk, always too sacred for use, too heavy with stories.
She braided her mother’s graying hair with careful fingers, weaving in the sacred threads:
Gold, for strength handed down.
Red, for sacrifice given freely.
