An echo, winding back, reverberating from a time when someone else wore Arick’s face to say the same thing.
An awful, huffing laugh burst from behind Red’s teeth. “So it was just stalling. Eammon and I splitting the Wilderwood between us, keeping it together—there was always going to be just one of us left in the end. The Wilderwood needed two on the surface to hold it, but when the Shadowlands collapsed, it only needed one soul to lock its magic up.” Her fingers curled against her sternum, like she could still feel the roots between her bones. “It was always going to be one of us.”
“Not one of you,” Arick said gently. “It was always going to be you, Red. You were the soul the Wilderwood needed, the one that could mirror Neve. It was always going to be the two of you.”
Red’s breath sounded bladed and harsh in her throat. Neve turned slightly away, closing her eyes.
Souls as anchors, scales balanced. One holding the other in place.
This is bigger than you and your sister. She’d heard it over and over again. A warning that something large and cosmic would come to rest on the two of them, a First and a Second Daughter who loved each other so fiercely that their souls could balance worlds.
“Your souls have to stay here,” Arick said quietly. “Now that the Shadowlands and the Old Ones and the Kings are gone, the purpose this magic was given has run its course. Your souls have to hold it in stasis, so it doesn’t leak out into the world again. So that there’s no chance of the cycle repeating.”
Almost absently, Neve’s hand pressed against her chest. No heartbeat, still, but that seemed like merely a symptom of something larger, something more essential that was missing from her now-dead body.
Slowly, she looked up.
Those three apples, hanging from the Heart Tree’s otherwise barren branches. The black one shone down at her, skin puckered by the points of thorns pressing out from the inside, the single black leaf extruding from the stem glossy in the strange light.
“Souls,” she said simply. “That’s what they are. Not apples. Souls, Red’s and mine.” Her eyes went from the black apple—hers—to the golden one she assumed was Red’s. Then the simple crimson one, slightly smaller.
She looked from the souls hanging on the tree to Arick. “And yours.”
A single nod. “And mine.”
Red’s brow furrowed, turning to look up at the apple-souls suspended in the Tree. “Why are you here? You should… you deserve to rest, Arick. This can’t be what your ending was supposed to be.”
“Maybe not, before.” He waved a hand. “This place didn’t really exist until the two of you got here. I was…” His lips pursed, searching for words. “I was elsewhere, out in the in-between. But now my soul is here, with the two of yours. I got just as tangled up in this as you did.” There was no anger in it, a simple stating of fact. “So were the other Wolves, the other Second Daughters. But they truly died, their lives drained away, so their souls have moved on. I was different. I was…” He stopped, faltering as he tried to frame what had happened to him—becoming Solmir’s shadow, a bargain that left him only partially alive. “I don’t think I was ever dead. Not truly. Just… gone.”
Neve’s not-beating heart contracted behind her ribs. “I’m so sorry,” she murmured, choked with guilt at what had been done to Arick and what she felt for the man who’d done it. “Arick, I am so sorry.”
His green eyes flickered to hers, understanding in them—he knew, of course he knew. “It hasn’t been so bad. It’s nice to understand everything.” That slight smile again, the one made sweeter for the sadness that tugged at its edge. “Well, everything as far as magic and forests and shadowy underworlds go. Not everything everything.”
It was the first time he’d really sounded like himself, and it made her want to laugh and cry in equal measure.
The three of them stood in silence, clad in white and heartbeat-less. Neve looked up at their souls again.
Wasn’t it supposed to feel… bad, being soulless? Wasn’t a soul the culmination of all you are? But Neve still felt like herself. She still loved her sister, loved Arick. Loved Solmir, despite herself—the first time she’d thought the word, and it being here, in a liminal space that was neither good nor bad, felt right.
She’d been prepared to die. She’d known when she chose to take the Kings into herself, to become the vessel of the Shadowlands, that the only way this could end was in her ending. Divinity wasn’t something she could carry, not something she wanted to carry.
But though she could make that choice for herself, she couldn’t make it for Red.
Neve felt at peace. She felt like she could wander these fields and lose herself and be just fine. But Red… the tears leaking from her eyes hadn’t stopped, and she kept tracing that scar in her palm. Neve knew she was thinking about her Wolf.
It wasn’t fair for Red to be dead because of a choice Neve had made. She was through making decisions for her sister.
She turned to Arick. “Can someone live without a soul?”
His eyes widened, the first bit of true surprise he’d shown in all this bizarre time together. “I don’t think anyone has ever tried.”
That had never stopped her before.
Neve gestured up to the souls on the limb, black and red and gold. “Those are what holds us here, right? Our souls. So if we…”
Movement before she could talk herself out of it, reaching up to pluck the dark orb of her soul from the branch. It weighed heavy in her hand, warm as if picked fresh from an orchard, buzzing faintly against her palm.
Neve held up the apple, half expecting Arick to try to take it back from her. “If I destroy this,” she said, using the placeholder word because she couldn’t quite make herself say the words destroy my soul, “everything in it is destroyed, too. Instead of being just… just held here, locked away, it’s gone.” She swallowed. “And I’ll be gone, too. Not here. Nowhere.”
It shouldn’t have sounded as comforting as it did. She was so tired.
“Neve.” Red stepped up, hand tight on Neve’s forearm. “No.”
“If my soul is gone,” Neve said, “then it takes all the Shadowlands magic with it. And that’s why yours is here, right? To keep mine balanced? So once my soul is gone, you can go back.” She didn’t know how she knew it was true, but she did, deeply—the knowledge running like water downhill, death whispering its secrets to her like it had to Arick. “You can live, Red.”
“Without you?” Her sister shook her head. “No. I won’t. I did all this to save you, I won’t live without you now.”