THERE WAS NO PRECEDENT FOR THE DEATH OF AN IMMORTAL.
There was no knowing whether Aris would ever return. Whether he’d remember her if he did, or if he’d even be himself.
Every morning Blythe stood in her late husband’s study, waiting for the motionless tapestries to move. Waiting for color to spill onto the blank canvases, or for the threading of still needles. Because Aris could not truly be gone. He was too powerful. Too imposing of a soul to ever simply disappear.
And yet a day passed. Then three. A week later, and still the tapestries had not moved.
One week was but a glimmer of the time Aris had spent waiting and searching for her, and already Blythe could not fathom how he’d done it. In knowing him, her soul had filled in a way she’d not been able to fully appreciate until the palace was absent of his quips and laughter. She had fractured with his loss, and Blythe wasn’t convinced she would ever be whole again.
There was no life left in Wisteria Gardens. There was no magic nor color. The manor had truly been little more than bare stone walls falsified into something grand by Aris’s magic alone. He was like one of the sorcerers she’d always read about in fairy tales, seeping magic into every facet of the world around him. And now, without the grand facade, she once again saw every crack in the home’s design. Every split stone and unadorned wall that appeared half ready to crumble.
His room was gone. Every piece of art and each trinket that he’d
collected remained, but the rest of his bedroom was nothing but stone. A sterile museum for a man who had once burned so bright. So extravagant.
Blythe’s room, too, was nothing but an armoire and chair, somehow sparser than when she’d first found it. Even the splendor of her library had vanished, and she knew in her heart that it could only mean one thing—Aris was truly gone, and he was perhaps never coming back.
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For weeks after Aris had abandoned her, Blythe could not find it in herself to speak. It was as though she’d forgotten how, unwilling to relearn what it meant to live in a world that did not seep with magic. A world without Aris.
She took no company in those weeks, her windows barred by thorny briars as she relied solely on the meals left at her doorstep to sustain both her existence as well as that of the blasted fox. Day by day she tired of watching the creature paw at his bedroom door. His study. The parlor that Aris had spent so many of his nights in. Waiting for a man who would never answer.
“He’s not coming back,” she told her one day, nearly a month later, the words fire in her throat.
But the awful creature only inclined her head, blinking those amber eyes that so cruelly reminded Blythe of her husband. She spoke again, sharper this time.
“I said he’s not coming back!” Blythe screamed the words that had plagued her all this time. “He’s never going to open that door, don’t you understand? Not for as long as you’re alive, and maybe not ever. He is gone, you beast!” With each word, Blythe dissolved closer to the floor until was on her knees, sobbing.
“He is gone.”
She curled her fingers into the ground, heedless of how long she spent there. Minutes? Days? What did any of it matter when time kept moving no matter how much she begged it to stop? It wasn’t until she felt the brush of a tail against her skin that she stirred, flinching when a cold nose pressed against her hand.
Blythe stared down at the fox as the animal let out the softest whimper, her ears flattening against her skull. Slowly, she crawled onto Blythe’s lap, curling against Blythe’s stomach with a tired sigh.
Hands shaking, Blythe stroked her fingers down Beasty’s back, over and over again as she dampened the fox’s fur with her tears.
“It’s just you and me,” she whispered, settling herself on the floor with the beast. Her skin itched with vines that seeped from her as if to root the pair in that very spot forever. Blythe made no move to stop them as she cradled the fox close. “He’s really gone.”
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Elijah Hawthorne arrived at Wisteria’s doorstep every morning without fail. Blythe never once let him inside, her briar patch growing thicker around the palace each day. Still, that did not stop him from taking residency on her doorstep. Had she not accepted the food he left for her, Blythe had no doubt he’d have broken whatever window or door necessary to ensure she was alive. As it was, Elijah did not press. He, more than anyone, would understand what she was feeling. It was the same pain that had driven him to near madness only a year prior. One that had him drowning his sorrows in liquor and trying to dull the ache with lavish parties.
Blythe’s body turned to thorns that tried to bury her into the earth every time she shut her eyes. She could hardly see her own skin, too overwhelmed by her grief to find the will to draw back her powers. Each day she roused only when Elijah appeared, long enough to feed herself and Beasty before once again lying down near the door, listening to her father’s updates without ever responding. He told her that Grey’s was doing well again and that he was in conversation with a potential buyer, and provided updates on Thorn Grove and her nephew. Mostly, though, Elijah spoke of Blythe’s mother, telling stories of their courting and the earliest days of their marriage.
“I knew I would marry Lillian the moment I laid eyes on her,” he said, a smile in his voice.
Sometimes Blythe listened through her tears. Other times she’d let the
moss fill her ears and the growing bramble consume her as she drowned him out.
She never gave confirmation that she heard Elijah. Never thanked him for coming or allowed him inside even when the weather was at its foulest. But she never told him to go away, either, nor had she forbade the fox from sneaking out and spending an hour getting petted and cooed at.
At first the stories of her mother brought pain, but as Elijah recounted a time that she and Blythe had gotten into the most absurd argument over Blythe’s childhood penchant for making a mess of her dresses, only for Blythe to point out that the hem of Lillian’s dress, too, was covered with soil, Blythe found herself smiling at the memory. And with every day that passed she tried to listen closer. Tried to slip free from the sorrow that was rooting her to that spot.
And when Blythe finally was ready to open that door, Elijah was there. He took one look at his daughter—at the thorns protruding from her skin and the ivy that was growing from her hair—and wrapped her tight in his arms.
“He is why you’re still here with us, isn’t he?” he asked, weeping as he held her so tight that Blythe was not convinced he’d ever let go. “He is who I have to thank.”
There was no use hiding it anymore. Not when the evidence was there upon her skin and throughout all of Wisteria, its bare gray floors and walls torn apart by roots and hellebore pocking the floor every time she cried.
Elijah took it all in, but he did not flinch. He only held Blythe closer, ignoring the blood that her thorns drew and smoothing his hands over her arms until those thorns disappeared.
“You have every right to be angry,” he told her. “You have every right to be sad, or to be anything in between. But you’re going to be all right, Blythe.” He kissed the top of her head as she fell into his chest, burying her tears in his shirt as he smoothed a hand down her hair. “I know it doesn’t seem like it right now, but you’re going to be all right.”
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By the third month, most of the bramble had receded from the palace.
Though the walls remained bare, Elijah’s arrival had breathed new life into Wisteria. He’d taken to decorating, bringing paints and brushes so they could adorn the walls in color. At first Blythe had resisted, struck by the memory of her and Aris crafting her wonderscape whenever she so much as touched a brush. But after several days of watching her father tinker away at turning the kitchen walls into a lavender garden befitting the palace’s name, she’d tentatively joined in.
At first she started with the parlor, following her father’s lead in the kitchen and continuing the theme. Rather than stave off his memory, she let herself channel Aris’s likeness as she painted her mother’s garden. She let herself be extravagant and fantastical and all the things he would have loved as she lost hour after hour shading the light of the pond. Filling the buds of the roses and sneaking imaginary beasts between the stems. She carved out lily after lily until the walls were no longer bare but full of life. Full of memories that brought her more comfort than they did pain.
And then she moved on to the halls, painting them as she remembered from the first time she’d ever seen Wisteria. For weeks she worked like this, painting as her father cooked or laundered. As he set her up slowly but surely in a home that no longer solely ached with Aris’s loss, but had reminders of his life at every turn.
Painting was the only thing to ease her mind, for whenever she was not lost with a brush Blythe found herself sitting in front of a hearth that no longer burned at all hours, reliving the night of Aris’s death over and over again. She thought of all the ways she might have prevented it. Of everything she’d do differently.
If only she’d never gotten out of the carriage the day of their wedding. If only she’d never set foot in the garden or hadn’t let herself think of Percy and how she wished he was still alive. Blythe hated herself for awakening her powers, because if she never had, then Aris would still be here.
They could have built a life together. They could have been so happy.
Instead, she had only a paintbrush and a broken heart.
If only. If only. If only.
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Sylas came to check on Blythe often in those days, even when she wished that he wouldn’t.
She hadn’t spoken to him or Signa since the night it happened. How could she, when he was the one who had stolen Aris away from this world, and when Signa had so pointedly turned away from Blythe’s pleas?
For weeks Blythe held nothing but rage for them both, though she knew even then that it was misguided. Knew that she would have done the same if she’d been in Signa’s position, and that Aris would have been inconsolable if left to suffer such a loss again.
Blythe couldn’t fathom how he’d done it. He had waited centuries for her, trusting all the while that she would find him despite never seeing any signs. And here she was only months in, convinced that she was doomed to never see him again.
He had waited. He had believed. So what choice did she have but to do the same for him, no matter how impossible it felt?
When a chill seeped through the room and shadows stirred in the corners late one evening as her father slept soundly deeper within the palace, Blythe decided she’d had enough. This time when Sylas paid her a visit, she did not ignore him. This time, she stood and reached out her hand.
“Take me to see my cousin,” she said, and without hesitation, he did.
Foxglove was tidier than the last time Blythe had visited. Brighter, too, the springtime sky a cloudless blue. Even Signa looked more put together, no longer bearing heavy shadows beneath her eyes or stains on her dress as she hurried to her feet. She held her hands clasped to her chest, forcing herself not to fret at them.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” her cousin hurried to say, twisting to glance behind her. “Liam, could you fetch us some tea?”
Blythe shouldn’t have been surprised by the teapot that floated into view by a phantom hand that poured its contents into three porcelain cups. Nor should she have been so surprised when Sylas took hold of one, his shadows bending to form a chair beneath him.
“I didn’t know you could drink tea,” Blythe murmured, to which he shrugged as the shadows leached from his skin.
“Only when I’m parched. Shepherding you around all the time gets exhausting.”
Blythe smiled into her cup. For a moment, his teasing had reminded her of Aris. She was glad to see Sylas shed his incorporeal form, for Blythe didn’t have the space in her brain to fathom how a shadow could drink tea. How strange her life had become.
The silence stretched among the three of them, no one certain of what to say first.
“What became of Chaos?” It was Blythe who broke the silence, her lips warm from the tea’s steam. The question had been weighing on her for some time now, and it seemed the easiest place to start.
Signa’s fingers clenched tighter around the handle of her porcelain cup, and Sylas’s eyes slid over to her before he answered. “In the game of Chaos, we were the ones who lost. We may not have played exactly as she anticipated, but I imagine the outcome was… satisfactory. It’s likely she’s already become bored with us.”
Blythe set her teacup down so hard that it clattered against the saucer. “That’s it, then? She’s off to wreak more havoc and we’re just going to let her go like none of this ever happened?” Blythe turned to her cousin, her fingernails digging into the edge of the table. “You’re fine with this?”
“Of course I’m not fine.” Signa sighed. “I’ve finished every journal I could find and still have no idea who Solanine truly was to my mother. Not once does she mention my father in her journals until the morning of her wedding. There are two conflicting sides of me—one that wants to see Solanine dead for all the pain she’s caused and another that wants to sit her down and ask a thousand questions to make sense of this story.”
“As interested as she was in you, Signa, I doubt this will be the last that we see of Solanine.” Though Sylas leaned casually back in his seat, there was a hardness in his expression.
“So we just wait for her?” The plan was so ridiculous that Blythe scoffed. “We don’t pursue her? Try to stop her? We just… move on?”
“What’s the alternative?” he asked. “We make an enemy out of her? Let her pin her sights on Elijah or your friends? Chaos is ever moving. She craves reaction and sets her sights on the next project the moment things become too stagnant. It’s not fair, but one day, when my brother returns and you and Signa both have fully mastered your abilities, we will face her
again. But for now—for the sake of those we love who cannot protect themselves as we can—our safest option is to let her go.”
The truth of his words was more bitter than any poison Blythe had consumed. Yet as ill as she felt, she knew that Sylas’s plan was the best they had. At least for now.
“It seems ridiculous to ask how you’re faring, but I cannot help myself,” Signa began after another awkward silence that Blythe did not help fill. “Is there anything we can do to help you?”
Signa, of all people, should understand how impossible the question was to answer.
Blythe would never be well. A part of her was forever lost, and there was no mending the pain of Aris’s absence. She could only rebuild herself around it, which was why she had finally deemed it time to pay her cousin a visit.
“I am becoming more myself each day,” she decided finally. “Though it’s a slow process, considering I no longer know who that self is.”
Sylas was right; Blythe still did not understand the power coursing through her or the possibilities of what she could do. She’d tried to magic the front door and disappear elsewhere as Aris had. Tried to transport herself to another place entirely, as was possible for both brothers. But it seemed that was not a skill in Blythe’s repertoire.
She had, however, learned how simple it was to breathe life into the world. For any organic matter not involving a soul, she needed only to touch it and watch the world bloom around her. Souls, however, were trickier, and Blythe had a feeling she had a long while to go before she could form them as easily as Mila had, let alone at all.
Which meant that it was time for her to get started.
Aris was gone, but with every passing day Blythe understood that the world would carry on without him, and that she needed to try, as well.
If Blythe and Aris shared a tapestry, the threads would burn red with passion. And though she loved him—or perhaps because she loved him— Blythe would not allow her world to stall for another day longer. She needed to believe that, one day, he would come back to her. And when he did, she didn’t want him to know that she had spent her time dull and aching. She wanted infinite stories to share. And so she leaned forward, the knot of grief in her chest loosening just a little.
“I want to learn about my powers,” she told the others. “Will you both help me?”
“We would like nothing more.” Signa wasted no time reaching out, taking hold of one of Blythe’s hands and encompassing it between both of her own. Sylas flinched, surprised when Blythe reached to take his, too, and squeezed tight.
These were her people. Her eternal family forevermore, and for the first time since Aris’s death, Blythe smiled.
