Eirlys surfaced on a Tuesday.
No attack. No dimensional manipulation. No Fae operatives sweeping the perimeter in coordinated formation. Just a message through a channel so old Vera almost missed it—a frequency that hadn't been used since before the prison—that said: I want to negotiate. I am alone. I am coming unarmed. I am asking you not to kill me before you hear what I offer.
The stronghold spent forty-eight hours debating whether it was a trap.
Hope said it wasn't. Not because she trusted Eirlys, but because she'd felt the dimensional merge from the inside while the imprisoned consciousness anchored it, and she'd felt every Fae signature in its vicinity, and Eirlys's signature had fractured during the merge. Something in the ritual's failure had damaged her in ways that didn't translate cleanly into any vocabulary any of them had—but if Hope had to approximate it, she'd say Eirlys was operating at a third of what she'd been. Maybe less.
