Page 115 of Aïdes the Unseen
Chapter
Twenty-Two
IRINA
It didn’t feel like descending. It felt like remembering how to breathe. The chamber unfolded around me not in architecture, but in sensation. Warm air scented with crushed laurel and thyme, something like sun-warmed stones, and the faintest flicker of water in motion.
Yet, there was no stream. No walls. No ceiling. Just presence andlight. So much light. Soft, diffused, not from above or below, justhere.
I let go of the token, or at least what remained of it, and it dissolved in midair like it had simply been waiting to be unmade, job complete.
Graven followed in my wake with the dog padding behind us. Though the animal paused at the threshold and settled there to watch. This was my space and he knew it. The flash of insight was just there. A knowing. A truth.
Graven came closer, brushing his fingers against mine. I didn’t take them again, not this time. I wanted to. I loved the way he held my hand. At the moment, I needed to feel the air on myskin. I needed to be unmoored from my anchors and standing on my own feet. I needed to feel my own weight and to breathe…
That’s when I saw her.
Or rather,me.
Maybe she was the first version of what I had been or could have been. She stood at the far side of the chamber, barefoot on stone that glowed faintly beneath her feet. Her hair was long, black as pitch, her skin the color of olive bark and her face… It wasn't like looking in a mirror.
I was Irina now, and I had been so many others before.
This woman, this being, she was the origin. Clothed in a robe of woven green and pale ochre, the earth and the stalk, wrapped together. Around her neck was a simple cord without a pendant.
No crown. No symbols. Nothingclaimed.
I stared and she canted her head. She didn’t smile or offer any threat; she just waited.
“What is this?” I whispered and the words came out rough and a little rusty, like I’d forgotten how to speak for a moment. “Are you me?”
She blinked slowly. “No. You are me.”
I staggered back a half-step. Graven’s hand was there, pressed against the base of my spine. He didn’t grasp or try to control, just steadied me. Grounded me.
The version of me—her—us… Yes, us. The version of us stepped forward.
“They called me Melinoë once,” she said, and that name rang through me like a bell. Even my brain stuttered.
“I thought that was a myth.” That name was associated with different stories and chthonic myths. But how could she…
“Most things are, until we return to them.”
My throat tightened in both sadness and awe. “Why now?”
Melinoë knelt, pressing her hand to the center of the chamber’s floor. Where her fingers touched, a spiral of lightunfurled, smaller than the one above, tighter. A map. A seed. A lock.
“Because you remembered enough to speak the true syllable.” Her gaze lifted to mine. “Because you chose. And because he,” she continued, her gaze flicking to Graven, “let you.”
My chest and throat both ached. So much emotion. Too much. Graven said nothing, yet I felt the shift in him and heard the breath he didn’t release.
Melinoë looked back at me.
“Demeter took me first,” she said. “Not from anyone. Not from Hades. Not from a father. She took me frommyself. Gave me a name not mine. Raised me to be hers. Shaped me to need her. When I chose to love someone else and when I chose to leave, she called it betrayal.”
A pulse of something electric shimmered around the chamber.
Truth.
