Page 119 of Aïdes the Unseen
This was all so confusing.
When she turned to face me, her expression had filled with a gentle sadness. “Now, you’re asking to remember not just who you were, but you’re becoming.”
She continued to guide me down the path to the next chamber. This one was smaller, round, and all stone. An olive tree stood in the center, its roots coiling like veins into the floor, The branches were full and filled with—tokens?
Locks of hair.
Tatter scraps of fabric.
A burned quill.
A broken ring.
A child’s ribbon, once green.
I reached for one, acting on pure impulse, but Melinoë caught my wrist. “Not yet. These are echoes. Lives you lived. Choices you made. Regrets you buried. You can’t hold them—not until you reclaim the name that bore them.”
Of course, I couldn’t. I almost muttered an imprecation, a frustration. But Melinoë didn’t deserve my irritations.
“How do I do that?”
She glanced down at the base of the tree. Beneath the roots, just barely visible, a singlenamehad been carved into the stone.
Not English or Greek, but Iknewit. Felt it behind my teeth and in the hollow of my ribs.
Kneeling slowly, I reached out. As my fingertips brushed the name, everythingshiftedagain. The roots stirred, the tokens swayed, and the lights dimmed, only to return assound. It was a soft hum, a lullaby almost and sung in a voice I had loved once. Maybe as a child or maybe as a mother.
Maybe both. My eyes stung.
“Don’t cry,” I whispered to myself, to the roots, to the name. The tears came anyway. Melinoë knelt beside me, placing her palm over mine and anchoring us both to the carved letters.
“Say it.” The command resonated.
I opened my mouth to protest that I didn’t know how, but it came out. The name tasted like rain on clay, harvest smoke, sunlight, and sea salt. It tasted like truth.
When I said it out loud, the tree answered, the tokens rustled, and the roots lifted enough to reveal what had been hidden beneath them.
A silver key. Small. Unadorned.
Even as I reached for it, my hand trembled. I expected it to burn when I closed my fingers around it, but it only pulsed, once, twice, and then stilled again.
“What does it open?”
Melinoë didn’t answer until I lifted my gaze to hers. She smiled truly for the first time. “The next door.”
I glanced back at Graven. His eyes were focused on me, wide, dark, and soft.
He didn’t ask me for what I saw, nor did he try to take the key. All he said was, “I’m still with you.”
“I know.” That truth was embedded so deeply within me, it seemed to be forming the new bedrock of who I was. I treasured it. I tucked the key into a pocket that formed in the sheer robe as though summoned by my need.
Maybe it had.
The dog wagged his tail. We were all ready to move again.
Chapter
Twenty-Three
