"Wait here," I said to her over my shoulder as we approached the door. If I remembered correctly, this one would deposit us into an alcove outside of the Star Garden's antichamber.
The hall outside the alcove was blissfully empty. Few beyond her own sons came to visit the Lost Star in her garden anymore. Though, for all its beauty and splendor, my brothers and I had always seen it more of a cage.
"All clear."
I opened the door long enough for Azralyth to slip through, then sealed it shut behind us. The stone settled back into place with a hushed whisper, the seam disappearing completely once settled back into place.
We passed through a grand archway framed by columns of green and blue marble shot through with veins of silver and gold, the colours of starlight. Patterns of stars and constellations had been carved across their surfaces. Beyond lay the Star Garden antechamber, a circular room with a domed ceiling that opened to the night sky.
The air not just smelt but felt different here. As if the miasma of this festering palace couldn't be felt here. I took a deep breath, feeling my body relax, if only just a fraction.
A single figure stood watch beside the iron-bound doors.
My brother.
He stood statue still, dressed in his black leathers. The twin blades he favoured hung down his back beneath a dark cloak that hung from his shoulders.
"Good evening, Tyreal," I said as we approached, keeping my voice low.
We all had our rotations watching over the Star Garden. The honor of guarding the Lost Star fell to us, the Val'Rhayne, alone. We trusted no one else with her safety. Tonight was Tyreal's night.
"Mikhael." His reply came with a slight incline of his head and his gaze shifted past me, and I watched the subtle change in his expression, the slight narrowing of his eyes, as he processed the scene before him.
His older brother, his commander in battle, walking towards him with measured steps. A thin, filthy prisoner in chains following close behind with a dagger, my own dagger no less, pointed at my back.
Tyreal's dark eyes flickered between us, reading the tableau with a warrior's practiced assessment. The Witchlight caught the angular planes of his face, casting shadows that made him look carved from stone. He said nothing, but one eyebrow lifted in silent question.
"It's not what it looks like," I reassured him.
"Alright," Tyreal's voice was dry as desert sand. "Care to elaborate?"
"She's just making sure I keep true to my promises."
"I see." The words came measured and even, in a way that conveyed he really didn't see at all, but would accept what he was being told without further interrogation. His gaze lingered on Azralyth for a heartbeat longer before returning to me. "Well, I take it you're here to see Mother?"
"See, Mikhael, this is what happens when you don't visit on a regular basis. Mother has to get creative." A new voice joined us in the chamber, warm with barely suppressed amusement. "Though this is imaginative, even for her."
I pivoted to see the youngest of us, Akyreal, making his way into the antechamber with that easy, prowling gait that made him seem more cat-like than warrior. His silver eyes took in the scene with undisguised delight. A grin spread across his youthful face, sharp and knowing.
"Hello, brother," he said with a wicked smile. "And who, pray tell, is your charming companion? And why does she look moments away from stabbing you?"
Probably because she was.
How Akyreal had managed thus far to avoid maturing physically past the equivalent of a freshly turned twenty human, when Tyreal and I looked just barely south of forty, was beyond me. Seven hundred years, and he still had the unlined face and reckless energy of youth. It made strangers underestimate him. A mistake most made only once.
"Tyreal, Akyreal," I said with carefully measured patience, "may I introduce Lady Azralyth Drathex. The Lady of Vraycia."
The effect was immediate and sobering.
Akyreal's grin faded, replaced by something more thoughtful. His eyes softened with what might have been sympathy.
We all knew what Vraycia had been. What they'd suffered. The excessive taxes. The conscriptions that had stripped the land of its sons. The pillaging of their natural resources. The God King's had much to answer for, and we, his personal guard, no longer involved ourselves in such provincial matters.
Tyreal's expression shifted to something almost rueful. "Your husband fought well, from what I heard. Held Khymarr for six months."
"Which was six months longer than anyone expected." Akyreal added, unhelpfully.
"Seven," she corrected quietly. "We held it for seven months."
Tyreal bowed his head in apology. "Forgive me. Seven months. That's... impressive, given what you were facing."
A muscle worked in her jaw, but she said nothing.
"Alas, my dear brothers, if I delay much longer, I suspect Lady Azralyth might actually make good on her promise. So, if it's all the same to you."
Tyreal studied me for another long moment, then nodded once. "Mother's by the pond. Something about a flower that only blooms under the full moon." He reached for the iron ring set into the heavy door, muscles flexing as he pulled it open.
Together, with her pointing a dagger at my back, we cross the threshold into the Sanctuary of the Lost Star
I felt Azralyth shift behind me, heard her breath catch as she staggered to a stop to take in the beauty.
The Star Garden sprawled before us, a massive inner courtyard that seemed to defy the very architecture that contained it. Above, instead of a ceiling, stretched an enormous cage of gilded iron, its bars rising like a great celestial cage into the open night sky. Through the lattice, stars blazed with impossible clarity, undimmed by torch or Witchlight, as if the garden existed in some space between earth and heaven.
But it was what grew beneath that captured her fascination and held it prisoner.
"By the Daeude," I heard her gasp and turned to watch a wonder overtook her completely.
The dagger lowered, forgotten, and she began to move forward as if drawn by an invisible force. Her steps were slow, halting, as if she feared that moving too quickly might shatter the vision before her.
"Azralyth," I said, but she didn't respond.
The garden sprawled before us in wild, impossible profusion. This was no manicured inner courtyard of stone paths and ordered beds. Here, the ground itself was alive. A carpet of soft moss and grass that gave gently beneath our feet, woven through with patches of dark, rich earth that released the scent of growing things into the humid air. There were no trails, no boundaries. Only wilderness tamed just enough to invite wandering.
And wander she did.
She drifted past massive tree ferns whose fronds unfurled like green lace overhead and blooming flowers. Past delicate purple flowering vines, the kind that grew wild in the hills of Epili, tangled with jasmine and honeysuckle.
I followed at a distance, watching as awe transformed her face. All the hardness, all the defiance and pain, it melted away, leaving behind something raw and vulnerable. She looked young suddenly, despite everything she'd endured. Lost in beauty the way a child might be lost seeing their first glimpse of a dragon.
The chains at her wrists and ankles clinked softly with each movement, a discordant note in the garden's symphony.
Water was everywhere. Small ponds nestled between roots and rocks, their surfaces mirror-still and reflecting the constellation-studded sky. Fountains trickled from carved stone, their gentle music mixing with the rustle of leaves and the occasional call of night birds that nested in the canopy above.
Then she stopped.
Before her was a pond larger than the others, its surface smooth as glass beneath the open night sky.
Floating on the pond's surface were flowers I had only seen in one place before; Evelyd's Grove, inside the Synder Forest. The cluster of blooms, each about the size of my hand, petals spiraling from deep indigo at the edges to luminous silver at their hearts. They drifted slowly across the water, catching starlight and throwing it back in colors that shimmered and shifted with each gentle movement.
The store went that when my mother was captured, she'd had one of these blooms in her hair. She managed to keep it alive throughout her captivity and, over a millennia later, it still lived on.
Though I can't remember the last time I saw them bloom.
Azralyth stood at the pond's edge, her breath shallow and quick. I watched, stunned as tears spilled from her eyes and traced silent paths down her dirt-stained cheeks.
"Beautiful, isn't it?"
The voice came from behind her. Soft. Musical. Carrying harmonics that seemed to resonate in the bones.
Azralyth went rigid, but she didn't turn. Couldn't, perhaps, still held captive by the blooming flower.
My mother emerged from the shadows beneath a shimmering tree, moving with the fluid grace of flowing water. She wore a gown of deep indigo that faded to silver at the edges, mimicking the luminous blooms in the pond. The seamless fabric clung to her slender form before pooling around her bare feet like liquid starlight. At her throat rested a delicate necklace of woven silver and gold, the intricate knotwork inscribed with words in a language older than empires—the language of the Fhemor, the first Witches.
Her hair, black as the void between stars, fell unbound down her back in waves that drank in the starlight above.
But it was what rose from her shoulders that stole the breath from any who saw her for the first time.
Wings.
Magnificent, impossible wings that spread wide as she approached, each dark feather perfectly formed and laced with silver and gold.
She stopped beside Azralyth, close enough that her wing tips nearly brushed the prisoner's shoulder, and gazed down at the blooming flower.
"In all the years that plant has made its home in my sanctuary," she said, her voice carrying that otherworldly quality that marked her as something more than mortal, "this is only the second time that particular flower has bloomed."
Azralyth finally turned, slowly, as if moving through deep water. Her eyes lifted to take in my mother's face, the high cheekbones and skin like polished alabaster with eyes the color of starlight itself.
The Lost Star smiled and reached out one slender hand. "Welcome to my sanctuary, Azralyth Drathex, Lady of Vraycia." Her starlit gaze dropped to the iron shackles at Azralyth's wrists. "Come. Let us remove those dreadful things."
Azralyth opened her mouth. Closed it. Her eyes darted between my mother's face and her wings, then to the flower, then back. Her breathing hitched, shallow and quick.
Her eyes rolled back.