They didn't speak as they walked.
Ravine moved quickly, the firelight still flickering behind her eyes. Arana followed without question, the mist of Delnira rising once more, blurring the trees into columns of shadow. The village had quieted—ritual ended, songs fading, the echoes retreating back into the stone. But the Bloom still pulsed against Ravine's skin, as though drawn forward. As though it remembered the house before she did.
When they reached it, Ravine didn't hesitate. She opened the door with shaking hands and stepped inside. The space welcomed her. Not gently. Not kindly.
But completely.
Dust stirred. Light shifted. The air tasted of ink, metal, and time.
She turned slowly, letting her eyes adjust to the half-familiar layout. Scrolls were unspooled across tables. Notes pinned to walls. Diagrams, sketches, maps, all layered like a mind unthreading its own maze. The mirror shard on the far wall pulsed faintly.
Arana stepped inside behind her.
"I need to see it," Ravine said. "All of it. I need you here. Please."
Arana nodded.
Ravine moved through the room in a slow, spiralling path, letting her fingers skim along paper edges, furniture grain, the backs of objects that once lived under other names.
A model of the gate.
A folded piece of music annotated in tight, slanted script.
A half-burned letter addressed to "Tovin."
The scent of dried herbs.
Ash-streaked tools lined on a shelf.
A rune stone with Lysa's sigil barely visible beneath time-stained soot.
Ravine stopped in front of a board covered in thread and pins, notes crossing one another like a constellation half-formed.
"Every one of them," she whispered. "I gathered them. Chose them. Built something out of each gift, each pain."
She picked up a pendant she hadn't noticed earlier. The metal still warm, as if waiting for her.
"I remember who I am."
She turned to Arana. "And I remember why I did it. Why we did it."
Arana said nothing. Her eyes were open, steady, waiting.
"I need time," Ravine whispered. "Just… to process."
Arana reached out and gently touched her shoulder. "Of course. I'll be at the inn. Come when you're ready."
And without ceremony, she left.
Ravine stood in the doorway long after the sound of Arana's footsteps disappeared.
Then she sank to the floor.
The sob broke from her chest like a crack in stone.
Then another.
And another.
She clutched her head, pressing her palms against her temples, the sound of breath not her own echoing in her ears. Not Ravine's. Not Maelon's. Something between. Something fractured.
"I don't want this," she cried into the floorboards. "I don't want to be them again. I don't want to carry it."
But the memories came anyway.
Faces. Voices. Screams. Hope. Plans. The night. The end.
The house pulsed around her with the rhythm of a remembered life.
And Ravine wept.
Until there was no sound left but breathing.
And memory.