Chapter 13: Heritage

Lisera's form radiated magic, terrifying and beautiful, as she faced the huddled group. The ridge felt smaller, the world narrowed beneath Lisera's shadow, and even the wind seemed to hesitate.

Nix stood apart, trembling. His wings had retracted moments ago with a sickening sensation, flesh knitting closed over the wounds at his shoulder blades, though the ache remained raw and insistent. Magic guttered within him, leaving him small and slight once more. The hollow in his chest throbbed with each shallow breath, the drain of magic leaving him dizzy and spent.

Oren still held Tavik upright, his brother's weight sagging against him. Tavik's breathing had steadied somewhat, but his face remained grey, drawn with pain that shouldn't have been his to carry. His hand still pressed against his chest, and his eyes, though open now, held a haunted quality that sent unease crawling through Nix's bones.

He watched them with growing confusion. Tavik had been fine before the transformation. Strong. Capable. The warrior amongst them. But now he looked as drained as Nix felt, hollowed out by something Nix didn't understand. His ears drooped with exhaustion and worry that sharpened into something close to fear.

"Can you stand?" Oren's voice was low, meant only for Tavik.

Tavik nodded, though when Oren released him, he swayed slightly before finding his balance. His gaze immediately found Nix, and something unreadable passed across his features, a flicker of understanding or resignation that excluded the others.

Bran noticed. His healer's eyes moved between Tavik and Nix, cataloguing the pallor they shared, the tremor in both their hands, the way their breathing fell into the same laboured rhythm. "Tavik?" His voice carried worry and confusion in equal measure.

"What happened?" asked Bran, peering up at Tavik.

"Not now." Tavik's response was clipped, fragments rather than sentences. "Later."

Nix's confusion deepened, knotting in his chest alongside the ever-present ache of the wound. What had happened to Tavik? His ears swivelled towards his friend, trying to catch some clue, some explanation, but Tavik wouldn't meet his eyes now, his gaze sliding away like water from stone.

Oren moved closer to Nix, positioning himself within arm's reach of the boy whilst keeping Tavik and Bran nearby. His attention divided now, flickering between Nix and Tavik with growing alarm, as though watching for cracks in a dam he couldn't shore up.

"Stay close," Oren murmured, though whether he meant for all of them or specifically for Tavik and Nix, none could say.

Lisera's eyes moved over the group with predatory precision, reading the configurations of their bodies, the way they clustered together in patterns of protection and worry. Her gaze lingered on Tavik, then Nix, her head tilting in that distinctly inhuman way, birdlike and precise. She'd sensed something, some thread connecting them that her ancient mind catalogued without understanding.

Instead of speaking to it, she drew a slow breath and diminished her size. Her wings folded close against her back, tucking tight, the light about her dimming to a gentler glow. The ridge, so charged moments before, eased under her adjustment, the air losing some of its electric weight.

She moved with the fluid precision of a hunting cat, each step soundless despite her presence. When she was merely slightly taller than Oren, rather than towering like a monument carved from storm and starlight, she stopped. Still larger than them, still unmistakably other, but less overwhelming. Less likely to send prey fleeing on instinct alone.

Nix drew a slow, measured breath, then another. The meditation technique Lisera herself had taught him years ago, when she'd been silent and captive, her hands shaping lessons in the candlelight. He focused inward, breathing into the pain, letting it wash through him rather than fighting it. The wound in his chest screamed, but he made no sound. His runes flickered weakly, pulsing in time with his heartbeat as he fought to stay conscious, to stay present.

His eyes kept drifting to Tavik, trying to understand what invisible wound his friend carried.

Lisera tilted her head, studying them with the curiosity of a creature observing an unfamiliar species. She opened her mouth, attempting speech, but what emerged was a strangled, growling sound, more beast than language. Her throat worked, tongue shaping syllables that refused to form properly, consonants mangled by fangs and a palate never meant for human words. Frustration flickered across her features.

She tried again, the guttural sounds rougher this time, as though forcing her mouth to obey against its nature. "Words..." The single word was mangled, thick with the wrong shape of consonants. She growled, low and rumbling, the sound vibrating through stone and bone alike, then abandoned the attempt altogether.

Instead, she reached towards them with one hand, palm outward, claws catching the dim stormy light. Then her mental voice unfurled within their minds. Not spoken but felt, threading through consciousness like silk through water. Velvet and unyielding, intimate and unearthly, her thoughts pressed against theirs with the weight of inevitability.

"Words are clumsy things," she said, the voice in their heads clear and melodic where her actual voice had been broken, "and my tongue, more beast than woman, would shape them poorly."

The sensation was deeply unsettling. Oren's jaw clenched, his hand tightening where it hovered near Nix. Bran gasped, staggering slightly, his healer's sensitivity making the mental touch feel louder, more invasive, like fingers pressing too hard against fresh bruises.

Tavik flinched, his whole body going rigid. The mental intrusion crashed against senses already overwhelmed, and he pressed both hands to his temples as if he could physically push it all away. A strangled sound escaped him, raw and involuntary.

Nix's ears flattened in alarm. Tavik looked like he was in agony, but why? The mental voice was uncomfortable, yes, invasive and strange, but not painful. Not like this. "Tavik?" His voice came out small, worried, a thread of sound barely audible above the wind.

Nix accepted Lisera's presence in his mind. He'd felt her there before, in those early years when she'd had no voice, when communication had been gestures and silent knowing. This was clearer but not entirely unfamiliar, an old intimacy made strange by transformation.

Lisera's mental voice continued, patient as stone, ancient as the ridge beneath their feet. "I speak this way so you may understand. Forgive the trespass into your thoughts. It is necessity, not cruelty."

Her gaze flickered to each boy, lingering longest on Nix, then moving to Tavik with calculating interest, as though reading a text written in a language only, she could parse. When she spoke again, her mental voice held something that might have been gentleness in a creature capable of such emotion. "Family."

The silence fractured as Nix, voice barely a whisper, breathed: "Aurelian."

Oren went very still, the way a hunted thing goes still when the predator's shadow falls across its path. A shadow crossed his eyes, stormlight glancing off the tension in his jaw, his whole frame going rigid with recognition and something darker.

Nix felt fear threading through him, cold and certain. He'd known since Oren’s collapse in the ravine what Aurelian's name meant, had pieced it together in the dark whilst his friends sat brooding around the campfire. Lisera's brother. Which meant his friends carried Lightweaver blood too. The knowledge had sat heavy in his chest all through the night, another secret he didn't know how to share.

Lisera's lips curled, revealing the glint of fangs. Not amusement, but acknowledgment. Her head tilted in that precise, inhuman way. "Aurelian is my twin," her thoughts rang clear, each word measured and weighted with certainty, "the other half of my heart, not a ghost to mourn, but a brother lost to the wilds of Awakening."

The world seemed to tilt beneath their feet.

Tavik's weight shifted, feet finding combat stance without conscious thought, warrior's instinct seeking solid ground even as the earth moved beneath him. But the movement was slower than usual, hampered by something that drained him from within. His knuckles went white on his knife hilt, seeking something tangible to hold whilst everything else unravelled.

Oren's face drained of colour. For a long moment he said nothing, his lips working soundlessly as though testing words before releasing them. When he finally spoke, his voice held the careful control of someone keeping themselves from shattering. "I was there when he died." Each word deliberate, shaped with effort. "Two years. Two years since our father died."

Nix felt the waves of grief and shock rolling off his friends through his steady connection of the threads binding him to them. His own confusion twisted with their pain, knotting together into something heavy and sharp that settled in his chest alongside the wound's constant ache. He'd suspected but hearing it confirmed made it real in a way that night-time thoughts had not.

"Our father is dead." Tavik's voice came flat, stripped bare, each word a stone thrown against an impossible tide. But the words cost him visible effort, his stance widening, bracing, though his legs trembled with more than grief. "We mourned him. We've lived without him for two years."

Lisera's mental voice came again, and this time something rippled through it that a more emotionally sophisticated creature might have recognized as sympathy. To her, it was simply observation of their distress. "Not dead," she corrected, her tone holding the certainty of one who states universal law, "but somewhere else. Aurelian walks the path of his Second Becoming. The world waits for his return."

"Second Becoming?" Bran's voice cracked, thin and wavering. "What does that mean?"

Oren's control fractured. "Where?" The single word tore from his throat, ragged and raw. He drew breath, tried again. "Where is he then? Do you know what we've..." He couldn't finish. Two years of trying to raise his younger brothers whilst still not finished growing up, two years of decisions and responsibility and fear that he'd lead his brothers wrong. All of it broke open, threatening to spill. "We had nothing."

"Lost our home." Tavik's words came in fragments, the way they did when emotion overwhelmed his usual economy of speech. His breathing had gone rough, and his free hand pressed harder against his chest, against a place that shouldn't hurt but did. "Working wherever we could. Just to survive."

Nix's ears flattened further, alarm and confusion warring in his chest. Something was very wrong with Tavik, and the wrongness seemed to be growing with every passing moment.

Bran's breathing had gone shallow and rapid, his face bloodless. "Where is he?" The question emerged small, almost childlike, stripped of his healer's usual composure. "Why didn't he come back?" His voice broke completely. "I needed a father. I was only just thirteen."

Lisera watched their anguish with that same tilted, observing curiosity. She did not comfort, did not reach for them, did not offer the reassurance they desperately sought. Simply observed, as one might observe an injured animal's behaviour, cataloguing their responses with detached precision.

"I do not know where Aurelian walks," she responded, matter of fact. "The paths of Becoming are solitary. He will return when the transformation is complete."

She paused, her luminous eyes studying each face in turn, lingering longest on Oren's devastated expression, on Bran's tears, on Tavik's rigid stance. "You are confused by my words. This is natural. You do not yet understand what you are."

Her hand extended towards the three brothers, fingers splayed, claws catching the dim light like shards of ice. "Nephews. Each of you. I claim you as kin beneath this fractious sky."

The words fell like a blessing and a burden entwined.

Bran went utterly still. His breathing stopped, then started again too fast, too shallow, the way breath comes after a blow to the chest. His healer's training kicked in despite his shock, piecing together implications like symptoms of a disease he'd never seen. "That makes Nix..." He looked at Nix, eyes wide with dawning understanding. "You're our cousin."

"Simi is your cousin too," whispered Nix miserably, watching his cousins slowly grasp this new reality with varying levels of distress.

Oren's hand moved unconsciously towards Nix, as if to offer reassurance, but he was still processing, still trying to understand the weight of what they'd learned, the way it reshaped everything they thought they knew about themselves.

"You three are Tiorian Lightweavers," Lisera confirmed, her mental voice holding no apology for upending their entire understanding of themselves. "As am I. As is Nix, though he is also Caelvarae. You three carry the Lightweaver blood, though diluted by your mother's elvish line."

"No." Tavik's denial was immediate, visceral, his body rejecting the information as surely as it might reject poison. "Father was human. Raised us as human. We look human, except for our ears, of course." His stance shifted, weight redistributing as though preparing to flee or fight, though what enemy he'd face, he couldn't name. "We're half-elf, Nix told us that, but not... not Lightweaver."

Nix shifted uncomfortably, his ears drooping further. He'd told them about their elvish blood, yes, but he hadn't told them the rest. Hadn't known how to voice the suspicion that had grown in the ravines, the terrible certainty that Aurelian was Lisera's brother, that his friends carried the same Lightweaver heritage he did.

Bran's legs gave out. Not dramatically, not all at once, but in stages, the way a body surrenders when shock becomes too much to process standing. His knees folded, then buckled, and he sank to the wet stone, hands bracing against the ground, head bowed. His whole body shook, tremors running through him like aftershocks. "We have family," he breathed, the words barely audible, speaking to the stone rather than to any of them. "Real family. Not just each other." He looked up at Lisera with something between wonder and desperate need. "We're not alone."

Oren knelt next to Bran, placed a hand on his shoulder, and helped his brother sit upright, leaning against each other. His own hands trembled, but he held steady, always steadying for them even when breaking himself. "Two years we thought he was dead. Two years of grief." His voice cracked on the last word, splintering like ice under too much weight. "He let us think he was dead."

Lisera's ears flicked, registering his tone but not fully comprehending the depth of emotion behind it, the way humans carried grief like stones in their pockets, weighing them down with memories. "He did not choose the timing of his Becoming," she said, clinical and precise. "It is not a conscious decision. The transformation takes hold when it will."

Nix watched the exchange with growing unease, his own memories of neglect and abandonment resonating with their pain in harmonics he couldn't quite voice. He understood, perhaps better than Lisera ever could, what it meant to be left behind by a parent. His hand moved unconsciously to his chest, to the hollow wound that throbbed with each heartbeat.

Across from him, Tavik gasped softly, a sharp intake of breath that spoke of sudden pain. His own hand flew to his chest in the exact same spot, pressing where Nix's wound ached and burned. His face went grey, colour draining like water from cracked stone.

Nix's eyes widened, fixing on the synchronized movement. His hand stilled on the wound, and he stared at Tavik with dawning horror. That couldn't be coincidence. Not again. Not the third time he'd seen it. Something was happening, something he didn't understand, and it was hurting Tavik. Hurting his friend.

Bran's healer's eyes caught the synchronized movement, sharp despite his tears. His gaze snapped between them, understanding beginning to dawn alongside his grief, puzzle pieces falling into place with sickening clarity. "Tavik," he said carefully looking up at his brother, his voice shaking but steady enough to be heard, "you're... you're mirroring him. Every time Nix touches his wound, you..."

"Leave it." Tavik's voice was rough, warning, stripped of its usual fragments and reduced to raw command. "Not now."

But Nix had heard. His ears swivelled forward, focusing entirely on Bran's words, on the terrible implication threading through them. "Mirroring?" His voice came out small, confused, a child's voice asking questions he wasn't sure he wanted answered. "What do you mean?"

Tavik met Nix's eyes, and there was no accusation there, only exhaustion and confusion and something that might have been resignation. "Connected somehow. To you. Feel what you feel."

The words hit Nix like a physical blow, stealing the breath from his lungs. His ears flattened completely against his skull, and his eyes went wide with horror that painted itself across his pale features. "What? Since when?"

"The cliffs. When you saved Bran and Oren." Tavik's words came with effort, each one dragged from some deep place. "I had my hand on your shoulder. When your wings... when they tore through. Something happened. Been feeling it since then."

Nix's legs gave out. He sank to his knees on the wet stone, and the movement sent a spike of pain through his chest, sharp and immediate. Across from him, Tavik's breath caught, his hand pressing harder against the same spot, his face contorting with shared agony.

Every time he'd been in pain, every time the wound had drained him, every throb of pain, this recent transformation, every moment of agony... Tavik had felt it. The knowledge crashed over Nix like a wave of ice water, drowning him in implications. "No." The word came out broken, splintering at the edges. "I didn't know. I didn't..." His hands pressed against the ground, trying to steady himself, trying to think past the guilt that threatened to overwhelm him. "I'm hurting you."

Lisera's head tilted sharply, her eyes fixing on the connection between them with curiosity, the way a cat watches a mouse moving beneath floorboards. She circled slightly, observing the way their breathing synchronized despite the distance between them, the way pain flickered between them like lightning seeking ground. Her mental voice came soft, almost to herself, a wondering that held no explanation. "Twin warriors."

The words hung in the air, baffling and ominous, shaped by a language and understanding none of them possessed.

"What does that mean?" Oren asked sharply, his voice cutting through the charged silence, but Lisera simply continued to observe, offering no explanation, no context, as though the answer should be obvious to anyone with eyes to see.

Nix barely heard any of it. His breathing had quickened, distress rising in his chest like flood water, threatening to drown the careful connection to the threads he'd been maintaining. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I don't know how to stop it."

Oren moved from Bran to Nix, crouching down beside the boy. His hand found Nix's shoulder, firm and reassuring, an anchor in the storm. "Nix. Look at me." He waited until those hazel-green eyes lifted, guilt-stricken and wild. "This isn't your doing. You didn't create it. You didn't even know about it."

"But I'm hurting him," Nix whispered, his voice breaking like thin ice underfoot. "Right now. Just by being hurt myself."

Tavik moved closer despite his exhaustion, closing the distance between them. He knelt beside Nix, and his hand found Nix's arm with surprising gentleness. When he spoke, his voice was steady despite everything, fragments coalescing into something solid. "Listen to me. What you feel, I feel. You understand?"

Nix nodded miserably, ears drooping so low they nearly touched his shoulders.

"That means when you blame yourself, when you sink into guilt, I feel that too." Tavik's grip tightened, demanding attention, demanding understanding. "So, you blaming yourself? That hurts me worse than any wound. You want to help me? Then stop blaming yourself for something you have no control over."

The words cut through Nix's spiralling thoughts like a knife through silk, clean and sharp and undeniable. His ears lifted slightly, focusing on Tavik with sudden, fierce attention. If his guilt hurt Tavik, then giving in to it was selfish. Harmful. He drew a slow breath, forcing the guilt down, boxing it away with the discipline Lisera had taught him. Not for himself. For Tavik. Because Tavik needed him to be steady, to be calm, to not add emotional weight to the physical burden they already shared.

"Better," Tavik said quietly, feeling the shift through the tether that connected them, the way the storm eased into something more manageable. "Keep breathing. Keep steady."

Lisera turned her attention fully to Nix, and he tensed beneath her regard. "Child," her voice softened in their minds, losing some of its clinical edge, "your magic gnaws at flesh and soul. It should not have come before your twenty-second year."

"The premature awakening has damaged you," Lisera continued, and for the first time something close to concern coloured her mental voice, though it remained more observation than empathy. "You will need help to survive it. Help I cannot give, for I do not understand why you woke so early."

The brothers went very still, fear cutting through their grief like a blade through fabric.

Lisera straightened, turning her attention to her nephews, her wings rustling with a sound like distant thunder. "You are half-elves, woven of two worlds. In you thrums the old Tiorian Lightweaver blood. Your magic will stir first as any elf's magic does, a quiet budding, a whisper of earth and sky." She paused, letting the words settle like snow on frozen ground. "But when your twenty-second year breathes its first dawn, the Lightweaver in you will awaken fully. Then you shall truly understand what it is to shape light and shadow."

Oren's breath caught. "Twenty-second year. That's four years for me."

"Five for me." Tavik's voice had gone hollow, stripped of its usual strength, the warrior's confidence eroded by too many revelations.

"Seven for me," Bran whispered, still sitting on his heals as though it might steady him against the world's tilting.

Lisera's mental voice wove on, clinical and precise. "Yours is not the path of iron and blood, as it is for others of your line. Mixed lineage is a gift, a gentling of the harsher Lightweaver traits. Perhaps you are not meant to be killers, as so many in Tiorian families are born to be." Her gaze sharpened, focusing on each of them in turn. "You should ask your mother, when you find her. She will know why she chose to mix her blood with Aurelian's. There is always purpose in such unions."

"Our mother?" Tavik's voice cut through, sharp with an anger he was struggling to contain as he left Nix’s side and rose painfully to his feet. His hands clenched into fists at his sides, the only outlet for emotions too large to name. "How can we ask her anything? Our mother died when Bran was born." Each word came harder, dragged from some deep place. "I don't even have any memories of her."

Lisera's head tilted again, that same curious, animal gesture. Her eyes glimmered with something unreadable. "Your mother did not die."

The silence that followed was absolute. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.

"What?" The word fell from three mouths simultaneously, raw and disbelieving, shaped by shock too vast to contain.

"She did not die," Lisera repeated, her mental voice holding the same matter-of-fact certainty as before. "She lives still. I can sense her thread, though I cannot see where it leads."

Bran made a sound, small and broken, somewhere between a sob and a laugh, the kind of sound that comes when the body doesn't know how else to process information too large for words. "I have a mother," he whispered, staring at his hands as though they belonged to someone else. "I have a mother. She's alive." He looked up at Oren, still crouched beside him, eyes swimming with tears that hadn't yet fallen, balance and grief warring in his features. "She left me. Left us."

Oren pulled him close, holding him as Bran's body began to shake in earnest, tremors running through him like small earthquakes. His own eyes were bright with unshed tears, fury and confusion warring across his face.

Tavik stood frozen, his warrior's composure shattered entirely. His weight shifted from foot to foot, body unable to find rest, unable to settle into any stance that felt right when the ground kept moving beneath him. "Why?" His voice was barely a whisper, all the strength gone from it, reduced to naked bewilderment. "Why would she leave us? Where has she been whilst we..." He couldn't finish. The question was too vast, the betrayal too deep to voice completely.

"I do not know," Lisera said simply, offering no comfort, no speculation, no softening of the brutal truth. "These are questions for her, when you find her."

Oren's voice came low and dangerous, grief hardening into something sharper, more useful than despair. "Fifteen years. Bran's entire life, she's been out there somewhere. Alive." His jaw worked, muscles jumping beneath skin. "And she never..." He stopped himself, but the fury remained, simmering beneath the surface like magma waiting for cracks to exploit. "What kind of mother does that?"

Lisera's ears swivelled, catching the distress in his tone, the rising anger, but her response held no emotional weight, no acknowledgment that the question might deserve an answer beyond simple fact. "The truth is often difficult to accept. You will adjust."

Oren stood and helped Bran to his feet, supporting his weight as his brother found his balance. When Oren spoke again, his voice was hard as stone, shaped into something like purpose, like a blade being honed for use. "We'll find her. We'll find them both. And they'll answer for leaving us."

Lisera's ears flicked forward, a gesture that might have been approval in a creature capable of such distinctions. "You are stronger than you know. All of you." Her gaze rested on Nix once more. "Especially you, child. Do not let your wound define you. You are not like me or your brother. I think you are more like your father."

Then, suddenly, unexpectedly Lisera went very still.

Her head snapped to the side, ears swivelling towards something in the distance, some sound or scent beyond their elvish perception. Her nostrils flared, scenting the air with quick, shallow breaths. Every line of her body went rigid, predatory instincts flaring to life with electric immediacy.

The boys noticed instantly. Oren's hand moved to his sword, body shifting into protective stance. Bran pressed closer to his brothers, seeking the shelter of familiar bodies.

Nix's ears flattened completely against his skull. Through his connection to all threads, through his exhausted senses, he felt it too. Something huge. Something dangerous. Something approaching with intent. He pushed himself to his feet, swaying, the world tilting around him in dizzying arcs.

Beside him, Tavik struggled to stay standing, his hand on his knife, but his movements were sluggish, compromised by the double burden of his own exhaustion and the drain bleeding through from Nix.

Lisera's face contorted, lips pulling back from her fangs in a snarl that was pure animal rage. A low growl rumbled from her chest, building into something that made the stones beneath their feet vibrate with primal warning.

Without explanation, she launched herself skyward. Her wings snapped open with a crack like thunder splitting stone, and she shot into the air, arrowing back the way Simi had fled. Within seconds, she was gone, swallowed by the storm-grey sky.

The boys stood in shocked silence, staring at the empty air where she'd been.