Until they landed on me. The change was immediate.
A warm grin broke across his face. “Father,” he said, stepping forward. “What a surprise. I thought you left—” His words faltered the moment Daphne stepped out from behind me.
The world tilted. He looked confused, his eyes locked on her face, and all the air seemed to leave the chamber. “Thalia?” he asked, in a rough and bewildered voice, like he’d just seen a ghost.
Daphne stiffened beside me.
Under different circumstances, this moment would have been funny, but the way it was, it was anything but. Myccael's expression shifted, from shock to disbelief, then to something tangled and uncertain. I couldn’t blame him. The resemblance between mother and daughter was uncanny. Especially with the rotations stripped from Daphne, with the radiance of her returned life softening her face, it was almost impossible not to see Thalia in her. They could have been twins.
“It’s not Thalia,” I said quietly. “It’s her mother.”
Silence.
Myccael’s gaze flicked to me, then back to Daphne. “That’s not possible.”
“I know,” Daphne said. Her voice was calm, but I could feel the tremor beneath it. “But here I am.”
He took a slow step forward. “You—You died.”
“I did,” she said softly. “And now I’ve returned. I don’t know why. Not fully. Only that I need to speak with you. And that it cannot wait.”
Myccael looked between us, war battling with wonder in his eyes. “Grandyr…” he whispered. “It had to be him."
“Zyn,” I answered.
He shook his head once, sharply, as if trying to clear it. “Snyg. All this time. You were… What are you now?” He looked at her, not as a soldier, not even as a king, but as a boy who had once grieved for the only mother he had ever known.
“I don’t know,” Daphne admitted. “But I’m here. And I think the train… the rail… has something to do with it.”
He blinked, then turned toward the archway at the end of the chamber. Beyond it, the Zuten apartment waited, full of secrets that had waited longer than any of us had lived.
“She said the magrail must be stopped,” I added, stepping forward.
“She said the magrail must be stopped,” Mallack told Myccael, his voice low and steady behind me.
But I wasn’t listening anymore. Not really. The words floated somewhere above my head, muffled by the roar inside my own heart. Because Myccael was staring at me. Still staring. Like the world had just cracked in two, and I had stepped out of the break. He took a single, uncertain step forward. Then another. And suddenly, without warning, he closed the space between us and folded me into a crushing embrace.
“Mother,” he breathed.
My body froze. His arms were warm. Strong. Familiar in the way a place might feel familiar in a dream, close but unreachable. He smelled like sun-warmed metal and something faintly sweet, like the air after a storm. His scales were golden, glimmering over his deep aqua skin like light caught in molten stone. He was tall and broad and strikingly handsome, far more so than I’d expected, more warrior than son, really. But I felt… nothing.
Not fear.
Not comfort.
Not even recognition.
Just silence.
I lifted my arms slowly, uncertain what to do with them. I was supposed to return the embrace. Wasn’t I? This was my child. This was the boy I thought I had carried.
And yet…
There was no warmth swelling in my chest. No rush of memories. No maternal flood of joy or grief or anything at all. There was just the terrible, aching void where those things should have been. I pressed my hands lightly against his back, more for balance than affection. He noticed and leaned back, staring questioningly at me. There was pain edged into his features. So much pain. Different from the pain I had seen on Mallack's face, but no less deep.
"You still can't embrace me, can you?"
"That's enough," Mallack interrupted. "She doesn't remember. She doesn't remember anything, not even me."
