One small hand stretched toward him, fingers grasping at empty air.
"I'll find you," Althander choked out, still struggling against the shifters holding him. "I swear on every god that exists, I'll find a way to reach you. I'll cross dimensions, break every law, burn every bridge. You're my daughter. You're my—"
The mage stepped through the portal. The infant's outstretched hand passed through the barrier between worlds. And then she was gone, disappeared into the magically dead world of Earth, where she would be found in a hospital bassinet with no record of admission, no parents listed, nothing but a handwritten note pinned to her blanket that said simply: Sophia.
The portal collapsed. The connection severed. And across dimensions, Althander felt the pack bond that should have linked him to his daughter—faint, barely formed, but undeniably there—stretch impossibly thin, then fade to nothing.
He screamed. Shifted. Went wild. It took all six remaining Council members to contain him, to bind him with magical restraints, to drag him away from the spot where his daughter had vanished.
No one was watching Jasmine anymore. Every eye was fixed on Althander's breakdown, every hand occupied with restraining the grieving father as he thrashed and howled. The Council members shouted orders to each other, their attention consumed by the immediate threat of a wolf gone feral with loss.
In the silence behind them, something impossible began to happen. Blood that had seeped into the scorched earth started to move—not spreading outward as it should, but reversing. Crimson threads pulled themselves back up from the soil, defying gravity, defying death itself, flowing backward along paths they'd already traveled. The droplets reunited, crawled across blackened grass, and disappeared back into the wounds they'd come from. The island's earth seemed to exhale, releasing what it had absorbed, giving back what had been taken. Color returned to Jasmine's skin in slow waves, starting at her fingertips—pale gray warming to cream, spreading up her arms, across her chest, into her face. Her lips shifted from blue to pink. And then, so subtle it might have been imagination, her chest rose. Fell. Rose again. A breath so shallow it barely disturbed the air.
Her eyes remained closed. Her body utterly still. To any observer, she would have appeared exactly as she had moments before—dead, cooling, gone. But around her, the island knew. A few withered plants near her body suddenly straightened, their leaves unfurling. The ancient oak's blackened bark showed a hint of green beneath the char. Life recognized life, even when death still wore its mask. The miracle happened in absolute silence, witnessed only by the dying storm and the earth that had refused to let her go.
Behind them all, forgotten in the chaos of Althander's breakdown, Jasmine lay motionless beneath the dying storm, appearing as dead as they all believed her to be. The ancient oak that had sheltered them for four years was split and blackened. The garden they'd cultivated was scorched. Four years of building a life together, destroyed in a single night.
And on Earth, in a hospital in a city called London, a nurse discovered an infant in a bassinet that shouldn't contain one. A baby with hazel brown eyes flecked with gold, with power locked behind dimensional barriers that would hold for nearly two decades—though in Galthera, thirty years would pass before those barriers began to crack.
The note pinned to her blanket would be logged as evidence and filed away. The infant would be processed through the foster system, given to temporary parents who would marvel at how quiet she was, how rarely she cried, how her eyes seemed to look through people rather than at them.
She would grow up human, as the Council intended. Would never know magic or shifters or the truth of her parentage. Would be ordinary in every way that mattered, her abilities locked so deep she couldn't even sense them.
Until she turned nineteen, when Earth's suppression would finally break down, when the dimensional barriers would thin, when everything that had been sealed away would come flooding back in a cascade of power and memory and ancient bloodlines demanding recognition.
But that was still decades away.
For now, she was just Sophia. An orphan. Alone.
And somewhere in a pocket dimension rapidly collapsing without the anchor of the woman who'd created it, Althander was screaming his daughter's name into the void, making promises to gods who didn't listen, vowing revenge against a Council that had only done what they thought necessary.
The island seemingly began to die with Jasmine. it seemed that without her presence, without the energy that had fed it for four years, the pocket dimension started to destabilize. Plants withered. The ocean began to recede. The sky took on a gray, washed-out quality as reality reasserted itself.