Page 122 of Aïdes the Unseen
The dog let out a low, near-whimpering sound and pressed his head gently against the back of her knee. He didn’t cross the threshold, but his eyes were wide and solemn, locked on what lay ahead.
I moved beside her. For a moment, one single, solitary moment, I saw what she saw. A wide chamber. Circular. Its walls pulsed with carved veins of glowing stone. The ancient sigilswere knotted patterns of grief and grace, with starscapes that shifted and breathed.
In the center of it all: a pool of still, black water.
But the water wasn’t empty. It held reflections that didn’t match the space around it. Lives flickering past the surface—Thessaloniki, Berlin, Kyoto, Paris. Not memories, exactly. Not visions. Butechoes. As though each incarnation of her had left behind a single drop of their voice here, preserved in a chamber that had waited for her to reclaim it.
The air was thick with the scent of myrrh and ash. Olive oil. Cold metal. Wildflowers pressed in old books.
Deeper still below it all was the sametruththat beckoned us on this journey to begin with. The kind that didn’t announce itself. The kind you had tochoose to see.
Irina’s fingers trembled in mine.
She stared into the pool, and her reflection rippled, fracturing for just a breath into a dozen different faces. A child. A queen. A singer. A fighter. A girl in a garden who had never been just a daughter.
One by one, the faces smoothed into her own.
Irina. Despoina. Both. All.
She opened her mouth.
Before she could speak, a sound rang through the space like a bell dropped into still water. Low. Pure. Final.
It came frombeneaththe water, fromwithinher and from whatever woke in the chamber with her arrival. It was all of them. I didn’t ask if she was ready; I didn’t need to. My fingers never left hers.
Together, we stepped forward.
The chamber pulsed, softly, almost imperceptibly, as though it were breathing her in and remembering.
Irina stood motionless at the edge of the dark water, the folds of her robe drifting slightly as the air moved. She looked carvedfrom resolve and doubt in equal measure. Her reflection in the pool shimmered, then fragmented again, as though even the surface had to adjust to the fact that she had arrived whole.
She wasn’t alone in herself anymore.
The roomfeltthat and somehow, it responded to me, too.
Not in the same way. Not in the way it responded to her name or her blood or the thread of divinity braided through her soul. But the chamber didn’t resist me. Itacknowledgedme. Dimly. Like a place long-forgotten nodding to a familiar shadow.
The air shifted near the columns, a hand brushed across a harp string, too deep to hear but present enough to feel in my bones. One of the sigils carved into the far wall flared briefly. Had it recognized us, too?
A second later, I felt a soft pressure against my calf.
The dog had circled back. Wordless, silent, he leaned into my leg with a practiced familiarity—as if he’d done this a thousand times in lives I couldn’t remember.
A reminder. A tether.
An invitation.
I lowered my hand to his head, fingers brushing his ears. He pushed into the touch for half a heartbeat, then turned again and padded toward her, toward the pool. But he stopped just before the edge. Waiting.
For her. For me. Forall of it.
Slowly, I wasn’t sure what I expected, resistance, maybe. A barrier. An ancient recoil from my presence in this place clearly meant for her. But there was none.
Instead, the floor beneath me gave the faintest glow, like footprints illuminated just behind each step.
Something—somewhere—began to hum. A resonance. The matching note of two strings across a great distance. My gaze flicked back to Irina. She had turned slightly and looked at me over her shoulder.
Eyes darker now, rimmed with something ancient, somethinghers. Behind all of it, still her softness. Still herwill. Still the woman who had pressed her hand to my chest and told me why she chose me.
