Aisling Blackwood's Arc

Chapter 7 of 10

Aisling could not practice guiding a ghost without a ghost to guide. She told Zamir this on the shrine steps, frustrated. "Willowbrook is quiet. No restless dead. How do I learn to send one home if none will come?" Melora had traveled up the mountain with her that morning, resting now against the stone rail. The old woman snorted. "You have been staring at the answer for weeks, girl. Look at the boy beside you." Aisling turned to Zamir. His ears went flat. He had waited on this mountain for hundreds of years, forgotten, calling for someone to hear him. Aisling had always thought of him as a deity. Melora made her see the other truth. He was bound here. He was a spirit the mountain had kept. "You hold a piece of my soul," Aisling said slowly. "The bond keeps you here." "It does." Zamir did not soften the words. "I have waited centuries for someone to hear me. When you came, I wanted you to stay. But I would not trap you. So I let you choose." He looked out over the trees to the valley below, where Nightbird Lake shone flat and bright. "You could take back your fragment. Then the bond breaks." Aisling's chest went tight. "What happens if I take it back?" "I disappear." His voice stayed calm. "The bond is what keeps me here. Without it, I return to what I was before. A spirit of the mountain. Nothing that speaks. Nothing that remembers you." Here was the restless spirit she had wanted to guide. He stood right in front of her. To free him, to send him home to peace, she would have to unmake the man she loved. Aisling thought of the snowstorm. Of the child he saved. Of every lesson on these steps. "No," she said. The word came out hard. "I will not send you into nothing. That is not peace. That is erasing you." Melora watched her closely. "Then you have learned the first real lesson," the old woman said. "Guiding a spirit home is not about getting rid of it. It is about what the spirit still needs." Between them, the air darkened. A small shadow took shape on the steps, a girl with ruby eyes and a cracked smile. Nyx. She was not shivering now. She reached one dark hand toward Zamir, then toward Aisling, linking them. Aisling understood. "She is not only my grief," she breathed. "She is the piece of me you have carried. She stands between us both." Zamir stared at the shadow child. "I have never seen her outside a dream." "Then the task is here," Aisling said. "Not sending you away. Helping her. Whatever Nyx still needs, we finish it together." She took Zamir's hand. The bond would stay. But now it held a waiting child, and that child had finally stepped into the waking world.