Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Mayhaps, at one time vampires had been in great need of dying. 

But that was a long time ago—a thousand years, give or take. Plenty of time for magic to right itself, for Nature to patch over the cracks, for the world to shrug and move on. Nature was funny like that—it had the attention span of a tectonic plate: immense, unhurried, and entirely indifferent to whatever was built upon it.

And just like those layers of bedrock and sediment, Nature had a very long memory and had seen everything imaginable.

Perhaps vampires had once been a mistake to be corrected. A stain to be scrubbed out. But time passed, as it always does, and eventually even that indignity seemed to be forgotten. Now they mostly kept to themselves—investing in the stock market, arguing over city ordinances, brooding in penthouses, and occasionally snatching up an unlucky tourist who wouldn't be missed by anyone important.

Nature, vast and ancient, hardly noticed them anymore.

Meanwhile, the living had gotten much better at staying that way. Infants began to outlive their cradles more often than not, storms lost their dramatic flair, and plagues retired to the margins of medieval manuscripts covered in dust and gold filigree, right between Ye Olde Cures for Goat Madness and Ten Home Uses for Leeches. Humanity, in its own way, adapted just as ruthlessly as those creatures of moonlight and bone. It patched the holes in its walls and learned to name its shadows. The monsters outside grew quieter and more selective while the monsters inside grew civilized.

And in turn, each new advancement and invention became like a type of spell—proof that mankind, through sheer will, cleverness, and tenacity could best a natural world that wanted them swept away in a flood or sneezed out of existence. Electricity lit their homes like fire never could. Antibiotics quieted the old ghosts of fever and infection. Satellites mapped the sky, and skyscrapers reached into it. And with each step forward, humanity declared itself victorious, as if progress were a battle to be won rather than a tide to be temporarily held at bay. But Nature did not care. It was not impressed. Nature was not even watching.

Nature did not care about struggle. It did not care about sentiment or human suffering. Nature did not care about the cost of things—it cared only for homeostasis. In all things there was balance to be found. Equilibrium is the currency of all natural things.

And so when Amara and Silas broke the truest of covenants, the oldest of rules—thou shalt not make thyself deathless—Nature did not smite them with divine fury. It did not send any warning. It did not even send a strongly worded letter. It just...adjusted. It created doppelgängers. Not out of vengeance, mind you, but bookkeeping. If you cheat the system, the system doesn't get angry—it just adds a few more zeroes and waits for someone to scream.

Amara and Silas overbalanced the ledger, and Nature—like any bored, long-suffering accountant—fixed the numbers. Not because it cared. If it had cared, they would have paid for their theft immediately. If it had felt betrayed, they'd have been unmade so thoroughly that nothing, not even the memory of them, would have remained. But Nature is not vengeful. Nature is not even mildly annoyed. It simply is. And when something disturbs the balance, it finds the most efficient way to put things back where they belong.

Brunhilda Voss knew this truth—and understood it quite well. Magic was not a blessing nor was it a curse. It was simply a law like gravity or thermodynamics. It was entirely disinterested in anyone's opinion.

This was not just theoretical knowledge for Brunhilda. It was woven into the fabric of her—handed down through the centuries by her foremothers. She was a nineteenth-generation witch, at least as far as she knew. Witchhood wasn't exactly something one could trace on paper—not when ancestors were more likely to leave hexes and unsigned grimoires than heirlooms and detailed genealogy. But Brunhilda liked to think that if magic ran in the blood, then surely it had to trickle down from somewhere. Probably from the First Witch—whoever she was. That would technically make Brunhilda something closer to an eight-thousandth generation witch, but she only knew of the nineteen.

The earliest of her noted ancestors was also named Brunhilda. There was a certain poetic symmetry to that, she thought. Her line had started with a Brunhilda and, depending on how things played out, it might very well end with one.

Brunhilda the Elder had been a seer—an unfortunate trait that kept popping up every few generations like bad teeth or hemophilia. Five hundred years ago, she had run afoul of the British monarchy, shouting inconvenient truths in a world torn asunder by the Protestant Reformation. King Henry VIII (or more likely—a loyal lackey who was too busy ordering "traitors" to the scaffolding to worry about what might happen to him when he was also no longer new and shiny) had taken one look at her overinflated head filled with prophecy and strange sight, and promptly relieved her of it. Brunhilda the First had joined the other fifty-seven thousand people that the king had executed—joining the ranks of Anne Boleyn and Cromwell as inconvenient traitors to the New Order that were removed from the board.

She was not the last woman to see. Brunhilda's tenth great-grandmother, Agnes Wells, foresaw she would die surrounded by water and consequently refused to bathe for most of her adult life. She slipped on an ice patch and smashed her head into a frozen birdbath. Her fifth-cousin once-removed, Lillian Moore, predicted she'd die choking and swore off solid food. She inhaled a moth mid-sentence during a séance and suffocated before she could explain what the moth had to say. Lillian's niece, Margaret Shoals, had a vision of dying surrounded by fire and moved into a lighthouse in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It was struck by lightning. Twice.

Then there was Edna Blackwood—Brunhilda's great-aunt—who foretold she'd be struck by the same lightning that had taken her great-great-grandmother and spent forty years avoiding the sky like she owed it money. She refused to leave the house on cloudy days, carried a copper rod indoors "just in case," and eventually fled to a storm cellar to wait out what turned out to be a mild summer drizzle. There, alone and quite frightened by the dark and the visions that plagued her therein, she plugged in a faulty lamp to feel a little less alone. The lightning found her anyway—through the wiring.

Brunhilda learned two things from this: prophecies were usually right, and witches in her family had a knack for dying exactly as they said they would—just never quite how they expected.

Brunhilda was a bit of a seer herself—but not in the wild-eyed, bent-over-teacups and fearing her own shadow kind of way. She never even saw herself, not really. Except once. Agnes, Lillian, Margaret, Edna, and the first Brunhilda had all been organic, home-grown seers—purebred mystics, the kind who dreamed in riddles and died in punchlines. Brunhilda was something else entirely. Something a little more...synthetic.

She rarely saw what would happen—more often it curved backward. Brunhilda most often saw things that had already come and gone, time peeled back in brittle layers. Rooms flickered between past, present, and future. The walls and dust motes whispered secrets to her. She would step out from a hallway and find herself somewhere else—observing a twin room a century prior, when the wallpaper was unfaded, the chandeliers lit with gas, and the air hung heavy with perfume and pipe smoke.

She did not see the past so much as enter it, as if her presence knocked some ancient door ajar. The ghosts never acknowledged her—they had no need. They were too busy reliving their final conversations, their last, half-finished gestures. A man arguing over a telegram he would never send. A woman in mourning black whispering secrets into the fireplace. Children playing with a wooden ball that rolled to Brunhilda's feet and vanished when she tried to pick it up.

She once walked through a crumbling chapel in Belgium and saw it as it had been on the eve of the First World War—filled with young men in uniform praying, not for victory, but for home. She watched a nurse lay out bodies on a battlefield in 1813, wiping blood from their eyes so they could be seen clearly in death. In Prague, she stepped into an abandoned tenement and saw a family sitting down for dinner, the father's chair already empty, the silence at the table louder than any scream.

Sometimes the furniture no longer matched the blueprints. Sometimes the windows looked out onto gardens that hadn't existed in decades. More than once, she had to remind herself which version of a room she was physically standing in, lest she trip over a chair that had long since been removed.

The first time she saw the future instead of the past was at the age of ten, when she calmly told her teacher that the school guinea pig would escape its enclosure, fall into the janitor's mop bucket, and be replaced with a suspiciously similar looking one by lunch. It all happened precisely as described. Her second prophecy involved a neighbor's wedding dress catching fire during the bouquet toss. Her third predicted that her cousin would break both wrists trying to test a flying machine made of cardboard and painter's tape. Brunhilda thought perhaps that was all her magic would amount to: mildly alarming party tricks.

And then she turned fifteen and a vision so terrible tore her from her slumber screaming and sobbing with the horror of it.

In her dream, Brunhilda saw the world as it would be—an end to all human things. A true ending, as rare as those were.

It started with two tombs.

Amara's moved and changed—once it was an altar, another time it was a stone box, a coffin, a shipping container. Sometimes it was nothing but a narrow space with no light, no air, and too much dust in her lungs. She did not breathe. She had forgotten how.

Silas's, by contrast, never moved. His tomb was carved into the belly of a cave on an island off Nova Scotia, a place the sea never quite forgot. His sleep was the kind that hummed, the kind that waited. The wind screamed like it was mourning something, and the waves kept breaking like they were counting down.

And Brunhilda, poor girl, carried them both. Amara behind her eyes, brushing her hair in mirrors that had long since stopped reflecting the living. Silas at the edge of everything, watching the world collapse with the calm detachment of someone who had already seen it end.

The dreams were like that: rarely loud, but always terrible.

In one, Bonnie Bennett's eyes were too wide, too bright, brimming with fury and inevitability. In another, Jeremy Gilbert was red—his hands, his hair, his face. And suddenly the sky split open above them, flashing with the bright, screeching souls of the unburied dead. They fell like confetti.

Then the Other Side, where all things strange and supernatural lingered, was sundered when Silas finally found the girl with big brown eyes and sobs that sounded closer to screams. As the in-between faded to some unknowable place, taking with it those who the witches may have been able to drag back into existence, the girl who Brunhilda would later learn to be Amara scratched at the man she had promised to love forever, begging him to let her go.

Silas was not moved, but Bonnie Bennett was—and that was all that truly mattered, Brunhilda supposed. In the end, Amara faded from Silas's side, and with her went the world.

Brunhilda saw the fall of the Mikaelsons. Finn was first and then Kol. Rebekah was next and then Klaus—and finally Elijah. Davina Claire tried to save what was already doomed, hacking away at the sirelines like a gardener cutting away blight. But fruit cut from the vine rots just as surely as fruit poisoned at the root. And so, what should have been a single swift end became a slow, aching unraveling. The restless dead did not simply fall. They lingered, for days and then weeks—their faces turning grey and then purple, their skin falling away in strips. And then they stayed dead.

Vampires had embedded themselves in the ecosystem over a thousand years—like ticks they were persistent and parasitic. They fed, they lived, occasionally they left a bit of themselves behind, and Nature had adjusted as it always did. Systems rewired. Populations stabilized. Predation accounted for. Then, suddenly, they were gone.

It began with fear. People watched their lovers, neighbors, coworkers—hundreds of thousands of them and then millions—turn cold and then combust into ash. Dust in the wind. Bone on the breeze. Nature had spent centuries adjusting for their presence, and now they were ripped away, root to tip. Left behind was the bare minimum of the supernatural—witches, werewolves, and mortals who remembered too much. The ones once compelled by vampire magic were free now, and with that freedom came memory.

And so the fear grew. And with fear came paranoia. Bombs flew, wars raged. Populations surged. Food waned. Water sources turned dry. Forests withered as Nature clawed back what it could. But the living? The living adapted like cockroaches—clever, stubborn, and infuriatingly difficult to eliminate. What Nature could not artfully prune, it massacred.

Plagues returned. Famines swept through nations. Nature deployed every card it had left. Infant mortality grew steadily while the elderly clung to life, afraid to leave it behind. The young grew thinner, poorer, hungrier. Rivers became rumors. And still—still—people kept making babies.

Nature tried to respond. The soil turned to dust. Crops curled in on themselves. The farmers plowed, and when that failed, they stripped bark from trees. When that also failed, they boiled leather. When that failed, the crueler ones made pies of meat and gristle. The kinder ones made mud pies. Children sat beneath empty skies and waited for the sun to bake their meals.

Brunhilda felt cold when she dreamed of that part. Starvation was children waiting for the sun with dirt in their teeth so they might have something to nibble at, she thought. Thirst was plastic wrap stretched over bowls, catching condensation and licked clean like glass candy.

She tried to stop it. Of course she did. Every woman in her family had tried, in their own doomed way, but prophecy is not a warning—it's a record of something that simply has not happened yet, and three years was not enough time to unmake this ending.

Still she tried. Brunhilda tried to find Davina Claire before the others did, to steer her left instead of right. She tried to find The Five but learned their names too late. She left ominous messages on forums she knew Klaus frequented. She even tried to crash Esther Mikaelson's ball. She salted graves, warded tombs, bribed oracles, and cast curses on anyone she thought may contribute to The End.

Still, everything played out the way it was always meant to. A girl named Elena was turned, a boy named Jeremy died, and a witch named Bonnie cracked the seal holding back the end of days open like an egg. The world turned, and Brunhilda watched.

And ten years after the apocalypse, she wandered.

She walked through the overgrowth of what had once been cities, their steel bones buried beneath layers of moss and mildew, vines curled through shattered windows like veins crisscrossed through flesh. She scoured ruins, pried open rusted vaults, and cracked the wards of long-dead witches. She was, as far as she could tell, one of the last humans still moving about—upright, conscious, and curious—as Nature began its slow reclamation.

And yet, despite extinction breathing down her neck, Brunhilda endured.

She collected thousands of codices, scrolls, and tattered half-sheets of forgotten incantations. She read spells penned in blood by Kol Mikaelson during the centuries that he too wandered, and others scraped together by desperate covens until The End also came for them. Most were useless. Some were insane. A few were actively malicious. But buried in the ash heap of magical history, at the age of twenty-seven, Brunhilda found him.

Silas sat in his tomb, atop his alter, staring down at his hands—exactly where she'd dreamed that he'd be. A single strand of light peeked through the ceiling cracks, painting a streak of orange over his skin, scattered into his hair. He didn't turn when she approached. Didn't speak, didn't smile.

When she asked if he regretted it, he laughed.

"I don't know you," he said, breathless and he finally looked at her—that streak of light glinting over his left eye.

Brunhilda shrugged. "I dreamed of you," she said by way of an explanation—and the story poured from her lips. All of it. The deaths, the unraveling, the mistakes she had made. How she'd missed Shane by weeks. How she'd seen Jeremy Gilbert in Denver and hesitated—how that hesitation had cost everyone something they couldn't get back. She emptied herself out like an offering.

And as the light died and the dark reclaimed them, Silas filled the resulting silence. Told her their ending. Told her his. He whispered secrets about things that could not be undone but could be remade—if she was willing.

Silas rifled through her mind like a library shelf, brushing aside the clutter until he found what he was looking for: a fragment of a ritual from the Gemini Coven—The Merge. Not a perfect match. They weren't twins. Not even kin.

But Silas still offered it to her. Not out of generosity. Not for his regret. But because Amara had hallowed him out and the world was so very cold without her.

They stood hand in hand under the light of the full moon—her eyes reflecting the stars and his the dark. The ritual was a bastardization—they had no coven to sanction this, no witches to witness them. Just two monsters trying something ancient and foolish. Their blood mingled, their magic pulled taut like a thread—and when it snapped, Brunhilda was the one left standing. Stronger. Stranger. Full of him.

Silas was gone, and yet not. She carried his memories now: ancient, bitter, burning things that clawed at the corners of her mind. His cruelty. His grief. His hope, buried like a splinter in the heart of her. And his last request—that she lock him away this time, that she save Amara. From herself. From him.

And when he left her, she gathered what was left of the covens. And when near two hundred witches—scattered and scared—answered her call, Brunhilda lied. Said she'd found the basis of the spell in some ruined chapel. Said it was hers. Let Silas's wish die with the rest of the world.

And still, the spell worked.

They were the last of the witches, and they knew it. Together, they opened their veins and asked Nature not to break, but to bend. Just a little. Just enough so that not all versions of this story would end as this one had.

And bend it did.

The first ring of witches—twenty-eight in total—bled into the bones of the earth, tapping into ley lines that had gone quiet a decade ago. The second and third rings hovered in ritualized limbo, long enough to claw open the hidden pockets where Cade and Bonnie Bennett had hidden souls away.

The fourth ring entered the void—and led three witches back out at the cost of their lives. Qetsiyah, Inadu, and Emily Bennett. Each was bound to Brunhilda using blood. Three souls. All wrapped tight and tucked inside her ribs, anchored by the work of the fifth and sixth circles—forty-nine witches in total who were each willing to die to see the world made anew.

And then came the seventh—the final ring. The witches whose magic and knowledge now crackled inside Brunhilda's bones, burning like a forest fire barely hidden under the skin. They tore into the edges of time and space, carving a hole in reality just large enough for one very stubborn mouse-like human to slip through.

And so, a decade after the end, Brunhilda stepped sideways and slipped from the confines of her reality.

Chapter Text

The first thing Brunhilda did was look around.

The New Jersey Pine Barrens loomed as ominously as ever—miles of tangled undergrowth and blackened pitch pines pressing in from all sides, the skeletal trees clawing at a sky. Brunhilda twisted in a circle, listening and looking, but finding and hearing no one for as far as the seeable distance carried. The silence here was thick. Far off, the dawn was just beginning to unfurl, as if the universe itself wasn't quite ready to deal with the chaos she'd stirred up.

This was not what she had expected.

The place didn't surprise her, not really. She had stood here just minutes ago—or perhaps a decade in the future, depending on which knot of time you pulled—gleefully participating in the sacrifice of one hundred and eighty-three witches. The Barrens were less wild than they were moments ago. She could feel the leyline thrumming beneath her feet, pulsing like a second heartbeat, singing to her like it had only done before The End.

No blood. No bones. No cinders. The Pine Barrens had swallowed the evidence whole.

So, the spell had worked—Brunhilda could tell that much—but not quite in the way she intended.

The second thing she did was check her pockets.

Brunhilda wasn't supposed to be here. She was supposed to wake up in her younger body, probably tucked away in her childhood bed, somewhere deep in her family's commune where the world couldn't touch her. Instead, she was here—unmoored, unprepared, rummaging through threadbare pockets like a thief in someone else's timeline.

She turned her pants pockets inside out. Fifteen bottlecaps—because yes, even post-apocalyptic wastelands needed a currency—an old multitool, a handful of small crystals, her last ball point pen, and a tiny notebook scrawled with nonsense only she could decipher.

Brunhilda reached for her messenger bag. Inside she found a lighter, a handful of candles, a hunting knife, a few first aid supplies, a long length of rope, and nothing else. She felt a thrum of panic as she continued to dig—and after a few moments of dread, she sighed in relief after she finally found it. Her grimoire. She'd need that if she was to survive what was coming.

Then—suddenly—

"Surprise," said a voice right next to her ear, smooth and amused.

Brunhilda whipped around, lashing out with a violent crack of magic that gouged deep into a nearby pine, sending splinters hissing through the air. She spun, breath caught, looking at—nothing? Brunhilda blinked and looked around. There was nothing. Just open air.

"What the fuck was that?"

"That'd be me," Silas's voice drawled.

The bottlecaps slipped from her fingers, clattering into the pine needles like coins dropped into a wishing well.

He'd never spoken to her before—not since the ritual. She had not even realized he could.

For a long, tight breath, she stood still—staring into the nothing that had spoken.

Then came a dry laugh. "Yeah, no, ignoring me won't make me go away."

"I'm not ignoring you," Brunhilda shot back, her voice sharp, defensive. "You've never talked before—I'm allowed to be surprised."

"Oh, come on. Did you seriously think the Merge would just dump all my power and memories into you and that'd be the end of it? Like you could just carry around my good parts like a backpack?"

Brunhilda didn't answer. Because yes, that was exactly what she'd thought.

"Cute," Silas said. "But I'm an immortal super witch. Of course it doesn't work like that."

"Obviously," she muttered, still not quite ready to admit that it was precisely what she'd banked on.

She bent to gather her scattered bottlecaps, letting the weight of them slide through her fingers. They wouldn't do her much good this far back in the timeline, but Brunhilda imagined it wouldn't hurt for her to start building her wealth just in case she was unsuccessful in her apocalypse-stopping activities. Currency was currency. She wasn't about to start over from zero.

"Why didn't the ritual work?" she asked, stuffing the caps back into her pocket. "I was supposed to wake up in my younger body."

"It did work," he said. "Just... not like you thought. This isn't really time travel. It's more like different editions of the same book."

"You literally called it time travel."

"Yeah, well, I lied." Silas was practically smug about it. "We—" (she grimaced at the word, it certainly didn't feel like a we situation)—"didn't turn back the clock. We tore a hole in the fabric of space and shoved you through it. The witches bound to you? They were meant to burn off like kindling to power the swap. The idea was you'd jump into the body of your younger self in this version of the world."

"And if there's no younger me here?"

"Then you're stuck like this."

Brunhilda rubbed her temples. "So, I was never born in this world? Or I'm already dead?"

"Looks that way."

A terrible thought crept in, and when she spoke again, her voice was slow, cautious. "... what happened to the witches? The ones bound to me?"

Silence.

For a long moment, Silas didn't answer.

Brunhilda could almost feel him scrambling for an explanation. Finally, he said, awkwardly as if he hadn't really stopped to consider that possibility, "Uh. Yeah. If the ritual couldn't burn them off to power the jump... they're probably still with you. All of them."

Brunhilda felt the migraine bloom behind her eyes. Qetsiyah. The Hollow. Emily Bennett. Still tangled inside her.

Silas broke the silence, almost sheepish. "Okay, so. Full disclosure? I'm realizing now that I probably should've mentioned the real plan sooner. But honestly, I thought it'd be way more entertaining to just watch you burn Qetsiyah's spirit to dust to get what you wanted."

That's when the air shifted.

A sharp voice sliced through her mind. "I should've expected this from you, Silas. You've always been reckless, cruel, and painfully predictable."

"Selfish? Me?" Silas's spirit bristled. "Wow. Coming from you? That's rich."

Brunhilda could feel Qetsiyah coiling, hot acidic. "Yes, selfish! That's all you've ever been. I'm not even surprised by the depths of your pettiness anymore."

"Petty?" His rage crackled, static sharp. "You're the one who locked me away for two thousand years! All because you couldn't stand that I loved someone else."

"You betrayed me."

"And you never let it go! I didn't want you. Get over it."

"You didn't leave me, Silas—you used me. You wanted immortality. You wanted power. You would've taken it no matter what it cost."

Silas spat, "And what a cost it was—two thousand years of cost, thanks to you—"

"Enough."

Emily Bennett's voice landed like a slammed door.

"This will not become your battleground," she said. Her words sank deep, cold and certain.

Brunhilda pressed her fingers hard against her temples, as if she could shove them all back down into the dark. But they lived in her now, and deeper still—Inadu stirred.

Silent.

Waiting.

That, more than anything, made Brunhilda want to carve the magic out of her with the multitool in her pocket and run in the opposite direction.

She stumbled away from the trees, away from the gouged bark and the lingering echoes of their fight, clutching her aching head and heading toward the nearest town. The ghosts continued to bicker inside her skull, though at least now it was quieter.

She walked two miles under a sky whose daylight was still new, and when she reached the edge of the town—the third thing she did—was hunt for a store that might sell a proper skincare regimen.

Yes, really.

Even in the apocalypse, even across universes, vanity was a comfort.

For years, she'd conjured water to wash her face (thank the gods she always traveled alone—any companions would've been livid at her waste of precious resources). She hoarded old-world serums until they spoiled and had to be replaced with home-remedies. When the last bottle of sunscreen expired, Brunhilda came to hate the sun and hid from it the best she could by sporting long sleeves despite the heat and an ugly wide brimmed sunhat. Humanity may have lost its grasp on the world before they were able to patch the holes that they had poked into the ozone layer—but Brunhilda refused to be vexed.

She spotted a shop and peered through the freshly cleaned window—closed. Of course. Brunhilda pressed her forehead against the cool glass, looking longingly at the rows of moisturizers and concoctions inside, and promised that she'd be back for them.

Her stomach twisted—not with hunger exactly, but with the hollow ache of never feeling full. She needed something hot, something to keep her hands busy while her mind worked. Food. She needed food.

A sleepy café just a few doors down offered salvation. It smelled like grease and calories. Perfect.

Inside, early risers nursed half-drunk mugs. A pair of joggers in early-2000s athleisure typed away on their Blackberries, picking at their fruit cups. The kind of people who could have been pulled from any universe, who fit anywhere because they belonged to nowhere. Brunhilda envied them a little.

The woman behind the counter looked up with a wide, friendly smile. "What can I get you?"

Brunhilda hesitated.

She couldn't remember the last time she'd eaten something not scavenged or canned. The thought caught in her throat. She felt her upper lip waver and her eyes flutter, just a little. She almost turned and walked out.

"I'll need a minute," Brunhilda said, her voice thick with something that made the waitress blink, surprised, and offer a polite, uncertain nod.

Brunhilda drifted to an empty booth near the back, sliding in stiffly, her eyes tracing the seams of the cracked vinyl cushion as her mind scrambled to map out her next steps.

She had no shelter, no permanency. No ID. No anchor in this timeline. She didn't even have money—not money that worked here anyway—and there wasn't exactly an ATM that accepted bottlecaps.

If I'm stuck here, I can't afford to start from scratch. I need shortcuts. I need leverage. I need resources.

She glanced at the door. She could run after scarfing down her meal, but she'd have to avoid this place after.

"You know," Silas's voice broke into her thoughts, lazy and entertained, almost smug, "it'd be way more elegant if she just thought you paid."

Brunhilda blinked and whispered, wishing that she had a phone so she could pretend to be taking a call. "What?"

"The food," he drawled. "You don't have to pay for it. Just compel her."

Brunhilda scowled at the empty air. "I'm a witch—I can't—"

"You've got my magic," Silas cut in, still arrogant and still annoying. "You've got all the tools. You just don't know where to look yet. C'mon, I'll walk you through it. It's easy."

Brunhilda pinched the bridge of her nose. "You want me to mind-control a waitress."

"Look, we can call it something fancier if that makes you feel better." His voice oozed amusement. "But yeah. Mind-control the waitress. Or you can wash dishes for the next three hours. Your choice."

Her stomach growled again.

Silas sounded way too excited. "Look—just try. Focus your magic behind your words, like you're pushing them into her bones."

"Fine," she muttered, standing and making her way to the counter.

The waitress looked up expectantly. "Did ya figure out what you want, hun?"

Brunhilda inhaled slowly. "Yeah. Uh, just a coffee. And—" her eyes skimmed the menu hanging on the wall, "—four eggs. Scrambled with cheese. And toast. Extra jam, please."

"Coming right up."

Brunhilda caught her gaze, steady, deliberate. "You'll think I've already paid. You'll remember me handing you exact change."

The woman blinked slowly, her brow furrowing, and then her face smoothed over, relaxed, a polite smile sliding into place. "Right. Exact change. Got it."

Brunhilda stepped back, the thrill of it rising in her chest, unfamiliar and electric.

I did that. I actually did that.

Silas's laughter echoed faintly in her head. "See? I told you. Fun, right?"

Brunhilda's mouth pulled into a wide grin, and she found herself nodding to the empty air.

As she returned to her seat, the waitress brought her plate and coffee with a friendly nod, already convinced she'd been paid.

The eggs were fine, the coffee was burnt, and they forgot to give her the extra jam, but Brunhilda ate slowly, savoring each bite like it was a rare luxury. She'd forgotten how quiet the world could be without the constant backdrop of collapse, without the distant screams or the electric hum of a dying grid.

She sipped her coffee and mentally laid out her next moves.

First, I need to get my bearings. I don't even know what year this is. I don't know who's alive, who's dead, who remembers me.

She reached for her notebook, flipping through the cramped, looping handwriting—half sigils, half chaotic scrawl. Somewhere in there, she'd tucked away a few leyline markers. If the magic of this world still followed the old pathways, she could use them to anchor herself.

Brunhilda sat in silence, slowly picking apart the toast, her thoughts racing, as she read through her notes. She needed to start charting the magic in this world—to see where it aligned with what she knew and where it diverged. If her family didn't exist here, maybe her enemies didn't either. Or maybe they did, but in new shapes.

Leylines first. Track them. Map them. They're the pulse points—the arteries of power. They'll tell me who's pulling the strings in this version of the world. If anyone.

I'll find a map, she promised herself, chewing absently. I'll find out where I landed, and I'll rebuild from there.

"You're thinking too hard," Silas chirped.

Brunhilda didn't look up. "I'm making a plan."

"That's adorable." His voice dripped that same self-satisfied tone that made her want to go back to a time when he had a physical body and hit him. "But this isn't a scavenger hunt. It's survival. Take what you need. Don't overcomplicate it."

She flicked a glance toward the empty air. "I'm not going to run through this world like a blunt weapon."

"Why not? Worked for me."

"And look where it got you."

She felt him roll his eyes. "Oh, she's got jokes now."

Brunhilda ignored him and flipped another page in her notebook. There. She'd scrawled a crude map of leyline crossings—most of them traced back to Mystic Falls and a small island in the Mediterranean, but a few stretched toward the typical haunts. New Orleans. Ephesus. Rome. There would be witches near those crossings. Power always attracted them.

But who's here? she wondered. Are the Gemini still around? The Bennetts? The Claires? What about my family? My great-aunt and her cousin? If they are, I can use them. If they aren't...

If they weren't, she'd have to build from nothing. Again.

Silas's voice cut in. "If you're interested in my opinion—and I know that you are—I'd suggest avoiding the Bennett witches. They can be... testy."

Brunhilda arched a brow. "You say that like I'm not testy."

"Yeah, but you're my testy witch now. I feel invested."

"Flattering."

"Not really. You're basically my timeshare."

She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. "Silas, if I have to listen to your commentary every time I think, I will find a way to carve you out of me."

He laughed, unfazed. "Good luck with that."

Brunhilda stared at her map a moment longer.

She needed allies. Or at least people she could use. She needed to know what this version of the world looked like. What had shifted. Who remembered the old ways. She needed to find another leyline—something more powerful than this one.

Maybe New Orleans, she mused. Big enough to hide in. Old enough to still hum with magic.

She'd be damned before she allowed herself to be dragged to the godforsaken hellmouth that was Mystic Falls—at least not before she had to be.

Her gaze slid back toward the waitress. The woman was wiping down a counter, oblivious, happy.

I'll need money. Clothes. A place to stay. I can't compel my way through everything. Not forever.

A bus ticket, then. Something low-profile. She could compel her way onto public transport for now. Later, she'd have to find a more sustainable method.

She drummed her fingers against the table, the rhythm matching the pulse of the leyline still echoing under her skin.

Brunhilda wasn't panicking. Not yet. She'd done harder things with fewer resources. But something about the silence in her head—the way Inadu hadn't stirred again—made her uneasy.

Silas seemed to notice the pause in her focus.

"What's got you so tense?"

Brunhilda didn't answer right away.

It's too quiet. I can feel the others—Emily's watching, Qetsiyah's still bristling—but Inadu? She's waiting for something.

"Just thinking," Brunhilda muttered aloud.

"Dangerous hobby," Silas quipped.

Brunhilda continued to nibble on her eggs—which quickly had become more and more rubbery as they cooled

She opened a new sheet and wrote, in order: Money. Clothes. Good moisturizer. Bus ticket. New Orleans. Shelter. Allies. And—she glanced toward the nothingness beside her—information.

"Alright," she said aloud. "What else can you do?"

Silas's voice floated back. "You're going to have to be more specific. I'm a man of many talents."

"Specifically," she said, "besides compulsion. What else can I use?"

There was a beat of silence, then: "Ah. So now you're interested in our shared assets. Cute."

Brunhilda rolled her eyes. "Just answer the question, Silas."

"Well, you've got the compulsion, obviously. Stronger than what vampires can do—no eye contact needed, no proximity limit, you can compel a whole room if you push hard enough. Takes a little practice though. Don't overdo it, or you'll fry your own synapses."

"Noted," she said, filing that away.

"Illusions too," Silas went on, his voice almost playful. "The good kind. Not just make-you-see-shadows illusions. I'm talking make-you-bleed illusions. Make-you-feel-your-organs-liquefying illusions."

She whistled, low. "That's... horrifying. And useful."

"Flattery will get you everywhere."

Brunhilda finished her final bite of eggs. "So, you can make someone think they're on fire?"

"Easily."

"Think they're suffocating?"

"I've done it before."

She grinned. "Think they've been stabbed?"

"Sure. And if you're feeling really creative, you can make them think they're rotting from the inside out. That's always a showstopper."

Brunhilda's grin sharpened. "What about your physical tricks? Strength, speed?"

"Ah, now that's the fun part," Silas said. "Those things don't actually matter—not when you can make someone believe you're stronger and faster than them. But the thing is, if they believe it, their body reacts like it's true. I could make myself stronger, faster, uncatchable—just by making them think I was. It's all perception. It's all in their heads."

Brunhilda let that settle.

"I can do that?"

Silas's voice was syrupy. "You've got enough of me baked into you that you can learn. But it's a delicate skill. You have to believe it, too. If your conviction wavers, so does the illusion."

"So, it's a head game."

"Always was."

She thought for a moment. "What about telekinesis?"

"That's standard issue," Silas said, brushing it off like it was nothing. "You've already been doing that—it'll just be easier for you now. You can throw things. You can probably rip someone's ribcage open if you focus hard enough. I liquefied a man's insides once—though I wouldn't recommend that one in a crowd. Gets messy."

Brunhilda hummed thoughtfully. "You're disturbingly helpful when you want to be."

"I aim to please."

She finished her toast, her mind buzzing now—not with panic, but with possibilities. Compulsion, illusions, telekinesis, manipulation of perception. She had so many more weapons than she thought.

"How do I practice the illusions?" she asked.

"You'll figure it out," Silas said. "Start small. Make someone think they've got a scratch on their hand. Make someone think their shoelace just snapped. Make a waitress think she's already been paid."

Brunhilda smirked. "Funny you mention that."

Silas's tone was delighted. "You're learning."

"And the rest of your magic? Can I access it?"

"Well, some of it's still mine. I've got the blueprints in my head—you just have to ask nicely. I've got spells that bind, spells that burn, resurrection tricks—but don't get your hopes up. I never figured out the immortality spell on my own."

"I'm not looking to be immortal," Brunhilda said, mostly to herself.

Silas's laugh wrapped around her like smoke. "Sweetheart, it's a little late for that. You and I—we're stitched together now. What's mine is yours. My power, my curse, my time. You're not walking away from that."

A pulse of something cold stirred in her chest.

"Don't make it sound like we're married."

"Oh, please. If I were married to you, I'd at least expect dinner first."

Brunhilda snorted, the comeback already halfway formed—but the air shifted. Cold and sharp, like ice threading through her ribs.

Then Qetsiyah's voice slipped in, velvet-edged and poisonous. "Marriage? Please. You've never been one for commitment, Silas. You proved that the moment you ran off with my handmaiden."

Silas's voice bristled, defensive and immediate. "Oh, here we go."

"You left me standing there," Qetsiyah continued, sweet as syrup and twice as suffocating. "You wanted my power. You wanted my spell. But me? You could never quite stomach the idea of choosing me."

"You don't get to rewrite history—"

"No? Because the way I remember it," she hissed, "you had eternity on the table and still ran."

"Oh, shut up," Silas snarled, his calm cracking. "You really can't let it go, can you?"

"Let it go? You betrayed me, you stole from me, and now you'll rot in this body for eternity with me watching every moment."

Brunhilda winced as the pressure built in her skull, their argument ratcheting up like a storm trapped inside a bottle.

"You chained me to existence for two thousand years," Silas hissed. "You built a prison just to keep me close to you."

"You deserved worse."

"Oh, please, you never wanted justice—you wanted me to choose you! Even in death. Poor Qetsiyah—desperate to be picked by a man who can't stand her."

Qetsiyah's laugh was bitter. "And yet—here we are. By your logic, I've gotten everything I've ever wanted and what do you have? Certainly not Amara."

Their rage spun tighter, hotter, slamming against the walls of Brunhilda's ribs. Her half-eaten eggs rolled in her stomach, the greasy food suddenly clinging to her throat like regret.

"Could you both—" she gagged slightly, swallowing hard, "—just, maybe, not do this in the middle of breakfast?"

No answer. Just more venom, the volume rising as their centuries-old grudge reignited like dry tinder.

Her stomach churned. She pressed her palm against the café's doorframe to steady herself.

Then, Emily Bennett's voice whispered softly—just to her. No bite. No cruelty. Only cool, measured patience.

"You'll cross paths with Bonnie soon."

Brunhilda's chest tightened. She could feel Emily's presence like a hand resting gently on her shoulder.

"Do you plan to help her?" Emily asked, her tone unreadable. "Or will you simply use her?"

Brunhilda hesitated. She hadn't planned that far ahead, not really. But she knew that her path and Bonnie's would intersect. Their stories had always spiraled toward one another.

"I don't know yet," she admitted.

A pause. And then: "If you choose to help her... you'll have my magic to draw from, too."

Brunhilda blinked, startled. "Why offer me that now?"

"You carry my spirit already. You may as well carry the rest of me."

Silas snorted from the sidelines of her mind. "Wow, generous."

"Don't talk to my descendant like that," Qetsiyah hissed.

As Brunhilda gathered her things, the argument between Qetsiyah and Silas simmered down to a low, bitter hiss. Though Brunhilda could feel them still glaring at each other across the battlefield of her bones.

She dragged her fingers down her face.

"Fantastic. Now I've got a council in my skull."

Emily's voice was the last thing she heard before finally leaving the café.

"Then use it well."

Chapter Text

The world hadn't ended yet.

That's what Brunhilda kept telling herself.

She wasn't trudging through a sunburnt wasteland with the sky cracked open like a rotten egg. There were no roaming bands of cannibals, no witch-hunters combing the streets, no collapsing ancestral wells, screaming their last breaths beneath her feet.

Just a normal morning.

She drifted through the drugstore like she had nowhere else to be. Plastic basket in hand, she moved on autopilot, mechanically gathered things that she didn't really need but refused to leave behind—cleanser, toner, moisturizer, two tubs of sunscreen, travel-sized shower items, a pack of razors. She lingered in the skincare aisle for a long time, staring at the neat rows of moisturizers with the kind of reverence people usually reserved for things that actually mattered.

She picked through the pristine shelves with surgical precision, as if the right combination of serums and salves might protect her from the tangled mess clawing at her ribs.

Her fingertips brushed against the side of a familiar plastic tube.

It had been years since she'd worn any makeup. She grabbed the concealer and dropped it into her basket with a manic sense of joy—followed by a few tubes of lipstick, a colorful eyeshadow quad, and a mascara that stirred something distant in her memory, though she couldn't quite place where'd she seen it last.

Her throat tightened. For a breath, she forgot she wasn't supposed to feel anything.

"You're stalling," Silas laughed.

She ignored him and made her way to the over-the-counter medication, sweeping pills for inflammation and headache relief into her basket. She snagged a bottle of Flintstones gummy multivitamins on the way out—because why not?

At the register, she didn't wait for the man behind the counter to speak. She pushed her magic into him, quick and sharp.

"You don't need to scan the items," she said softly. "I've already paid. The receipt didn't print properly, but it's fine. You just need to bag my items."

The man's brow furrowed, and then the compulsion slid into place.

He parroted pieces of her words back to her, cheeks flushing with polite confusion.

"I—I'm so sorry, ma'am. I don't know what's wrong with our machine. If you need to return anything, I'll process it without a receipt and I'll leave a note for my manager, so they know that they aren't stolen."

"Don't worry about it," Brunhilda said, offering him a vague, absentminded smile. "It's not your fault the machine's down."

She asked if there was anywhere nearby to buy clothes. The cashier told her about a secondhand shop three streets over—he hesitated, then apologized, adding that the boutique in the town square was temporarily closed for renovations. He suggested she try a larger town nearby.

She waved him off and left the pharmacy with the bag swinging at her side, stuffing the stolen items into her messenger bag as she walked.

The weight of her items settled comfortably against her hip, a small, silent comfort. After her breakfast and the quiet theft, she finally caught the digital clock flashing across the street on a bank sign: 9:27 AM.

The thrift shop's hours were stenciled onto the glass door: OPEN: 9:30 AM.

Perfect.

A few people loitered outside, leaning against the brick wall, nursing lukewarm coffees, scrolling aimlessly on battered flip phones. They didn't look at her. They didn't know what she was. That she wasn't from here. That she didn't belong anywhere anymore.

The door rattled open at exactly nine thirty.

Brunhilda slipped inside, breathing in the sharp tang of old fabric and something faintly metallic. The lights buzzed overhead, fluorescent and indifferent.

She quickly started to rifle through a nearby rack of jeans. She picked the ones that were plain, durable—a bit boxy, like they were from three decades prior. Easy to move in. Easy to run in. She moved to the shorts—now that she had sunscreen, she could wear things that showed a bit of skin.

"You realize," Silas's voice crooned, low and smug, "you're doing that thing again—where you pretend like everything's fine."

She refused to pay him any mind.

She grabbed a few soft, short-sleeved shirts in pretty colors that made her smile—small, private things. No logos, but she didn't shy away from patterns. She picked four: one with a vintage star-and-moon print, a brown one with yellow stripes, and two plain t-shirts in bubble gum pink and lilac. She tossed a brown belt into her cart from a nearby rack, found a jacket with a working zipper, and added that, too.

Silas kept speaking and she could feel him tugging on something deep inside her.

"I'm ignoring you," she muttered under her breath as she through the shoes.

She grabbed a pair of worn sneakers. The soles weren't cracked, the laces weren't frayed, and the tread was still intact. She could run in these. That mattered.

She was getting better at tuning out the ghosts and their endless arguments—Silas and Tessa, snapping and circling like rival vultures over the same half-rotted carcass. She only caught pieces of it now:

"Fuck you, Silas—"

—and his nasty, delighted laugh. "You're so obsessed with me. It's embarrassing."

Brunhilda let their voices fade into the static, focusing instead on the heft of a large black backpack she plucked from a nearby shelf. Her last one had been patched and torn from years of climbing fences and crawling through the ribs of abandoned houses. It wasn't on her shoulder anymore, but sometimes she still felt the ghost-weight of it, like an amputated limb. The messenger bag she'd picked up a year ago didn't quite fit right.

She shook away the thought and dragged her haul to the register—two pairs of denim pants, two pairs of jean shorts, a belt, four shirts, a pair of sneakers, a set of colorful pajamas, sunglasses, a light purple baseball hat with a tiny embroidered bat, a sturdy sports bra, an unopened pack of socks and underwear, an old but working wristwatch, and the backpack.

When she'd unpacked everything onto the counter, she pulled the same trick she'd used at the drugstore. The woman behind the counter didn't bother apologizing for the lack of a receipt like the last cashier had, but Brunhilda figured the big sign behind her reading "ALL SALES FINAL. NO RETURNS" had something to do with it. She asked the woman to pack the clothing directly into the backpack. Everything fit, except the sneakers, which Brunhilda carried in her hands.

She stepped outside and swapped her shoes on the sidewalk, taking her time tying the new laces tight. She tossed the old ones—practically disintegrating, held together in places with duct tape—into a nearby rubbish bin. She shoved her messenger bag into the backpack, pausing to pull out the folded newspaper tucked inside.

She stood there, next to the trash, her eyes dragging over the paper's date: May 27, 2008.

She gripped the paper and did the math automatically. Stefan wouldn't meet Elena for another year and some change.

She had time.

"That gives me options," she muttered, pulling out her notebook and starting to scrawl.

"Options?" Silas drawled, his voice curling around the word like smoke. "You mean delays. You should be looking for Amara."

"Why would I do that?" Brunhilda snapped, not bothering to lower her voice. The few passersby either ignored her or assumed she was on a Bluetooth call. Fine by her.

"Because she's alive in this timeline," Silas stressed.

Tessa's voice slithered in, sharp as a blade. "Oh, please. You don't get to decide that. You want to find Amara because you're still a selfish coward, still chasing the fantasy that you can fix your failures."

"And you'd rather what?" Silas bit back. "Keep me miserable? You've spent centuries punishing me, Tessa. Maybe you should get a hobby."

"Actually," Tessa snapped, "I quite enjoy watching you suffer. It suits you."

Brunhilda's stomach churned. The argument echoed and ricocheted inside her skull, her food sitting heavy and sour in her gut. She pressed the heel of her hand to her belly, breathing through the nausea, steady and slow.

Then Emily's voice slipped in, soft but cutting through the noise like a blade of light. "While those two are busy clawing at each other, I hope you haven't forgotten Sheila Bennett."

Brunhilda grimaced.

"She's not even close to dying yet," she muttered, still staring at the paper. "And Bonnie doesn't even know she's a witch right now. She's just a kid."

"That's precisely the problem," Emily said, cool and measured. "She should already be training if she's supposed to survive Katherine's paramours."

Brunhilda exhaled, long and slow. Her pulse still spiked with Silas and Tessa's distant bickering.

"I have bigger problems than that."

Emily went quiet, then asked softly, "Tell me you're not going to abandon her."

"I won't." Brunhilda's voice was barely a whisper against the rumble of a passing cars. "Our paths will cross. I'll handle it when it's time. But I need... I need an ally—a real one that already knows how to do magic. I need someone who can actually make a dent in all of this."

"Then don't waste time," Emily said. "You don't have long. And The Hollow—" her voice flickered, heavy with warning—"won't stay quiet forever."

Brunhilda's spine went rigid. She could feel Inadu scraping at her bones, a relentless pressure, the promise of a storm she didn't know how to contain.

I'm coming, the whisper stirred, ancient and low.

There was too much left to fix.

Too many lives hanging in the balance.

And if she wanted to save them, she needed Freya Mikaelson.

Brunhilda tossed the newspaper into the bin and began walking toward the town square, thinking she might figure out the best way out of this place once she got there.

She moved slowly, taking deep breaths of the clean morning air. The streets were surprisingly neat, the quiet hum of early-day life washing over her like a half-forgotten lullaby. It was still the world she'd once known, though stuck in 2008, but it felt like a faded photograph, warm and familiar, yet painfully out of reach.

She walked with a measured, deliberate pace, her eyes flicking to the small, ordinary moments that sparked old memories.

A man sat on a bench, thumbs flying over the clunky buttons of an old phone. Texting—she used to do the same, for hours, before the world had gone dark. The soft glow of the screen pulled at something in her, reminded her of late nights and half-formed plans and conversations with people long gone. She missed everyone—still—Brunhilda realized. The idea that they might exist in this world was enough to fill her with indescribable joy, just as the idea that they might not know her (or worse may have loved a version of her that died) filled her with dread.

Nearby, a kid grinned as they mashed buttons on a handheld game console, lost in pixelated adventures. Brunhilda remembered that sound—the faint, tinny music—and how it had once filled the commune's kitchen in the quiet moments before curfew. The nostalgia hit her like a quiet ache.

A young woman lingered outside a nearby café, muttering to herself about a slow shift and grumbling customers. The mundane frustration wrapped itself around Brunhilda like a soft blanket. Even now, with the world teetering on the edge—though none knew this aside from herself—life still had its small annoyances. People still complained about coffee and work and headaches. Life hadn't stopped—not yet.

Brunhilda's fingers brushed the straps of her new backpack. The weight of it grounded her—a tether to now. She'd left this world behind in so many ways, but it was still here, still moving. She was here, too. Caught between past and future— Schrödinger's girl.

The ache in her chest was sharp but steady. She let it settle there, a fragile thing she wasn't ready to let go.

She drifted along the cracked sidewalk, the sun low in the sky. A dusty road stretched ahead, mostly empty. A truck passed slowly, its engine a steady hum. Without hesitation, she pushed her magic outward, brushing against the driver's mind like the softest whisper.

You want to stop. You want to help me. You don't know why, but you trust me. You won't hurt me. You won't ask questions. You won't remember me.

The driver's fingers twitched against the wheel. His foot eased off the gas. He pulled over to the side of the road abruptly and rolled down the window, eyes an artificial kind of warm.

"Hey," Brunhilda said calmly, meeting his gaze. "Do you know where the nearest bus is?"

His voice came slow, like surfacing from a dream. "About forty minutes away. There's a Greyhound station."

She deepened her grip on his mind, layering the suggestion more carefully now, refining her non-verbal compulsion. You want to take me there. You don't mind the drive. I remind you of someone you care about. You won't think anything about me is odd—no matter what you hear. You'll forget me as soon as I'm gone.

The man blinked, his lips parting like he'd just remembered something important. "Get in."

Inside the cab, the truck smelled faintly of leather and cigarette smoke. There was an empty car seat in the backseat. Brunhilda sat in silence, her hands folded neatly in her lap.

After a few minutes of negotiating a radio station that Silas and the other ghosts could at least tolerate, she pulled out her notebook and clicked her pen. Her gaze flicked over the mess of hastily scrawled notes.

She didn't know much about the spell that kept Freya asleep—but all spells had ingredients, all spells could be reversed. That was always the place to start.

Brunhilda tried to remember what Bonnie had told her about the Mikaelson witch when they met. Bonnie hadn't been particularly forthcoming about Freya—and Brunhilda hadn't asked. Back then, Freya had already been long dead by the time Brunhilda had finally made it to New Orleans. It hadn't seemed important.

Now she wished she'd asked more questions.

Her pen glided across the page as she catalogued what little she knew. Freya Mikaelson, the last of her siblings to awaken from their endless slumber. Finn, Kol, and Rebekah were already dead. Hope was within the Hollow's grasp. Inadu's power had risen to its full, terrible height, and her resurrection had come at the cost of Hope's life. And Freya had risen to meet it—in the end, Freya and Niklaus both laid dead, and Bonnie was nursing a curse that was slowly killing her.

Brunhilda had never met Freya, but she knew she needed her. Freya was powerful enough to shove the Hollow at the height of its power into a pocket dimension—was powerful enough that New Orleans had stood for another two years before it eventually fell. She could help Brunhilda—could help her save the Originals, help her free Amara, and perhaps help her get rid of her Hollow shaped problem.

Even now, Inadu scraped and clawed beneath her skin, growing stronger, hungrier. Time was running thin.

The truck rocked along the highway, the low hum of the engine weaving beneath the morning traffic. Brunhilda sat still, her new backpack pressed against her sneakers, her fingers wrapped around a lukewarm bottle of water the driver had offered her twenty minutes ago.

She buried her face in her notebook, trying to focus, but her handwriting was becoming jagged, rushed—spells she didn't remember starting, notes she hadn't meant to take.

Her skin itched. Her throat ached. She couldn't wait to wash her face, even if it meant scrubbing it in the bus station sink. She was so tired of smelling like the apocalypse.

Finally, the man parked at the Greyhound station.

Brunhilda didn't bother to thank him. She had one foot out of the truck when Silas's voice crooned from the back of her skull.

"I'm hungry," he said, petulant, like a child denied sweets.

She didn't ask what he was hungry for.

Her hand spasmed. Just a flicker at first—her thumb twitching, her fingers jerking like a misfired nerve. Then the pull, slow and certain, like a string tightening in her palm. Magic rose there, uninvited.

Her teeth didn't extend into fangs—she wasn't a vampire after all. But as she looked at the driver—tall, kind-faced, smiling at her like she was someone he loved—a queer hunger took root in her.

"Let go," she muttered, trying to force it back down, to shove the magic back into its cage.

"Can't help it," Silas said. Brunhilda leaned in towards the man and swore that she could almost make out Silas's grinning face in the reflection of his pupils "Your power is technically mine, remember? What's yours is mine, and what's mine is—"

"Annoying."

Don't scream, her magic pulsed, curling toward the man like it had made a decision without her.

Brunhilda's jaw tightened until her molars ached.

"It's going to happen more," Silas warned, his voice close, curling around the edges of her mind. "The more you use our shared power, the more you'll blur. The more I'll bleed into you."

Brunhilda blinked.

The inside of the truck... melted, just for a moment—seats elongating like stretched wax, the windows warping into black pools. The man looked wrong and his face lost its shape as his mouth moved without sound.

Then the world snapped back.

Brunhilda's stomach lurched, iron flooding her tongue. She pulled back. Her blunt teeth had barely broken the skin, but she had clamped down hard enough to bruise the man's pulse point.

Her face flushed hot with shame.

"Forget this now," she ordered sharply, voice thick as she grabbed her bag. "You won't tell anyone. If someone notices, you'll say a dog bit you."

It was a weak lie. The wound didn't look like a dog bite. But the compulsion settled easily into his eyes.

She slammed the truck door and stumbled away.

Brunhilda fled to a nearby alley, her breathing ragged, pressing her back against rough brick as she slid to the ground. Her chest tightened.

A decade surviving past the end of the world. She'd starved. She'd scavenged. She'd hunted. She'd never—never—resorted to cannibalism.

And now—this.

A voice she didn't know whispered from somewhere inside her.

Poor girl.

Brunhilda's whole body flinched.

The Hollow didn't sound like the others.

Silas's voice always dripped with cruel amusement. Tessa's voice was sharp. Emily's was steady, like iron anchoring her to the ground.

But Inadu? Inadu's words did not sound like words—they flowed through her. She did not so much as hear them as she felt them, they were sweet and wet beneath her skin.

You wear me well, little witch, the Hollow purred, thick and honeyed, slithering up her spine.

Brunhilda's pulse stuttered. She hunched forward, her hands trembling violently—but the tremors began to ease as her mind scrambled to rationalize.

The world felt like so much more—the wind was sharper. The alley stank stronger. The magic core of her strained under the pressure of Inadu's phantom fingers dragging along it, a slow stroke meant to break her open.

You can feel me, can't you? Inadu cooed. My power pressing against your ribs.

Her hands burned. Magic sparked, wild and hungry, rising without consent.

Brunhilda shoved it down, her breathing shallow, strained. She locked her jaw, forcing her pulse to slow, but Inadu pressed harder, scraping at the walls of her mind, dragging her claws along the bone.

For a second—just a second—Brunhilda's vision blurred, and the world twisted.

The alley dissolved into scorched stone. The sidewalk cracked like volcanic rock, and the air smelled of fire, the sharp taste of ash clinging to her tongue.

"Brunhilda." Emily's voice snapped through the haze, firm and loud, slicing through the Hollow's creeping rot. "Hold. Her. Back."

Brunhilda squeezed her eyes shut, nails biting deep into her palms until the skin broke.

"You don't belong here," she hissed. "Not anymore."

Oh, but I do, Inadu whispered sweetly. I'm in you. I am you. We're so close now. One breath, one blink, and I'll wear your skin.

The pulse slipped again—and Brunhilda bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to tear flesh, the bright flash of pain anchoring her, snapping the rising spell in two.

The magic sputtered out. The sidewalk steadied. The world snapped back.

Silas and the others were uncharacteristically silent. Brunhilda wiped the blood from her lip and stood slowly, brushing dirt from her jeans. Her clothes reeked now—apocalypse and rot, sweat and fear, the sharp smell of blood.

She left the alley without looking back and started walking toward the station.

Brunhilda lingered around the front of the building. She needed money. She wasn't sure she could compel her way past the computer the attendant was using—electronic systems didn't always bend the way people did.

Her gaze landed on a man at the nearby ATM. He looked confident, well-fed, the sort who wouldn't miss a few hundred dollars. As he typed in his pin number, Brunhilda stepped toward him, her voice calm, edged with quiet authority.

"You want to make sure I get on my bus," she said, locking eyes with him—not strictly necessary, but she wasn't certain of her strength after the incident with Inadu. "You'll pull out an extra two hundred dollars and give it to me. It's no trouble, and you'll feel better doing it."

The man blinked, confusion fluttering across his face—but the subtle compulsion in her voice wrapped around his will like silk. After he completed the transaction, his hand slowly extended, pressing the crisp bills into hers.

Brunhilda took the money without a word, sliding it into her coat pocket. His brow furrowed, his expression clouded, but his mind had already made peace with what had happened, filing it away as his own idea.

She didn't bother to thank him.

Brunhilda bought her bus ticket and was left with forty dollars. Through the plexiglass window, the attendant wrinkled his nose at her and kindly suggested she bathe at the gym across the street. The next bus wouldn't arrive for another three hours.

She gave a shallow nod and crossed the street.

The gym offered a one-day pass for thirty dollars. Brunhilda looked down at her remaining cash, then up at the receptionist. She let her magic slip forward, the compulsion sliding easily into the woman's mind.

Five minutes later, she was in the locker room.

The first real shower she'd had in years.

She stood under the water until her skin pruned, until the steam softened the ache in her shoulders. She washed layers of grime from her body, her hair thick with the artificial scent of drugstore peaches. She shaved, moving the razor carefully over skin that no longer felt less dirty with every passing moment.

It felt good to feel clean. Truly clean.

She changed into the new shorts and one of her t-shirts—the lilac one. She pulled on fresh underwear and socks and nearly cried. She'd forgotten the small, exquisite joy of wearing something new.

Brunhilda lingered in the shower far longer than she should have. She only left when her skin was flushed red from the heat.

As she tried to leave the gym, towel wrapped around her hair, the attendant called after her—insisting that the towels were gym property.

Brunhilda simply told her, "You're happy to let me keep it. It's not a problem."

The woman's face slackened, then relaxed into a pleasant smile. "Sure. Of course."

Brunhilda left without another word.

She ate dinner at a nearby McDonald's, piecing together a meal from the dollar menu. The hot fries were almost enough to make her forget she was on the run from the end of the world.

She worked through her timeline while she ate, flipping back and forth through her notebook, her handwriting growing smaller and sharper with each entry.

After a few hours, she walked back to the bus stop and boarded.

Brunhilda settled near the back of the bus, her fingers drumming softly against the worn leather cover of her notebook. The streets slid past the window—too neat, too quiet, too painfully normal.

She was half-lost in thought when a man slid into the seat beside her, bringing the faint scent of stale coffee and sweat.

He glanced at her with a tired smile. "Long day?"

The urge flickered through her—a sharp temptation to bend his will, to taste that power, just a little. A whisper, smooth as silk, curled around her ear:

Go on, a voice that sounded like a mixture of Silas and Inadu purred. Just a sip of control. You could have him bleeding at your feet in minutes. You could have everyone. You could have anything. No one would notice. No one would care.

She could see it—his glassy-eyed submission, the sweet pull of compulsion snapping like a string between them. The dark hunger coiled in their shared bones. The memory of the man she'd bitten.

Her stomach turned.

"Sit somewhere else," she ordered.

The man nodded, oblivious to the war inside her skull. He stood and walked away.

Silas sighed, disappointed, like a child watching their parent make a dull, responsible choice.

"Such a waste, sweetness," he whispered, fading back into the corners of her mind. "Such a terrible waste."

Chapter Text

The trip to New Orleans was thirty-three hours long.

It included two transfers—which totaled over five hours of waiting for the next bus to arrive—thirteen stops, and a big enough headache that her teeth felt as if she were about to grind them down into a fine powder. Brunhilda kept her backpack wedged tight against her chest, the straps biting into her shoulders. She didn't remove it. Not once. It did not help with the comfort of the trip.

She spent the first few hours with her eyes closed, head tilted upward and her legs crossed in the seat, breathing deeply as she scrapped together a fragile sort of focus. She tried to drown out the witches in her head, tried to quiet the bickering, to wrestle some semblance of control.

"You're meditating wrong," Silas complained, nestled somewhere in the space between her eyes.

"Be quiet, Silas." She didn't bother whispering. The man across the aisle shot her a glance and then quickly looked away.

"No, let him speak," Qetsiyah purred. "Maybe he'll embarrass himself into silence."

"Not likely," Emily muttered. "None of us are likely to get silence—not with the three of us trapped in here."

After hours of attempting and failing to find inner peace, Brunhilda gave up and began writing out her shopping list on a scrap of paper as the hours dragged on. She needed chalk, more candles, and the most common spell components. She started to scrawl guesses about what else she might need to break Freya's slumber spell. She'd figure it out when she arrived.

Occasionally, someone tried to strike up a conversation, but Brunhilda didn't answer. They caught the edge of her arguing with people who weren't there and, without fail, they backed off within minutes. By the tenth stop, no one sat within three rows of her.

The bus hissed as it pulled into the New Orleans station, shuddering to a stop. Brunhilda rose slowly, the weight of her backpack dragging at her shoulders, her limbs stiff from the long, suffocating ride.

The city greeted her with heat and noise, her sneakers thudding against the pavement as she stepped off the bus and onto New Orleans soil.

Qetsiyah hummed, finally settling into something quieter.

Silas was, for once, too drained to be smug.

Emily whispered, "I always wanted to see this place."

Brunhilda moved through the station, snagging a few tourist brochures. Everything catered to travelers with real money—high-end hotels, boutique inns, places that would notice if she stopped paying or never paid at all. She needed somewhere no one would watch her too closely. Somewhere she could drag an unconscious woman into, if it came to that.

"You should find a place near the river," Silas said. "Easy exits. Plenty of places to hide a body."

"Is that all you think about?" Qetsiyah snapped, her tone sharp but less venomous than before. The hours on the road had dulled even their fury. "She needs a quiet place. Somewhere no one will ask questions."

Emily's voice was soft in contrast—she seemed entirely enchanted by the feeling of New Orleans and had no interest in debating where she should be staying. "There's something about this city. The magic hums differently here." Brunhilda could almost feel Emily leaning in, as if tasting the air.

Brunhilda ignored them, scanning the stack of glossy brochures in the station's cracked metal rack. Jazz tours. Riverboat cruises. Haunted hotel stays for the adventurous tourist. Every option was too polished, too visible, too expensive.

She walked out into the thick Louisiana heat, the ghosts trailing her like gnats, and spotted a young woman leaning against a wall, chain-smoking while scrolling through her flip phone.

Brunhilda approached, weaving her magic through her voice. "If you know somewhere cheap to stay where no one bothers you, tell me."

The woman's hand faltered mid-text. Her eyes glazed briefly before she rattled off a name and directions to a rundown motel in the Lower Ninth Ward.

"It's twenty-five bucks a night. Cash only. My sister does the night audit there—so I know it's lowkey. Nobody asks questions," the woman added, blinking rapidly as if shaking off a strange thought. Brunhilda was already walking away.

"Do it again," Silas murmured, his grin practically audible. "Take everything she has, Hilda. Make her crawl."

"Oh, shut up," Tessa hissed.

Brunhilda didn't answer either of them. She was too tired to moderate as she flagged down a cab.

When she finally reached the motel, it was even worse than she expected. A sagging, sun-bleached sign. Doors that looked like they had been kicked in more than once. It was perfect.

The woman behind the desk barely looked up from her magazine.

"One month," Brunhilda said, leaning on the counter. She laced her magic into the words, pressing the compulsion into the woman's mind like a thumb into soft clay. "You'll put me down as paid in full. You'll cook the books to match."

The woman's eyes went glassy. "Paid in full," she repeated. "One month."

Brunhilda slid the room key from the counter and turned away without another word. The ghosts stirred, but none of them spoke this time.

The motel room was worse on the inside. The air was damp, smelling of mildew poorly masked by some sharp chemical cleaner. The carpet squished faintly under her sneakers, and the wallpaper near the bathroom door peeled like sunburned skin.

Brunhilda slid the deadbolt home and gave the handle an extra tug. It rattled, but it held. Good enough. She'd fortify it later with protective spells.

She dropped her backpack onto the lone chair and set her messenger bag on the tiny round table beside it. The place had no fridge, no microwave, just a lumpy bed, a flickering overhead light, and a small cracked mirror over the sink. She didn't need more.

"This place is disgusting," Emily said, eyeing a suspicious brown spot on the carpet.

"You could've done better," Silas remarked, his voice drifting lazily from the corner, though she knew he wasn't really there.

Brunhilda ignored them both. She tugged her jacket off and draped it over the chair. She ran her hands down her arms, trying to shake off the road dust, the bus grime, the weight of too many hours sitting still.

She began pulling out items from her backpack and taking her toiletries into the bathroom. Her fingertips lingered on the smooth plastic lid of her cleanser as she went through the ritual of washing her face—a quiet comfort she had never been brave enough to abandon, even when all she had were soapberries and conjured water.

When she was done, she used one of the heavily bleached hand towels to dry her face. She rubbed her serums and moisturizer across her skin, working them in slowly, methodically, pretending it helped.

"I'm hungry again," Silas griped. "And bored."

Brunhilda continued to ignore the voices as Tessa picked another fight with him.

She unpacked the rest of her things with a soldier's efficiency: a few plain outfits, her notebook, the stolen fifty folded tightly and hidden in her shoe. She laid the notebook on the table, smoothing the cover with the flat of her palm. There she sat, hunched over the paper, the words smudged with the pressure of her handwriting, her pen tapping restlessly against the page.

She started with Freya.

Thankfully, Brunhilda knew where she was hidden.

It was just the ingredients she didn't know. She sketched out the spell's components again, refining, adjusting—trying to figure out what Freya's connection to the mortal world would even look like.

Immortality spells typically had three components: the anchor, the catalyst, and the human touch.

An immortality spell needed an anchor to one's past—to their mortality. Maybe the bones of a family member? But that would only work if Dahlia valued such connections, and what Brunhilda knew about her suggested she didn't. It could be soil if Dahlia valued her homeland more than her family. Spells like these often thrived on cruel dualities—the place of birth as the instrument of death.

Yet she wasn't certain Dahlia's native soil was part of the spell at all. It was just as likely to be her first thought or something entirely new like water from a local she drank from as child.

The second ingredient would need to invoke feelings of hatred or regret in Dahlia. This was the fuel for the spell's creation—Brunhilda would need Freya's insight to uncover who, or what, had been reduced to ashes in Dahlia's past. Whatever had stoked the fire of her desire to live forever was likely also the key to unraveling it. Magic born from vengeance was fragile and reactionary, its power tied closely to emotion, and therefore potentially undone by understanding.

Finally, there was the blood of something that grounded her to her humanity—it would need to be someone she loved. Emotions were both the wellspring of a witch's power and their weakness. Dahlia's love would be the chink in her armor—a link between emotional and physical vulnerability. To use that blood was to threaten the very core of Dahlia's strength.

You could still let me help you. Inadu's voice, soft and sweet, curled around Brunhilda like silk. You don't have to do this alone.

Brunhilda gritted her teeth and pressed her pen harder into the page until the tip nearly snapped. She refused to answer. She wasn't that desperate. Not yet.

She weighed the possibilities, tapping her pen against her knee.

Research more about Dahlia: few surprises later. More control. But it will slow me down.

Find Freya first: faster. Riskier. I will need to rely on her for all my information and Dahlia might wake if I'm sloppy.

Qetsiyah chimed in, her tone sharp and pointed. "You don't even know the proper ingredients. The answer is simple. For all your plotting, you may spend months gathering the wrong items only to free her and have to start over. How embarrassing that would be."

Brunhilda's grip tightened on her pen. "I'll figure it out."

"You could always ask Sheila," Emily suggested gently, though her self-interest was obvious—she still wanted Brunhilda to run to her descendants' side and act as their bodyguard. "You know they'll be helpful—our line always is."

Brunhilda hesitated.

Mystic Falls.

Too soon. Bonnie hadn't even begun practicing yet. Sheila was alive—for now—but how much could she truly help Brunhilda?

Still... it would be a comfort to see her. To know where Bonnie stood. To prepare.

She scribbled the question in the margin:

Visit Mystic Falls? Yes? No?

She stared at it for a long moment before she closed the book.

"I'll find Freya tomorrow," she said, though no one had asked.

Chapter Text

Brunhilda spent most of the following day asleep, the hard motel mattress barely registering beneath her exhaustion. The alarm on the crusted bedside clock dragged her out of uneasy dreams just before dusk.

The ghosts hadn't stopped bickering while she slept—if anything, they'd grown more insistent.

"This is a waste of time," Silas muttered as she massaged conditioner through her hair, his voice curling around the length of her spine. "Freya's got so much baggage, so many threads to unravel. All that effort to dig her out of a coffin when you could go—oh, I don't know—hunt for Amara instead."

Brunhilda continued to ignore him and his baffling implication that Amara would somehow have less baggage.

Her thoughts churned as she waited to wash out the product, and she found herself thinking of Freya—what little she knew of her.

It wasn't much. What she did know revolved tightly around the tribrid girl.

Such wasted potential, Brunhilda thought.

Hope had, by all accounts (as limited as they were), fallen to the Hollow suddenly, torn apart piece by piece until nothing but Inadu remained. The transformation had been slow, insidious, unnoticed—until the skies suddenly turned impossibly dark over New Orleans and the bayou ran red.

Brunhilda could still see the news reports: strange happenings in New Orleans—mass suicides, covens (not that the news knew them to be witches) burned en masse, and then a wave of destruction erupting across the southeastern United States. Finn, Kol, and Rebekah's sirelines had already withered, and the world's wide, horrified eyes turned toward these new impossible happenings.

Inadu had ripped out the ancestral well of power by the root and then turned her gaze outward.

Brunhilda heard the Strix sent their witches to confront her, but they were picked apart. Inadu slaughtered her way through the supernatural population—she was largely the reason that so few witches still survived by The End—until Niklaus stood in her way. Brunhilda hadn't been there when he fell, but the visions came to her in brutal clarity—Klaus, bloody and smiling, holding the line as his daughter's magic tore the world to pieces.

He didn't beg. Not at the end.

Davina, Freya, and Bonnie had worked together to unmake her—Davina cut Niklaus's sireline, Freya expelled Inadu, and Bonnie locked her away. The ritual took Freya to the grave. Brunhilda didn't know what became of Davina—or Hope for that matter.

Bonnie was the one she found in the aftermath—a husk of who she had been. The ritual devoured much of what remained of her. Bonnie's hair had thinned, her hands constantly trembled, her skin was permanently etched with sigils from that night.

The girls stayed together for a long time, watching the last of the vampires die as the world staggered toward recovery. Eventually, Bonnie left, walking alone into the wilderness. Bonnie never came back, and one day, Brunhilda stopped being able to feel her at all.

Brunhilda stepped from the shower and dried off. She tended to her skin and her wavy hair, blowing it dry with the motel's weak hair dryer.

The ghosts continued bickering as she double-checked the contents of her bag and slipped out into the humid streets of New Orleans.

The cottage wasn't far. The route snaked along cracked sidewalks and overgrown fences, the old house sagging between drooping cypresses.

The cottage hunched at the edge of a forgotten lane, its faded shutters hanging crooked, its paint peeling like ancient skin. As Brunhilda approached, the air thickened, pressing against her chest with a weight that wasn't entirely physical. The spell whispered around her—an unseen barrier that tugged at her senses, slowing her steps, dulling the world beyond.

The ground beneath her shoes was uneven, strewn with brittle leaves that crunched in the oppressive stillness. A wet warmth curled through the air, carrying the faint, lingering scent of dried herbs and smoldering incense—ghosts of rituals long past, tangled in the humidity.

"Easy enough," she murmured, pressing a palm to the doll's head.

She unraveled the spell with methodical care, her magic sliding along the wards like a key in a lock. Even before the Merge, spells like these would not have posed a problem for her—the magic holding it together was old but brittle, its edges fraying after nearly a hundred years of disrepair. As the spell collapsed, the doll melted away.

She continued onward.

Her fingertips brushed the warped wood of the door, the residual magic pulsing faintly beneath the surface like a struggling heartbeat.

Brunhilda reached out with her magic and cast her first true illusion over the inhabitants— sleep, it said. All shall be well, but it is dark and you must rest.

Brunhilda crossed the threshold into the gloom. For a brief moment, the spell's dying swan song surged before loosening its grip, as if acknowledging her purpose. The cottage seemed to exhale—a fragile welcome.

Inside, the floorboards groaned beneath her weight, sighing with stories she could almost hear—a low, mournful chorus of whispered prayers, bitter regrets, and fractured sanity. The stale air clung to her skin, as if the house itself was breathing with her.

Every corner held a shadow that wasn't quite a shadow, flickering at the edge of her vision—remnants of their fading light.

As she walked the halls, those memories danced.

She saw Mary-Alice Claire pacing the length of the house, her hands trembling around a porcelain teacup. Astrid sobbed in the corner, her fingers bloody from scraping at the locked window. Their voices overlapped—pleading, furious, resigned.

Brunhilda's eyes fluttered closed for a moment. The bus ride and the lingering weight of that exhaustion—it blurred the edges of reality. The world tilted beneath her feet.

She had, briefly, wondered when she crossed into the home why Klaus did not layer additional curses upon the occupants. She knew now—a curse wasn't necessary. The solitude destroyed them just as surely.

Mary-Alice's voice drifted toward her like smoke: Astrid, I think we're trapped.

Like rats, the girl whispered back.

The image flickered—and with a sharp lurch, Brunhilda's mind leapt to another Claire.

Davina.

They had only met three times—brief encounters, but Brunhilda thought she had meant something to her.

She remembered when Davina had asked, Brunhilda had happily cut her hand. Together they crafted their ritual in blind, grasping hope that it would pull Kol Mikaelson back from the grave. They had worked on it for weeks and Brunhilda had, for the first time in years, felt the crushing feeling of a tentative hope. Surely Kol Mikaelson would be able to help her set things right.

But he never returned.

It was before they fully understood how completely the Other Side had been destroyed. Davina could summon his echo, his ghost, but no spell could pull blood from this stone. He would remain just that—an echo.

And Davina—Brunhilda never saw her again.

A bitter knot formed in her chest.

Brunhilda forced her breathing to steady. It isn't real. It's residue, a lingering sadness. Nothing more.

She focused on the sharp smell of blood and lobelia lingering in the air, anchoring herself to the present. The house remained silent around her, dust motes drifting through shafts of dying light. She moved up the narrow staircase, each creaking step echoing like a heartbeat. The attic hatch was closed.

Brunhilda pulled the string. The ladder unfolded with a sharp clatter.

Inside, she found the coffin.

The faint pulse of magic emanating from it tugged at her senses—a steady rhythm beneath the silence, raw and flickering like a flame.

Brunhilda pressed her palm to the coffin's edge and pushed it open.

The pale face that greeted her was hauntingly lovely, an eerie contrast to the storm of magic pulsing just beneath the surface. Freya's lips were pulled into a frown, as if she were plagued by unhappiness even in century-long slumber. Brunhilda's fingers trembled as she brushed a stray lock of hair from Freya's cheek. Her skin was cool, but not cold—the faint warmth of magic still thrummed beneath, like distant waves rippling under the hull of a small boat on a vast ocean. It battered at Brunhilda's fingers as they made contact.

I know you, the magic seemed to call out in delighted surprise, twirling around her fingertips.

A strange recognition stirred in Brunhilda. Something within her magic recognized Freya's—as if their souls were old friends meeting again after a long separation. There was a strange reverence in the way she cradled Freya's face now—and a sudden surge of sadness swelled in her chest.

"So much power," Brunhilda murmured.

She lingered in the attic until the lines between past and present began to fray once more. The air thickened, the shadows deepened—and suddenly, she was not alone.

Faint whispers drifted through the silence, snatches of broken words, echoes of voices long lost to madness.

A tremble threaded through the air—the sorrowful cry of spirits trapped between worlds. Figures flickered at the edge of her vision—twisted shapes, the haunted forms of those who had been left to linger and die. Their eyes gleamed with desperation, their bodies bowed beneath the weight of their endless imprisonment. Astrid's madness and Mary-Alice's lucid sorrow clung to the walls, seeping into the wood until the house itself seemed to breathe their torment.

Please, the voices whispered.

Time unraveled around her. Minutes stretched and collapsed, past and present tangling. The sorrow layered into this place warped her senses—she reached out to touch the coffin edge, only to watch it ripple like water. Footsteps echoed behind her, though the room was empty.

Her heart clenched under the weight of their despair. Fear prickled along her skin, but beneath it bloomed something fiercer: sympathy—and a rising, burning anger.

The house exhaled around her, its sorrow heavy as rain-soaked cloth. If I could wring the sadness from these walls, Brunhilda thought, it would drown us with the depth of it.

With her mind suddenly made up, she wove a spell of lightness around Freya's body with practiced precision. The magic hummed, lifting just enough of her weight to make carrying her possible. Even so, Freya's body was no feather.

Brunhilda dragged her carefully, step by step, down the narrow staircase. The house pressed in with every step, shadows flickering, the weight of them clinging to the walls of this haunted house.

The car waited where she had left it, inconspicuous and ready. Behind the wheel sat a taxi driver with the dull eyes of someone under her thrall. With a gentle tug on her magic, she drew him back into motion. Together, they lifted Freya's body into the backseat. The driver said nothing, his gaze respectfully averted, his mind sealed and obedient beneath her compulsion.

Brunhilda closed the car door, Freya settled safely inside, and turned back to the sagging house that had held its prisoners for far too long. She lifted her hand, fingers splayed, her magic coiling tightly in her chest.

Flee, she ordered the living witches, the word sharp and commanding in her mind. Go. There is nothing left for you here.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened—but then, like smoke slipping through the cracks, she felt them begin to stir. One by one, the living witches peeled themselves from the rotting walls, from the crumbling floorboards, until the house stood empty but for the weight of its own sorrow and its many ghosts. When she was sure they had all gone, she flicked her wrist.

Flames licked up the dry wood, eager for her spark. In the distant glassy panes, she saw the faint reflections of the trapped witches, watching, as the blaze swallowed the house whole—and as the roof suddenly collapsed inward, she felt them slip free, finally unbound, their tether to this place burned away.

The ride to the motel passed in silence, the city slipping by in ghostly blurs of light and shadow.

Once there, the driver helped her again, lifting Freya carefully through the faded door into the cramped, dim motel room she had claimed for the coming weeks. They set Freya gently on the narrow bed, the mattress groaning under the strain.

Brunhilda walked the man to the door and compelled him one final time.

"You will leave. You will forget this night."

The man nodded, blank-eyed, and left without a word.

She locked the door behind him and sagged against it, her knees trembling beneath the weight of her tiredness.

Her limbs ached from the effort of dragging Freya's body, her breath shallow in the thick motel air. She felt hallowed out by the day—the fatigue of carrying Freya's body, the weight of all those ghosts and memories. She always hated entering liminal spaces, it took so much out of her. Tiredness wrapped around her like a second skin, but beneath the weariness pulsed something sharper—a gnawing doubt that scratched at the edges of her resolve.

Is this even enough?

Her fingers brushed the rough fabric covering Freya's still form. The witches nestled within her offered a chorus of opinions, and their clamor almost unraveled her careful calm.

Brunhilda clenched her jaw and shoved them into silence—at least for now.

Alone with her thoughts—or as alone as she could ever hope to be—she allowed herself a truth she rarely dared admit.

She was scared. Desperately.

Yet beneath the exhaustion, beneath the doubt, something fragile stirred—a small, stubborn ember of hope.

Chapter Text

The moment she brought Freya's slumbering body into her stale little room with its peeling wallpaper and strange smells, Brunhilda was struck by an abrupt feeling of embarrassment. Suddenly, she couldn't bear to exist in the crusted remnants of human filth for another day, much less keep Freya's body there.

The morning after her realization, she compelled the housekeeper to scrub every surface, every forgotten corner, until the place practically gleamed.

The woman worked tirelessly under Brunhilda's direction, dutifully ignoring the very obvious body laid out on the second queen bed. Brunhilda instructed her to treat Freya as nothing more than an unusually shaped pile of laundry that she wasn't allowed to touch, and the glassy-eyed housekeeper accepted that without question.

Only then could Brunhilda relax, knowing there were no lingering stains, no questionable fluids, no hidden infestations lurking in the seams of the mattress. With every sweep of the mop and every scrubbed tile, Brunhilda's tension eased—just a fraction—but enough to finally rest without the gnawing fear of invisible threats clinging to the shadows.

But rest was fleeting and never truly peaceful. Her mind churned constantly, a whirlpool of plans, worries, and tangled magical theory, punctuated by the faint, almost imperceptible hum of Freya's latent power across the room. The body was inert but not lifeless—magic shimmered faintly beneath the skin, a secret glow only Brunhilda could perceive.

The days blurred together, punctuated by brief forays into the city. Money was a constant need—she could easily compel herself a meal, but if she was caught not paying on camera often enough then she risked attracting the kind of attention she wanted to avoid. So, she picked tourists with easy smiles and pockets full of cash, their hands loose with spending. She approached them in public places—a café, a crowded street corner, outside the museums. Always with a smile and a map clutched in her hand, so she wouldn't look amiss in case anything was immortalized on film.

"Give me a few bills," she would urge them quietly, her voice threading into their minds like silk.

The money slipped from wallets without thought, unnoticed and unmissed.

At night, in the cramped motel room, she counted the notes methodically. Nearly a thousand dollars. She folded the bills in neat stacks and tucked them deep inside her backpack, nestled between spare clothes and her grimoire like some small, dragon hoard. It was a pitiful nest egg, but a necessary one all the same.

She'd also managed to get her hands on a few blood bags during the week.

Getting them had been the easy part—a well-placed compulsion had lured a nursing aide to a parking lot far from the local hospital, cooler in hand. The harder part was consuming it. The taste made her stomach churn—metallic, stale, and dead—but the layers of constant compulsion use frayed the edges of her self-control more than she liked to admit. She couldn't afford to lose control and try to suck some poor passerby dry like a capri sun again.

So, she drank a blood bag a day—quick, disgusted, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and trying not to taste it.

With little else to do and having worn every piece of clothing she owned at least once, Brunhilda finally gathered her laundry into a trash bag and walked to the nearest laundromat.

The place was humid and smelled faintly of bleach and old quarters, the rhythmic churn of washers filling the stale air. She sat cross-legged on a molded plastic chair, thumbing through a random magazine as the machines rattled and spun, occasionally glancing up to make sure no one was paying too much attention to her. She compulsively checked the dryer settings, folding her clothes into neat, precise squares. The act grounded her more than she expected.

For an hour, she allowed herself the illusion of normalcy—just another woman washing her clothes, waiting for time to pass.

But that hour was a crack in the otherwise relentless pressure of the week. The seven days following Brunhilda's return from the cottage passed in a strange blur—exhaustion, unease, and restless calculation bleeding into one another until the hours felt indistinguishable.

Her time was mostly spent attempting to unravel the tangled magic binding Freya.

It was June 6 now—ten days since she first arrived in this universe.

Each night—after her meal of blood she drank too quickly to taste, and cheap fast food she paid for with stolen bills—she would sit at Freya's side. She pressed her hands to the sleeping woman's sternum, alternating between peeling back layers of spell work and trying to see if she could push enough magic into the witch to knock something useful loose.

She learned to find the delicate thread tethering the sleeping Freya's life to her aunt with ease—a pulse in the sleeping woman's core that did not belong. The magic was old and clung to Freya like a second skin, like a shroud. Brunhilda traced the edges of the spell, carefully, methodically, night after night. Sometimes she thought she could hear a faint echo—a distant ringing, like the toll of a bell—as if Dahlia might, on some level, sense her prying fingers.

But Dahlia did not scare her. Brunhilda was hesitant, of course, but frightened? No.

After days of study and restless pacing, she saw that her path had forked into two dangerous, imperfect roads.

She could track Dahlia down and kill her—a task that sounded simple in theory and was anything but. The woman lived for a single year at a time and was at the mercy of the world for the other hundred. Anyone who was able to protect their body for that length of time without ever regaining their consciousness was worthy of being treated with the weary fear one typically reserved for seasoned predators. Brunhilda would need Freya's help to stand even a fraction of a chance at finding her.

But even that plan came with risks. Would she be able to wake Freya without also waking Dahlia? If Dahlia sensed the early awakening, would she come for them faster? She wasn't even sure of Freya's true capabilities—only that Bonnie had spoken of her highly and that the few dreams she had that featured her, Freya had done what almost felt like miracles. But that had been in her previous world. Maybe in this one, Freya had never learned those skills. Who was to say that Freya would even want to help her?

Brunhilda knew better than to assume that being saved and being willing to fight were the same thing.

The second option was cleaner on paper: sever the tether. It would wake them both—violently, abruptly—but it would also weaken them both in the process. Dahlia would lose power, but so would Freya. She would wake diminished—a shadow of the strength she had once wielded.

There was no clean victory. No perfect outcome. Either path meant starting the clock the moment Freya opened her eyes.

Eventually, Brunhilda accepted what she had known all along—Dahlia had to die. It wasn't a question of if. It was just a matter of when and the method of execution.

Brunhilda decided to evaluate the second option in more detail and she tried once more to hone in on the required ingredients to break the immortality spell. Hours were spent pacing the length of the motel, alternating between her notebook and grimoire, scraping the depths of her memory and the fragments of lore she had scavenged from her fractured timeline. The spell tethering Freya to Dahlia was almost a thousand years old, but Brunhilda had come to understand something about ancient spells—they always followed a certain logic.

She combed through her memories for every immortality or life lengthening spell she had learned. Tessa gave the occasional piece of feedback and Silas advised her on the differences between crafting resurrection and longevity curses—both perspectives were invaluable. Quickly, patterns began to emerge.

It only confirmed what she already suspected—there would be three elements she would need to identify: the anchor to her mortality, the catalyst of why she cast the spell, and the heart that still connected her to her humanity.

She could make educated guesses by scrying, but it would be difficult—almost impossible. She would need to watch Dahlia for days, weeks more likely, and try to guess based on what she saw.

"Hatred often makes the strongest chains," Silas suggested when she expressed her frustrations.

At first, Brunhilda almost dismissed him, thinking he was throwing her another red herring. But the more she considered it, the more the idea rooted itself.

Immortality spells were rarely about ambition. Most witches sought power not for the joy of it, but because someone had made them afraid. Someone had hunted them, cornered them, made them desperate.

She dredged up what little she knew of Dahlia's life and realized she didn't know who exactly the witch's enemies had been.

With the confirmation that she would not be able to figure out this puzzle on her own, she decided to focus on Freya instead.

She understood, after days of combing through the dense layers of magic binding the witch to her century long slumber, that the connection between Freya and Dahlia wasn't delicate or passive at all. It wasn't a simple stasis. It was a living tether—a closed loop, a carefully engineered rhythm that fed power between them in cycles.

Brunhilda marveled at the elegance of the loop even as she resented it. It wasn't a crude chain—it was a self-repairing lattice that seemed to stretch and breathe, as if it had adapted over time to all of Freya's desperate, failed attempts to break it. It wasn't just binding Freya's body to eternal sleep—it was keeping her magic dormant, siphoning it quietly, drip by drip, back toward Dahlia.

The connection was parasitic but sophisticated.

Brunhilda wondered how much Freya understood about the extent of her captivity. Did she know how deep the rot ran? Brunhilda didn't know Freya well enough (or at all) to be able to postulate a guess.

What if she could disrupt the rhythm of the spell? What if she could unhook Freya from the loop—not destroy it entirely, but offset it?

Brunhilda's hands trembled as she scrawled the numbers across the page. The spell's cycle wasn't fixed—it could be manipulated. And if she was right, they would have up to a year to gather the ingredients and hunt down Dahlia. But magic like this could only be shifted so much before the other side of the tether felt the pull. Dahlia would come. Brunhilda didn't know when, but the clock would start the moment Freya's eyes opened.

She forced herself not to dwell on it and clung to the other possibilities instead.

Freya awake now—with her power, if not fully intact, at least reachable.

Freya alive now—able to help untangle Dahlia's magic from the inside out.

It was dangerous. It was reckless. But it was the only path that didn't involve waiting half a decade while Inadu gnawed at the back of Brunhilda's mind, biding her time, growing stronger.

Brunhilda would have to be precise. She needed to fool only one side of the tether into believing time had passed as it should. She would likely need to build a blockage within the lattice—just enough of a delay to make the information lag. It might not buy her the full year, but maybe, just maybe, it would give her a few precious months.

Brunhilda worked with Emily, Silas, and a reluctant Qetsiyah to craft the spell—a task less about harmony and more about dragging warring titans into a temporary truce.

Perhaps "worked with" was too generous a term.

Emily was the most willing, but she approached this new problem like a weaver faced with a snarled loom—with absolutely no nonsense.

Silas lounged in the corner of her mind, alternating between caustic insight and needling commentary. He poked holes in their logic like an engineer testing the strength of a dam—not to sabotage it, but to ensure it held.

Qetsiyah was another matter entirely. She dismissed Brunhilda's abilities but lingered anyway, hovering at the edges of her host's thoughts, speaking up only when irritation dragged her forward. She criticized every decision, scoffed at the spell craft, and snapped corrections when Brunhilda or the others misstepped. It wasn't loyalty that kept her there—it was loathing and an unwillingness to allow Silas to do anything that did not somehow include her. But Brunhilda would take what she could get.

Over the coming days, sleep came to Brunhilda in scraps and her tiredness continued to grow, settling under her skin like a splinter she couldn't dig out. But slowly, the spell began to take shape.

"You can't just force her awake," Emily warned. "If you miscalculate, it'll recoil. You could end up crushing her consciousness instead of freeing it."

"I know," Brunhilda muttered. Too hard a break, and both Freya and Dahlia would likely be lobotomized in the attempt. Too soft and the tether would continue to hold, and they would both likely wake up simultaneously. "That's why I'm asking for your help. I can't afford to get this wrong."

Dahlia didn't frighten her as much as Inadu did, but she had no interest in facing her either. Brunhilda still wasn't sure how far Silas's immortality affected her—whether she could still die or not—but she certainly didn't want to end up as some eternal pincushion for a sadistic witch.

"And we are helping, sweetness. Aren't we such helpful little elves, hopping along when you say jump?" Silas's voice oozed sarcasm.

Brunhilda rolled her eyes and continued to speak to Emily. "I'm just not sure how to properly bend the tether."

"Not bend," Emily corrected. "Displace. You need to create a decoy—make the tether feel as if Freya is still asleep."

"And you think that will fool Dahlia?" Silas's laugh dripped disdain. "She's not some village hedge witch. Her magic has survived for centuries. Trickery won't hold. My vote remains unchanged—you need to cut the connection so deep it bleeds."

"And what would that do to Freya?" Brunhilda snapped, pressing her palms to her eyes. The headache had been simmering for hours—their constant bickering like iron nails driven into her skull.

A third voice, cold and unimpressed, slid in. "You're all idiots."

Brunhilda sighed. "Oh, you've finally decided to join us?"

"I was waiting for the children to exhaust themselves," Qetsiyah drawled. "If you're going to destabilize the loop, you'll need to mimic the passage of time and weave a counter-rhythm into the curse's pulse. Otherwise, it will detect the imbalance and collapse the cycle. Emily's right about the decoy—" Brunhilda felt her flick her spirit towards Emily with reluctant acknowledgment, "—but Silas is right about the depth. Surface magic won't hold. Subtlety is overrated anyway."

Brunhilda's stomach twisted. "What's deep enough?"

Qetsiyah's lips curled into something sharp. "You'll have to bind yourself to Freya as a living anchor to the block you want to insert—doing so will make you part of the connection, at least until Dahlia wakes up. A triangle is easier to stabilize than a circle."

"That's dangerous," Emily said quickly.

"That's magic," Silas purred, clearly delighted. "Oh, I do like the sound of this."

Brunhilda let out a slow breath, exhaustion burning in her bones, but she pushed through it. "Fine. We do it this way. We build the decoy—Emily and I can handle the spellwork. Silas will provide the raw force to split the threads. And Qetsiyah—" her throat tightened, "—you'll help me craft the anchor."

Silas's voice slid back in, barbed. "Know a thing or two about anchor spells, don't you, Tessa? Bit of a specialty, I hear."

There was the faintest flicker—almost a smirk. "I do favor what works."

Brunhilda blinked, faintly startled by the almost pleasant rhythm of their sarcasm. They weren't exactly fighting. Not like before. Were they... getting used to each other? Getting used to being trapped within her?

It was a positively disquieting thought.

...

Brunhilda counted down the days with a quiet, steady determination until she could put her plan into motion.

It took three days for Jupiter to reach opposition—when the planet would blaze brighter and loom closer than it had in over a year. It was an event that came once every thirteen months, when Earth would be perfectly positioned between Jupiter and the sun, the planet's pale light reflecting off the waxing crescent moon.

She had spent that time chasing down rare ingredients through the winding streets of the French Quarter. The guarana seeds had consumed most of her time—hidden on the dusty shelves of a cramped occult shop, wrapped in faded paper. They practically buzzed in her palm, charged with a faint, residual energy. The sweet-bitter scent of ginseng and peppermint clung to her belongings, mixing with the iron tang of her own blood—freshly drawn and willingly offered.

Tonight, under the watchful gaze of Jupiter and the crescent moon, she would attempt it.

She had compelled another cab driver—a different man this time—coaxing him into silence and obedience, ensuring he would wait patiently in the car parked at the edge of the clearing, no matter how long the ritual took.

Brunhilda carried Freya's lifeless body into the tangled heart of the Bayou, choosing a secluded clearing far from the city and its brightness. The thick canopy above fractured the moonlight into mottled patterns across the damp earth, the air heavy with the scent of water and decay.

Around the car and the carefully prepared ritual site, Brunhilda wove a barrier of magic and salt—a potent ward meant to keep the Crescent wolves at bay. Their howls echoed faintly in the distance, each drawn by scents and sounds imperceptible to humans. The barrier held steady, though she could feel several wolves growing curious toward the south. They would not be able to breach it, but it made her grateful she had set it. She could not afford to risk a disturbance—not tonight.

She'd have to fix their curse after this. The thought weighed on Brunhilda as the Bayou pressed in around her. It would serve her well to have the Crescent wolves on her side—wild, fierce allies who would not take such an action lightly.

And, on a more personal note, she had liked Hayley the few times their paths had crossed. She still remembered meeting the hybrid in the aftermath of the End. She had been the last remaining vampiric thing left in that version of the world. Brunhilda still wasn't sure how she had survived. As far as she knew, Hope had vanished after Inadu was removed from the board, and yet somehow, the girl's lone sireling lingered.

The woman had carried a stubborn strength beneath her rough exterior, a fierce protectiveness Brunhilda had quietly respected—even if they had never fully trusted each other. It was through Hayley's reluctant words, shared in moments where they both felt so alone and regretful at all that had transpired, that Brunhilda had finally learned about what had truly transpired between the Mikaelsons and the Hollow.

She needed to get Hayley away from Atticus Shane as soon as possible if she wanted to save her—and Brunhilda was surprised to find that the answer was simple. She wanted to. Hayley, fierce and loyal, had earned Brunhilda's respect in their brief encounters, and Brunhilda didn't want to lose the chance of meeting her again in this version of the world.

Moving Hayley out of Shane's orbit was critical—but what to do with Shane himself, that remained the question.

He was a volatile storm of grief with a scary knowledge of Expression and magics even darker still, a threat far beyond a mere man. Brunhilda didn't waste time questioning whether Shane deserved death or mercy. That was irrelevant.

She knew the accident that had stolen his family had pushed him to the edge, steering him toward a fate bound to Silas. If Shane's son died again or if Shane's descent continued unchecked, then he would inflict Silas on the world as he had in her original world.

If Brunhilda struck Shane down before the accident, maybe the chain of events could be broken. But what if killing him then unleashed someone worse—some darker chaos she couldn't foresee or control? And if she waited, trying to fix the accident and keep Shane's family intact, would that truly save the world—or simply postpone its inevitable collapse? His wife was deep into Expression, so she doubted that it would be that simple.

Neither choice felt clean and neither outcome was palatable.

No matter what she did to Shane—death or salvation—the threat would remain. Silas would find another pawn, another soul to corrupt and seduce into awakening him.

She would need to find a more permanent solution in the future.

Freya lay unconscious on the ground, the hard earth serving as a makeshift altar. Moonlight caught the edges of Freya's pale form, making her seem almost luminous. She was a very beautiful woman, Brunhilda thought as she waited for the celestial event to reach its zenith.

This magic required an exacting balance. Freya would need to draw power from an external source, something steady and powerful, without fully breaking the tether that held her captive. That source would have to be a living conduit and willing anchor through which Freya could quietly gather strength.

In an ideal world, tonight would give them twelve months to free Freya from her aunt's thrall. Realistically, Brunhilda suspected they'd have four. Five if they were lucky.

After a few minutes, the concoction Brunhilda had prepared was carefully administered—each ingredient measured to coax Freya's power awake. The night air pressed cool and damp against her skin. Overhead, Jupiter blazed at the height of its power while the crescent moon offered its quiet counterbalance.

Brunhilda raised her arms, palms open to the heavens, feeling the distant power pulse through the air and settle into her bones.

"Filo temporis. Expergiscere." Brunhilda chanted—drawing upon the magic of Jupiter, such an expansive bright thing, and weaving it with the softness of the moonlight, more dark than it was light. "Solve carmen. Expergiscere."

The spell wove tighter, pulling on all the strands inside her. Silas's dark magic writhed at the edges, familiar and heavy, but it did not overwhelm. Emily's cushioned it—cool, steady, and light.

Tessa's fire startled her—she had not expected the woman to ever offer it, especially not freely. It coiled suddenly around Brunhilda's spine, scorching and fierce, curling through her chest, her hands, her fingertips—heat of the dead witch threading into the spell.

Brunhilda felt the clash of all these forces within her—Silas's shadow, Emily's calm, Tessa's fire, and her own stubborn hope—twisting and knotting into something stronger than any of them alone.

She was both channeler and conduit. The power moved through her like lightning, but she held steady.

Her voice didn't falter. She pushed deeper into the magic, still repeating her chant over and over, driving the force of the spell into Freya's body until—

...

Freya's eyes snapped open, wide and unfocused, her breath shallow and quick.

The world came into focus through a haze of shadow and muted green. Confusion clouded her gaze as she blinked against the dim light filtering through the dense canopy above.

She was laying on something hard—a bed of dirt and moss. The sharp, sour tang of magic still clung to the damp Bayou air around her, vibrating through her bones, which frightened her.

She sat up with a jolt, suddenly realizing she was indeed awake, and clawed at the air as if trying to catch hold of something she'd lost.

Panic flashed across her face as her head whipped around, taking in the gnarled trees and the runes that surround her body, drawn with salt. She looks around and notices the swampy water nearby, and a feeling of dread grips her.

"Please tell me that you didn't just drag me out of one coffin to throw me into a watery one."

"No," a voice answers—feminine, a bit manic. Freya turns to look at her captor and then—

Her.

Freya freezes entirely, not daring to move an inch. Something coils in her chest—a hum, a pull.

Soulmate.

The knowing slammed into her like gravity, deep and immediate, the kind of recognition that couldn't be explained, only felt. It hurt to look at her.

But the woman didn't appear to notice. She gave no sign she felt it, no flicker of recognition in her distant, analytical gaze—like someone inspecting the result of a long experiment, not someone who had just stumbled into the rarest bond supernatural creatures could ever experience.

Freya's chest ached. Her lips parted, but no words came.

Freya felt as if she should start crying.

"I'm Brunhilda Voss," the girl says without being asked. Her tone is firm, and her shoulders are tilted back, her posture is impeccable. She looks like she's been preparing for this, preparing for Freya.

Freya still can't find the words. She keeps looking at Brunhilda—her eyes roaming over the other witch's face, her slender but muscular frame, and her wild gaze.

After a moment, Brunhilda looks sheepish—as if she had just realized something. "I know that it isn't ideal—but I promise that you're safe."

Safe.

Never has she woken up safe—not since her mother sold her for the possibility of future sons, not since her aunt had forced the secret of immortality against her spirit, a burning brand.

"Where am I?"

"You're still in New Orleans," the woman assures Freya. "I had to move you to the bayou. There was too much light pollution in the city proper to complete the ritual to wake you up."

Before Freya can say anything, a sudden howl breaks through the clearing—and she startles at the noise.

"Don't worry." Brunhilda says. "The Crescent wolves roam this territory—I figured you wouldn't want to be gnawed on your first night back." She gestured toward the salt lining the perimeter. "They can't cross the barrier. Not tonight."

Freya's brow furrowed as she peered at the line—the magic was dense enough to slow even the most relentless predator. It seems like her soulmate is a very powerful witch, though Freya had already guess as much based on the nature of their meeting.

Freya's eyes narrowed, trying to catch up. "How did you wake me?"

Brunhilda's eyes didn't stray from her face, but she did something with her expression that Freya didn't quite understand—as if she was having trouble listening to just one thing. "I adjusted the tether between you and Dahlia. You were supposed to sleep until 2014. It's 2008. I can go into the details later."

"Thank you..." Freya breathed, though the words felt too small, too clumsy for what she meant. Gratitude, confusion, panic—all of it tangled in her throat. She glanced nervously at the dark woods beyond the salt line, her fingers digging into the moss beneath her.

Her voice dropped, tight with worry. "But we can't stay here. If Dahlia finds me—"

Brunhilda's mouth twitched, almost amused. "Ah, about that."

Freya's gaze snapped to her.

"I didn't just wake you," Brunhilda continued. "I stretched the rhythm of your curse. I forced it into a different cycle. She should still be sleeping for some time."

Freya's brow knit tighter. "Wait—how did you do that?"

Brunhilda glanced at her, as if deciding how much to say. "I bent the timing knot in the spell. Forced it to miscount the years."

Freya's eyes widened, incredulous. "That's... that's impossible. I've tried but it's self-correcting."

Brunhilda's lips twitched. "Only if you let it correct itself. I anchored the knot to something else. Something Dahlia never knew to account for."

"What did you use?"

Brunhilda offered a cryptic smile. "A ghost—someone who wasn't supposed to be here in the first place."

Freya's pulse quickened. Her face felt hot. "You manipulated a ghost to buy me time?"

"I manipulate a lot of things. Come on—we can walk and talk."

She reached out and Freya looked at the hand—such a small hand, she thought. She grasped it and the skin was warm. Brunhilda pulled her up and Freya felt clumsy, like a newborn fawn, silly and almost childish compared to such a solid person.

Freya swallowed hard. "How long do we have?"

Brunhilda's dark eyes flicked toward the trees, calculating. "Four months. Maybe a little more if we're careful. Dahlia won't notice the shift immediately. I've bought us some time."

"Four months?" Freya echoed, half in disbelief.

"At least," she confirmed. "I'm hoping for longer. Maybe a year. Maybe just weeks. It depends on how quickly she adapts to the new presence in the loop."

Freya's pulse hammered in her ears. "And when she notices?"

Brunhilda shrugged, unapologetic. "Then she'll come for us."

Their eyes locked. Freya felt the familiar spark tighten in her chest, but she shoved it down, focusing instead on the cold reality settling between them.

"Us?"

Brunhilda's voice softened. "I didn't wake you up just to leave you alone. We'll be ready when she comes."

Freya hesitated, but there was something steady in Brunhilda's gaze—unshakable like she'd already mapped the thousand possible outcomes and was simply walking the most survivable path.

Finally, Freya exhaled, the weight in her chest loosening just a little. "Then we better get moving."

Brunhilda's mouth lifted in the barest hint of a smile. "Come on, then. Let's not waste the quiet."

Chapter Text

Freya sat cross-legged on the bed, a half-eaten Happy Meal balanced in her lap, its cardboard edges wilting from the humidity. Beside her, the unopened toy sat untouched, its bright colors jarringly out of place against the outdated floral comforter. Across from her, Brunhilda lounged in a battered chair, damp curls clinging to her temples from the heat.

She had insisted on stopping for food before they returned, compelling the cab driver into a silent, obedient detour.

Freya hadn't known what to order, hadn't even known where to begin, so Brunhilda had picked for her.

When the woman over the intercom had asked Brunhilda what she wanted to eat, she had almost given into her urges to compel the voice to cut her wrists and empty her blood into a to-go container. Even now, even full of fries and soda, she could feel that gnawing edge under her skin—an itch, a twinge of hunger whenever she was around humans. It was the lingering bleed of Silas's thirst, leaking through the cracks in their uneasy coexistence.

Silas and the other ghosts had gone quiet immediately following the ritual, vanishing into the deeper dips of her psyche where she hadn't cared to follow. They had felt almost... diminished after the ritual, and she imagined they needed time to recover their full power. Whatever little pocket of her mind they'd claimed was unknowable to her, and she was content to leave it that way.

Besides, the silence had been... nice.

She'd been able to focus on Freya, for the length of the car ride, without his half-amused taunts or Tessa's trigger-quick temper threading through every decision. But now Silas was talking again—low, sardonic remarks humming at the edges of her thoughts like distant radio static. For the moment, she ignored him.

Brunhilda sat across from Freya, perched on the opposite bed, hands resting loosely on her knees. She watched Freya with an unreadable expression before finally speaking.

"The world ends in a few years."

Freya paused mid-bite and she tilted her head, waiting for her to continue.

"I'm not from here," Brunhilda said. "Here being this world. At least not this version of it. It's like... time travel, sort of. But not really. I'm from a parallel version of your world—I'm not sure if they had sci-fi novels where, when, you're from, but if they did then it's sorta like that."

She didn't explain the sacrifice. Didn't explain how the magic worked. Didn't go into the details. They weren't relevant. Not yet.

"What matters is your family—they die," Brunhilda said flatly. "All of them. Soon, if we don't change the story."

The weight of it hung in the room. Freya, visibly shaken but steady, carefully set her meal aside.

"Okay," she said quietly. "What do we do?"

She didn't ask any other questions and Brunhilda was suddenly overtaken by the realization... she trusts me. She didn't have to show proof, didn't have to beg. For some unknowable reason this woman—who had no reason to believe her—did.

Brunhilda stood from the bed and pulled a corkboard out from underneath it, holding it out towards Freya so she could take possession of it.

It was a mess of pinned scraps—hastily torn notes, bits of schemes and jotted down memories pasted across every inch. Threads of red string crisscrossed the surface, connecting events and places like a madwoman's conspiracy.

Freya's breath hitched as her eyes swept across the cluttered board, but they froze—wide and sharp—when they landed on two names pinned in careful script. Her fingers trembled as she reached forward, brushing over the slips of paper, reading them aloud under her breath.

Finn Mikaelson — Murdered by Matt Donovan. October 28, 2010. 

Kol Mikaelson — Murdered by Jeremy Gilbert. January 28, 2011.

A wounded sound erupted from her. "These two... they die?"

Brunhilda nodded.

Freya's hand lingered over Finn's name. "What happened?"

Brunhilda sat back on the bed, folding her arms loosely. "Finn was linked to your siblings through a spell. Esther's doing. She told him it was the only way to fix the mistake she thought she'd made. Finn believed her. He was ready to die if it meant destroying the rest."

Freya blinked, stunned. "He agreed to that?"

"Yes," she said. She did not offer any additional clarification.

Freya's throat tightened. "So how does he die?"

Brunhilda's jaw tensed. "Damon Salvatore and his little gang hunted him down. Finn didn't stand a chance. It would've killed the rest of them... if Bonnie hadn't broken the binding spell just seconds before."

"Did he... did he do something to them?"

"No," Brunhilda said. "He was the one Original who hadn't hurt them. But they still took the shot."

Freya's hand drifted to the next name. "And Kol?"

Brunhilda's gaze darkened. "He feared Silas rising again. Feared him enough to try to stop them from waking him up, but no one listened. The worst part? Kol knew. He was right."

Freya's attention drifted back to the board. There were more dates, she realized—so many more. Some recent, some impossibly old. The Harvest Ritual was pinned near the corner, next to a small, half-torn photo of a dark-haired girl Freya didn't recognize—Davina Claire, scribbled in the margin. Near the bottom, another pinned slip: The rupture of the Other Side. Brunhilda had written nothing else on it, just the name Bonnie Bennett and the date it happened.

But the next item that pulled at Freya's gut was pinned near the edge of the board: a scrap that simply read Black Death. First confirmed case in East Asia, weeks after Rebekah's murder.

"What's that one?" Freya asked, pointing.

Brunhilda glanced at it briefly. "A ripple. Nature wasn't happy losing the tippy top of its food chain."

Freya went quiet as she took in the timeline—her fingers running over the dates that each member of her family died. Her fingers stopped on her own name and her frown turned more confused, more horrified.

The silence stretched out between them again.

"Stop ignoringgggg me," Silas's voice unspooled across her consciousness, lazy and drawn out. "I'm bored and hungry—it's so dull, tucked away in you. Emily's a bore and Inadu is a horrible conversation partner, and Tessa is... well, Tessa."

Brunhilda didn't dignify him with a response. She'd long since learned that silence was more aggravating to him than any argument.

"Oh, come now, don't pout. You've missed me. You always do."

The witch continued to ignore him, and his spirit did the metaphysical equivalent of laying on the ground and throwing out his arms and legs in a tantrum.

She isn't sure what he expected. She has company—important company—and she refuses to look crazy in front of someone as pretty as Freya.

"Fine." Silas said after she still refused to engage. "I suppose I'll go and rummage through your memories—the most embarrassing ones, mind you—since you don't want to give me the stimulation that I need. You're a terrible ghost owner. Horrible, really. You haven't taken me to the vet even once, it's like you don't even love me."

Brunhilda rolled her eyes and shut the door on his words like slamming a window against the cold. It wouldn't keep him out, not really. Silas could easily push through if he wanted, but she thought he needed to learn to content himself with the company he was destined to keep for the rest of their story. If he wanted better roommates then he really should have filled Brunhilda in on his lie before they made the jump.

After a long time, Freya finally sets aside the board. Her jaw worked. "And Silas?"

Brunhilda's eyes flicked briefly to the center of the conspiracy board, where Silas sat, circled in thick red ink, webbed with lines leading in all directions.

"I don't know where to start," she admitted.

"Maybe you could start by telling me who—or what—he is."

Brunhilda, sitting cross-legged on the motel bed, popped a fry into her mouth and chewed slowly, weighing how much to say. "Huh... I didn't expect you not to know. I keep forgetting you haven't actually been alive for the entire thousand years."

Freya shot her a dry look. "Well, forgive me for sleeping through most of it."

"Right, right—ten years sprinkled across a millennium. Let me say—all that uninterrupted beauty sleep did wonders."

Freya's cheeks turned a pretty pink color.

Brunhilda laughed. "Well, I think it's safe to say you have some significant gaps in your knowledge of magical history."

"It's not like Dahlia cared if I was well educated," Freya muttered.

"Silas broke my world," she says. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. "He was the first immortal. Long before vampires, he realized that he wanted to live forever and, unfortunately, he figured out how."

Freya's expression hardened. "Immortality?"

Brunhilda nodded. "Yep. Not for some grand purpose—mind you—just to shack up with his girlfriend until the end of time."

"Rude," Silas said. "Also, hurtful and, frankly, an unfair assessment of what happened."

Tessa laughed.

"Anyway, he also had a fiancé, Qetsiyah. She was the one who made the elixir, and she thought they'd drink it together on their wedding day. Instead, Silas ran off with his secret lover, Amara—Qetsiyah's handmaiden, no less—and they drank it without her."

Freya winced. "Ouch."

"When Qetsiyah found out, she didn't just curse him—she ruined him." Brunhilda's voice dipped lower. "She faked Amara's death, made Silas believe she'd ripped out her heart. She offered him the Cure—freedom from a life without Amara in exchange for a mortal life spent with her. When he refused, she entombed him with the Cure and left him to rot."

"How long was he imprisoned?"

"He still is," Brunhilda said—it was both the truth and a lie. "He's been in that tomb for two thousand years."

"That's..."

"Yeah. He could've taken the Cure at any time, but he chose starvation and darkness just to spite her."

"And you said that he caused the end of your world? How?"

"It's complicated," Brunhilda said.

Freya studied her for a long moment. "You're not giving me a lot of information."

"No," Brunhilda agreed.

"I assume he got out then?"

Brunhilda can't form the words, but she nodded.

Freya's face rearranged into something sympathetic, something kind. "What did he do when he got out?"

Brunhilda's jaw tensed slightly. "He broke it. That's why I'm here now."

"Broke... you keep saying that word. What does that mean exactly?"

When Brunhilda doesn't answer, Freya sighed. "Alright, I won't push you. You can tell me the rest when you're ready."

"..." Brunhilda looked at the woman sitting across from her. "Look, I promise we're going to deal with him soon enough. But it will be after we handle Dahlia. I need you free of her leash. That's the priority."

"You said we had time," she said, evenly.

"Time is slippery. I bought us some, but it's not endless. She will find you eventually if we don't hurry." Brunhilda held her gaze. "I'll need you, Freya. I can't stop it alone."

Freya reached out and settled her hand on top Brunhilda's. Her grip was firm, her cheeks flushed with determination. There was no hesitation in her. "You have me. Whatever you need. However long it takes."

Brunhilda felt something strange stir in her chest at the certainty in Freya's voice. Something... warm. Steady. It made her want to crawl out of her skin and crawl into Freya's.

"Don't go soft on me now, Sweetness," Silas said, snickering at her inner monologue.

"Okay," Freya said. "What comes next?"

Brunhilda handed Freya her notebook, opened to the newest page where she had written down her final thoughts on Dahlia's spell and a possible counter.

"I've been working on it. I think I know how to end the spell tying you both together. It would make her killable."

Freya's eyes sharpened. She sat up straighter. "How?"

Brunhilda blew out a breath, counting the pieces off on her fingers. "There's usually a structure to this kind of magic. We'll need three things: an anchor—something that tethers Dahlia to the mortal world. A catalyst—probably something that triggered the mindset needed to pursue immortality. And something that makes her vulnerable. That last one I haven't quite figured out yet."

Freya did that thing where she tilted her head. Brunhilda wondered, for a brief moment, if she knew how cute the action was. "I can think of a few options for the first part. But what are you thinking for the second?"

"My guess? The blood or bone of whoever—or whatever—she despises most in the world."

Freya's brow furrowed, the lines of her memory tightening. "Vikings."

Brunhilda's lips twitched. "Vikings?"

Freya nodded. "Dahlia told me once... she and Esther were stolen from their home as young girls by the raiders. They burned their village and dragged them away in chains. Dahlia never forgave Esther for falling in love with one of them—my father."

Brunhilda's expression brightened like someone fitting in the last piece of a puzzle. "Then the catalyst and the anchor are probably related."

Freya's gaze flicked to her, curious to hear her logic. "How do you figure?"

"She's still trapped in that moment—it's what made her." Brunhilda tapped her lip, thinking. "Even scorched earth remembers blood. We'll use the village soil for the first component and blood—no, we'll use ash to symbolize the burning of her village... the ashes of a viking."

"I don't imagine there are many of those left."

"You'd be surprised." Brunhilda said lightly. "There are your siblings—but they're off limits... that leaves one person."

"Who?"

Brunhilda grimaced.

She doesn't say it, but Freya doesn't need her to. She looks stricken. "I can't kill my father."

"You have to understand," Brunhilda said, purposefully softening her voice, "he isn't the man you remember. He isn't the father who sang to you. He isn't the man who held you when you scraped your knees or told you stories to make you laugh."

Freya's throat bobbed. "You don't know that."

"I do," Brunhilda insisted, stepping closer, her voice sharpening. "He's not that man. He's a monster. I've seen what he's done, Freya. He's slaughtered entire villages. Burned cities to ash. He's chased Klaus and your family across centuries, across continents, destroying everything in his path. Not because he wronged him. But for no other reason than he hates him."

Freya's eyes glistened, her arms crossing tightly over her chest as though she could physically hold the pieces of herself together. "But... he loved me."

Brunhilda's face softened. "Maybe he did. Maybe once he loved you more than anything in the world. Maybe to you, he was a good man. But to your brother, he was another Dahlia. He was the iron hand at his throat. He was the cage. The lash. The rod. The terror waiting in the dark."

Freya's breath hitched, and she shook her head, unwilling, unable to let go of that last shred of hope. "There must be some way... a compromise. I could talk to him. If I explain—if I tell him what's at stake—"

Brunhilda's jaw clenched, her patience thinning. "You can't save him. He doesn't want to be saved. He doesn't care about the cost. You'll never convince him to stand down. You have to choose."

She stepped forward and bent down at the end of the bed that Freya sat perched on, slowly lowering until they were nearly eye to eye.

"You can save him... or you can be free."

The silence stretched taut between them, humming with the tremble of Freya's breathing and the steady thud of Brunhilda's heart, too loud in her own ears.

It felt cruel. It was cruel. But life didn't wait for better answers—and neither did Brunhilda.

Freya looked away, her gaze distant, trapped somewhere between memory and the sharp edges of the present. When she finally met Brunhilda's eyes again, something had cracked in her. The hurt of this moment settled across her face like a fresh bruise.

Her voice was barely a whisper. "Then I choose freedom."

...

Over the next few days, Brunhilda took Freya on a whirlwind of errands and excursions. It was as if Brunhilda thought, perhaps, she could distract away the sadness lodged deep in Freya's chest.

Their first stop was a boutique tucked away in a quieter part of the city, where they picked out new clothes for Freya—each piece she tried on was undeniably nicer than anything Brunhilda currently owned. It didn't escape Freya's notice that while Brunhilda eagerly pushed her to purchase beautifully tailored coats in deep jewel tones and elegant jackets embroidered by hand, Brunhilda's own clothing, though sturdy, didn't come close in fit or form.

Yet every attempt to coax Brunhilda into shopping for herself failed spectacularly. Over the course of their trip, they amassed two entire suitcases of Freya's clothes—more than enough, Freya argued, to justify Brunhilda to even consider upgrading from whatever she could cram into her worn-out backpack.

"You don't understand," Brunhilda had said, waving her off, "my suitcase is already reserved for more important things."

Those important things, as it turned out, were books and potion ingredients—a collection of rare components that would be difficult to find once they left New Orleans: crushed vampire bones wrapped in brittle parchment, dried herbs that smelled of earth and rain, vials of enchanted oils, and strange powders.

Freya left the shop, defeated but in possession of a sizeable wardrobe.

Then came the matter of transportation.

In the shadowed streets of the city, Brunhilda cornered a wealthy human—a man whose life was comfortably mundane and whose pockets ran deep. With a light compulsion, she convinced him that gifting them his car was a favor to an old family friend—one he'd be proud to grant. The man, smiling warmly, handed over the keys without hesitation. The vehicle—a large dark sedan—became theirs. Brunhilda arranged it so he would continue to pay for the registration, insurance, and any tickets they might amass. He would never report the car missing—to him, it would always remain a generous act of goodwill.

Freya watched the entire exchange with a bewildered look, her confusion only deepening as they drove off.

It lingered, that question. Long after the shopping bags had been unpacked and the spell ingredients carefully sorted, it gnawed at her. Compulsion wasn't something witches could do. That was a vampire trick—a power they wielded with unnerving ease over humans. Brunhilda wasn't one. And yet, she'd compelled that man without effort.

One quiet evening, as they sat cross-legged on the motel floor unpacking the latest haul of magical items, Freya finally broke the silence.

"How were you able to make that man give us his car?" The words came out sharper than she intended, almost like an accusation. She softened her tone and added, "You're not a vampire. It doesn't make sense."

Brunhilda's hands stilled, a new grimoire that she had traded a spell for resting on her lap. She met Freya's gaze, something unreadable flickering behind her dark eyes.

"It's complicated," she said, voice steady but laced with caution. "It's tied to the ritual I performed to get here—the one that pulled me from my own timeline into this one."

Freya frowned, mentally rifling through everything she knew about temporal magic. The components required, the costs. None of it explained how Brunhilda could bend humans so easily.

She gestured for her to go on.

Brunhilda gave a soft, dry laugh—a sound that didn't quite reach her eyes. "Magic always comes at a price, and it rarely works in neat packages. The ritual I completed stitched me to this world in a way that lets me bend some of its rules—like influencing minds. But it's not like vampire compulsion. It's more fragile. It's taxing. And it doesn't always work the way I want it to."

Freya was sure she was lying.

"Why can't you just tell me the whole story? I'm going to figure it out eventually."

"Confident, aren't you, Princess?" Brunhilda's laugh was more genuine this time, though Freya flushed at the nickname. "Tell you what—when you finally figure it out, you come tell me. I'll let you know if you're right."

Brunhilda's sharp wit and dry humor teased a lightness out of Freya that she thought had been buried with Mathias. It felt wrong to be so easily swept into her orbit when the weight of him still lingered in Freya—he had been gone for six hundred years, but for her it had been less than a decade. The ache of him was still sharp, still fresh. But Brunhilda... Brunhilda was like the sun.

Freya laughed like she had when she was a child, and the world still felt bright and new, even if sometimes the laughter was nervous or bittersweet.

These days weren't just about what came next—they were the fragile beginnings of trust and dare Freya say it: affection. A quiet promise that, whatever lay ahead, they wouldn't face it alone.

...

One night, they lay side by side in the same bed, fully clothed on top of the covers. The TV played some strange, overly dramatic show that Freya struggled to follow. When she said as much, Brunhilda explained, with an amused smile, that it was called a "soap opera" and that the confusion was part of the appeal.

They were sharing a bottle—or three—of stolen wine. Freya had drunk at least four times as much as Brunhilda, and she could feel the warmth in her cheeks as she whispered secrets into the night.

"You know, Dahlia used to tell me when a new one was born. She never told me their names, though. I figured them out later. Except one. The youngest. I never found out who he was. What kind of older sister doesn't know the names of all of her siblings?"

Brunhilda's voice was soft, almost tender. "It's not exactly your fault, you know."

Freya waved her off. "You know what I do remember? I remember Finn. My little brother. He was so cute—he couldn't pronounce my name. Up until the day Esther gave me away, he used to call me 'Eya.'"

Brunhilda's eyes softened. "That's adorable."

"He used to follow me everywhere. Like a little duckling. It drove our mother mad." Freya laughed—a small, breathy sound that didn't quite reach her eyes. "I wonder what he's like now. When I think of him, I don't see a man—I only see the little boy with chubby hands and a terrible habit of pulling my braids."

Freya continued, the alcohol loosening an already wagging tongue. "I just wish I'd had a normal childhood with him. I wish I'd seen him grow into a man. Maybe then I'd recognize him if I passed him on the street."

The silence between them stretched—comfortable this time—until Brunhilda leaned back, taking a long sip from her plastic cup.

"You know," Brunhilda said, "I grew up in a sort of commune. A coven, really—though it barely functioned as one."

"You never talk about your family," Freya said, perking up, her curiosity piqued. "Tell me about them."

Brunhilda gave a small, rueful smile. "There wasn't much left to talk about. Most of my family... well, they were long gone by the time I was old enough to remember. But I did grow up with a few covenmates."

Freya nudged her, smiling. "Like who?"

"Edwina," Brunhilda began. "She was actually related to me—my great-aunt, I think. The last blood relative I had. She was older than dirt and more stubborn than anyone I've ever met. She used to brew potions all hours of the day. Said they'd either cure you or nudge the illness closer. She always told me that you'd never know until you took the plunge."

Freya laughed. "Sounds like a proper family herbalist."

"No, that was Eira," Brunhilda corrected with a fond smile. "She never cared for the potion-making business—she'd have traded it all for something normal if she could've. She was such a serious kid. Always frowning like the world owed her an apology. But she was brilliant."

"She sounds like the kind of person you'd want around when things went sideways," Freya said softly.

Brunhilda's smile turned wistful. "Yeah. She was."

...

They sat in a small, shaded courtyard café tucked between the wrought-iron balconies of the French Quarter, the afternoon sun filtering through draping Spanish moss, casting soft, dappled patterns across their table. The air was thick with the mingled scents of roasting coffee beans, sweet pralines wafting from a nearby bakery, and the faint perfume of magnolia blossoms carried on the warm breeze.

Freya stirred her iced tea absentmindedly, her gaze drifting to the bustling street beyond. The rhythm of the city pulsed through the brickwork, through the chatter of locals and the sounds of musicians playing for tips on nearby street corners.

She sighed, a soft wistfulness creeping into her voice. "I think... I'm going to miss New Orleans," she said quietly, her attention returning to Brunhilda, who was carefully slicing her pastry in half.

"Of course you will—the magic is different here. The streets sing with it. Nowhere else quite feels the same."

Freya hummed in agreement.

"We'll come back," Brunhilda added when Freya didn't respond. "New Orleans isn't finished with us. There's too much left undone here."

That caught Freya's attention. She looked up, curiosity flickering in her expression.

Brunhilda answered her unasked question. "I still need to free the Crescent Wolves from their curse."

Freya's glanced out again, watching a group of children chase a rolling ball down the cobblestone street. Their laughter caught in the sunlight—a brief, golden flicker of innocence.

"Do you have a timeline for that?" she asked softly.

Brunhilda shrugged, a faint smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. "Not exactly. It depends on when I can find Hayley. Once I track her down, I can plan."

Freya nodded, her smile faint but genuine. She stared out at the city as a quiet ache rose in her chest—a sharp, sudden yearning for her siblings.

"Did I ever tell you about meeting Kol in 1914?" she asked, and Brunhilda waved for her to continue. "I was so overwhelmed. I didn't know what to expect. The jump from 1814 to the next century was more extreme than any I had experienced before. The difference in technology, in culture, was far greater than what I was used to. I'd heard the stories—of course. His reputation preceded him—but he was so different from what I imagined. He was funny, fierce. Kind in a fashion, even. I was terrified when I last saw him. I thought Klaus and Elijah had killed him for good."

Brunhilda's expression softened, her knife pausing on the plate.

"Ah," she murmured knowingly. "The daggers."

Freya's brow knit. "How do they work, exactly?"

"They're cruel things laced with white oak ash—designed to incapacitate the Originals without killing them."

Freya hesitated, her voice quieter now. "Do you know how long Kol's been daggered? What about the others?"

Brunhilda's expression darkened, her words carefully chosen. "Kol's still daggered. He has been since the last time you saw him. As for Finn... longer than you might think. Close to nine centuries, by my count."

Freya's breath caught, her hand suspended mid-air. The weight of it settled over her like a stone. "Nine centuries? I didn't realize a slumber spell could last that long."

Brunhilda sighed. "About that..."

Freya felt the blood in her face flee. She could read between the lines. "He's conscious, isn't he?"

"Yes," Brunhilda confirmed. "It's why Finn agreed to your mother's plan."

Freya's fists clenched around the glass, her knuckles white. "How could they do that to him? To any of them? It's—it's monstrous."

Brunhilda reached across the table and rested her hand over Freya's, her grip steady. "I know."

Freya's eyes were fierce now, burning with conviction. She leaned in, lowering her voice but sharpening it all the same. "I want to find them. All of them. I want to pull those daggers from their hearts."

Brunhilda's jaw tightened—barely, but Freya noticed. Her eyes flicked away, lips pressed together. The silence stretched, and Freya could feel the hesitation radiating off her.

"You asked me to kill my father," Freya said quietly. "And I agreed. Now I'm asking you to help me free my siblings."

Brunhilda's silence stretched, heavy and taut. Freya could almost hear her thoughts churning, the way Brunhilda's mind always spun ahead. She was already scheming, already trying to puzzle out how to manage the Originals once they were freed.

"I can't leave Finn," Freya pressed, "not now that I know he needs me."

Brunhilda's shoulders sank slightly, as though she were yielding to her. At last, with a slow, reluctant nod, she said, "Alright. After Mikael—we'll find them."

Chapter Text

Brunhilda and Freya moved quietly along a narrow trail of packed mud, their footsteps softened by fallen leaves and the occasional splash where the earth dipped too close to the swollen water.

The moon was a shimmering, bright thing in the sky, its pale light spilling in through the thick canopy overhead, casting ghostly shadows that danced with each sway of the cypress branches. The night air was wet and clung to their skin, a heavy humidity that caused Brunhilda's hair to stick out in varying directions.

All around them were the sounds of a summer night distilled—frogs croaked their steady chorus, cicadas buzzed softly in the background, and somewhere distant, a heron's mournful call echoed through the stillness. There was a serenity to it, or there would be if not for the repeated sounds of Freya slapping her skin over and over, in an attempt to kill a particularly persistent mosquito that had identified her as its favorite meal.

"I still don't really understand why we're out here," she muttered, her boots squelching in the mud. She slapped her right bicep again, making a frustrated sound when the bug escaped. "You dragged me into the swamp in the middle of the night with no explanation except, and I quote, 'I gotta get something.'"

Brunhilda didn't stop walking. "And I did tell you that you didn't need to come, but if you must know, it's for the locator spell. I thought maybe Hayley's pack would have something of her baby things."

Slap!

Freya exhaled in relief, she had finally won her battle with the bloodsucker. "You really care about her, don't you?"

"I owe her," she said over her shoulder, smirking at the patches of bright red that now covered Freya's arms.

As they pressed forward, a figure appeared ahead—stepping through the same snarl of the bayou's pathways with a quiet grace. Her movements were fluid, her footing sure, as if the swamp itself parted to let her through.

"Who are you?" the woman called out, her voice steady, edged with suspicion but not outright hostility.

She stepped forward, her palms left deliberately open at her sides. "My name is Brunhilda Voss. This is Freya. We've come with information to exchange."

The woman's gaze flicked between them, her body tense. "What kind of information?"

"About Andrea Labonair."

The name hit its target like a stone dropped into still water and the woman's eyes widened, the breath catching in her throat.

"She... she's alive?" Her voice trembled on the edge of disbelief.

Brunhilda's answer was slow but certain. "She goes by Hayley Marshall now, but yes, she's alive. And I intend to find her and bring her back home."

The woman swallowed, her shoulders stiffening against the weight of long-held grief trying to unravel itself.

"And why would you care about finding her?"

Brunhilda allowed the faintest smile to curl at the corner of her mouth, "Because I can."

That startled a laugh out of the woman. Then the she finally stepped forward, the suspicion in her gaze easing just enough to allow something else—a cautious hope and excitement.

"I'm Eve," she said, her voice softer now. "And if what you say is true... I'll bring you to the pack to make your exchange."

Eve wasted no time leading them deeper into the Crescent Wolves' hidden sanctuary. The path wound through the thick curtain of trees until the makeshift village came into view—weathered cabins, fire pits just starting to glow with the embers of the evening, and the quiet stirrings of wolves moving in their human skins, curious but wary.

They didn't get far before a woman stepped into their path—a wall between them and the rest.

The woman's sharp gaze swept over Brunhilda and Freya, then flicked toward Eve. "Who are they?"

Eve hesitated, but her hope carried her forward. "They know something about Andrea. Brunhilda and Freya, this is Mary Dumas. She's one of our elders."

She recalled her version of Hayley talking about this woman. Brunhilda took her in—the gray bob, the sharp eyes that had clearly seen a thousand things worth remembering, and the posture of someone who hadn't let the years weigh her down.

The faintest shift passed over Mary's expression.

"And what exactly do you plan to do with that information?" Mary asked, her arms folding across her chest in the universal gesture of you're going to need to work for my trust.

Brunhilda stepped forward, voice calm and steady. "I plan to break your curse once I find her."

The words landed hard, rippling out through the gathered wolves. Several glanced toward one another, confusion and cautious disbelief painted clearly across their faces.

Mary's gaze hardened, arms crossing firmly over her chest. "Why would a witch—" Brunhilda wasn't surprised that a woman like Mary could recognize a magic user on sight—"a stranger at that—be so willing to help us? I've met a lot of witches, and few would be able to do it, and even fewer still would be willing to offer it to us for free."

"I'm not like most witches." She shot back, "I'm better."

A low, skeptical laugh rose from one of the nearby wolves—a sound quickly silenced when Mary's eyes flicked in his direction.

"I'll break your curse because I can and because I want to," she said. "And no one stops me from doing what I want." Her smile stretched wider, it was all teeth. "And if that gives Hayley—Andrea—somewhere to land then all the better."

Mary's arms didn't uncross, but her sharpness softened, just a breath. She studied Brunhilda as if trying to peel her apart with her gaze, to find the crack where lies might be hiding. But for once Brunhilda wasn't telling a lie—not even by omission.

Finally, Mary asked, "What exactly do you need from us?"

"I need something that belonged to her. Something I can use for a locator spell."

Mary's silence stretched long enough to feel like a challenge. Then, without breaking her stare, she gave a small, reluctant nod. "Follow me."

As they approached the distant cluster of weathered cabins, the soft hum of voices and laughter grew louder. When they stepped into the clearing, Brunhilda and Freya were met with curious but not unkind glances while the children continued to dart between the legs of these wary adults, weaving effortlessly with boisterous laughter.

Because of the nature of the curse, the full moon was a sacred occasion—the only time the pack's extended family, those trapped in their wolf forms for most of the month, could return to their human shapes. It was also a night when those who had not yet triggered their curse could rejoin the others without fear. For one brief night, they could all be together.

Mary led them toward one of the cabins. "There's plenty to eat and drink—help yourselves. I need to speak to the others."

Eve appeared quickly by their side, her smile bright and welcoming. "Come with me," she said, gesturing toward a cabin immediately next to the one Mary disappeared into. "I'll get you something for that spell."

...

As Brunhilda and Freya stepped over the threshold, they were immediately swept into the warmth of this home. The small house brimmed with life—animated voices rose and fell in conversation and hearty laughter echoed off the low rafters.

Eve led them down a narrow hallway past a bustling kitchen where several women worked in tandem. Bowls of freshly chopped vegetables, pots bubbling with rich stew, and trays of golden cornbread crowded the counters. The women worked with practiced ease, their hands guided by years of repetition and tradition.

"These are some of the best cooks in all of New Orleans," Eve said proudly, nodding toward the women.

"You planning on introducing us to your new friends, buttercup?" One of the older women stopped working and wiped her hands on her apron, offering them a toothy smile. "Sorry about her—we don't get many visitors out here, so it seems like Eve is out of practice."

"This is Mavis," Eve introduced, rolling her eyes. She pointed at each of the women in the kitchen and recited their names and then pointed to the witches. "And this Freya and Brunhilda."

"Well," one of the women said, "that's certainly a unique name."

"I'm a very unique person," Brunhilda quipped.

Eve led them away from the kitchen and deeper into the cabin, weaving through the crowded spaces until they reached a back room thick with dust. Shelves sagged under the weight of forgotten boxes, old linens, and items that had clearly not been touched in years.

"It's beautiful, how close you all are," Freya said quietly, watching as Eve sifted through the clutter. "It feels like family here."

"We're closer than family—we're a pack," Eve replied simply.

With a satisfied sound, Eve finally unearthed a box, brushing the worst of the dust off before carrying it back toward the kitchen table. The witches followed close behind.

She set it down with a soft thump, a small cloud of dirt billowing into the air around them. Brunhilda glanced at the worn edges of the table and scuffed hardwood beneath their feet. These cabins, she realized, likely didn't see much use. Trapped as they were by their curse, the wolves had a single night a month to be human—the rest of the time, these spaces waited in stillness for them to return home.

Eve carefully sifted through the box, her fingers brushing aside folded linens and old trinkets until she uncovered what she was looking for. She pulled out a few precious items—a small, timeworn baby blanket, soft and faded with age.

"This," she said, her voice softening, "Andrea's mother made this for her."

She set the blanket aside and pulled out a leather-bound family album, its pages swollen slightly from humidity, along with an old family Bible embossed with the Labonair crest.

Brunhilda carefully ran her fingertips over the fabric of the blanket. "This will work perfectly."

Eve flipped through the album, her thumb tracing over the faces in the faded photographs. She lingered on a picture of Andrea as an infant, her tiny fists clenched around her mother's fingertip. Her throat bobbed with the effort to keep her composure.

"Take this too," she said, pressing the album into Brunhilda's hands. "When you find her, she should have this."

The voices from the kitchen suddenly called out, announcing that the food was ready. The rich aroma of stewed meats and fresh bread drifted through the air, and Eve gave a quick, almost playful glance toward the witches.

"Come on," she said, flashing a smile. "You're not getting out of helping. We've got a lot of mouths to feed."

Brunhilda and Freya quickly found themselves enlisted to carry steaming pots and baskets of food out to the clearing.

The night had deepened, but the small encampment glowed with life. The men had hauled out long wooden picnic tables beneath the sprawling canopy of ancient trees, their thick branches strung with lanterns and torches that flickered warmly against the dark.

Brunhilda and Freya settled at one of the tables, their plates quickly filled as dishes and containers were passed around. Wolves of all ages sat around them, the cursed and the untriggered, the young and the old.

For the cursed wolves, this was their one night they were allowed to catch up on all they had missed during the month spent in wolf form. They leaned in eagerly as their family filled them in on everything that had transpired since the last full moon: births, celebrations, new love blooming, the smallest gossip from nearby settlements.

There was a bittersweet undercurrent to this moment, to the laughter that bubbled up around them. The teasing they shared was sharp but affectionate, and the wolves spoke openly, easily, and with the kind of joy that was heavy with relief. It was obvious to Brunhilda that each of them were clinging to these precious moments—as if this small lightness would be enough to carry them through the weeks of joyless dark.

...

After their meal, Freya and Brunhilda lingered with the pack.

The large fire pit at the heart of the clearing had become a natural gathering place, its wide stone ring filled with crackling logs and glowing embers that painted the faces around it in soft amber light. Dozens of the Crescent wolves circled the fire—some sitting cross-legged on worn blankets, others perched on logs or leaning comfortably against one another.

As the witches settled next to each other, a woman began to play a song that Brunhilda only sort of recognized—her fingers coaxing a soft melody from the guitar strings. The notes were gentle at first, tentative, like a memory taking shape. Slowly, the music became louder, and others began to join in.

In this way, music was the shared language of the clearing.

Fireflies drifted lazily through the air, their golden light blinking in and out of existence as children darted after them with outstretched hands, their high, delighted squeals rising in time with the chorus.

The sound wrapped around Brunhilda and forced her body to release the tension it held—though her heart, ever the hoarder of precious things, only clutched harder. Brunhilda was a greedy person. She wanted to stay in this moment, in this burst of joy. She wanted to bottle it and hold it in her hands, wanted to never set it down lest someone snatch it away.

She let her head rest on Freya's shoulder—and the other witch hummed, wrapping an arm around her.

"I don't want this night to end," Freya sighed, her voice a soft croon, her gaze fixed on the flickering fire.

Brunhilda's throat tightened, her chest blooming with something wet and yearning. She understood. She wanted to stay here, wanted to surrender to this moment, even if it was just that—a moment. A strange warmth for this woman next to her caught the kindling in her chest, and she felt as if she were caught aflame.

I don't think I can let you go, she thinks suddenly, pressing the meat of her cheek deeper into Freya's skin.

The guitarist's melody shifted, growing softer, slower, and its tenderness pulled at something raw inside her—a longing she couldn't name.

Brunhilda would linger on this for a long while, she thought, until this too would become a memory.

...

As the laughter faded into sad goodbyes, Brunhilda and Freya began their quiet trek out of the woods.

The vibrant pulse of the gathering now seemed like a distant heartbeat behind them, but its warmth trailed after them like the scent of woodsmoke clung to their clothes. Freya clutched the worn family album and the delicate baby blanket to her chest while Brunhilda walked beside her, hands buried deep in her pockets.

The crickets were still singing their own song, the rhythmic chirps filling the silence between the two women as they picked their way back to the car along the moonlit path.

Once inside, the car doors shut with a soft click that seemed to settle the weight of the evening between them. Freya turned to Brunhilda, curiosity flickering behind her tired but thoughtful eyes.

"Either one of us could break that curse with ease."

Brunhilda's fingers drummed against the steering wheel, her expression unreadable. "We could," she admitted, her voice light, almost careless. "But we won't. Not yet."

Freya frowned, tilting her head. "Why?"

Brunhilda glanced at her, then looked out toward the dark road stretching endlessly ahead. "Because I want Hayley to be there when it happens. I want her to see it. I want her to understand—her family didn't abandon her."

Freya's brow furrowed, her voice low with skepticism. "You really think that matters? After everything? After the years she spent on her own?"

Brunhilda's gaze lingered on the trees lining the road, their silhouettes fractured by the car's dim headlights. "It matters more than you know," she said softly, her voice carrying something like conviction. "The Crescent Pack isn't as unified as it looks. Hayley's position is far from secure. If I break the curse too soon, before she has a chance to come home, someone else will step into the space meant for her. And when she finally does come back on her own... there might not be a place left for her at all."

She tightened her grip on the steering wheel, her knuckles briefly going pale. "I won't take that from her. I won't rob her of the place that should have been hers."

Slowly, Freya nodded, her lips pressing into a faint, approving smile.

"Alright," she murmured. "We wait."

Chapter Text

The day after the visit to the bayou, they let themselves rest. Not sleep-but rest.

They wandered the bones of the city without urgency, sipping café au lait at a tiny corner shop near the Garden District, letting the morning stretch unhurried into the late afternoon. Freya dragged Brunhilda into a narrow art gallery tucked between two weather-worn buildings, where they spent nearly an hour meandering past oil paintings trying to figure out if any of them were painted by Freya's brother.

Lunch came from a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that served fried catfish on chipped porcelain plates. Freya insisted on stopping by the market for pralines, declaring them a necessary provisions. That night, they returned to room and reruns of Ancient Aliens-a show that Brunhilda had immediately tried to convince Freya was a documentary until her giggles gave her away.

The next day was for packing. Grimoires were double-wrapped and tucked between jars of salt and bundles of dried herbs; potion bottles were wrapped in thick cloth and cradled like relics in a crate of newspaper clippings and torn pages. Freya once again tried to convince Brunhilda to buy a proper suitcase for her personal items. Brunhilda just rolled her eyes and continued packing her backpack with surgical precision.

That evening, just after twilight, Brunhilda slipped out with only a vague excuse about needing to pick up burner phones. Freya didn't push. She never did anymore-there was a tension in Brunhilda's voice when she deflected, a quiet warning that whatever she was hiding wasn't ready to be spoken aloud.

In truth, she drove across town to her usual meeting point. The hospital aide was already there, standing in the shadows beside a battered sedan, cooler in hand. They greeted her with the blank civility of someone who didn't know what they were doing. Brunhilda took the cooler without a word.

In the car, parked beneath a dying streetlamp, she opened the first bag and drank. It did little to settle her. Nor did the second. By the third, her hands were shaking. It wasn't hunger so much as a need-a dull, awful static beneath her ribs that wouldn't quiet. Only after the fourth did the ache begin to settle. She ripped into the fifth one too just to be safe.

She leaned back in the driver's seat, head against the rest, eyes closed-her face smeared with blood.

For a few seconds, there was only the hum of the engine and the clink of empty plastic against the floor mat.

"This is dangerous behavior," Emily spoke up.

Brunhilda's hands shook against the steering wheel. "I know."

"You need to tell her," Emily said-Brunhilda didn't need to ask who the her was. "Hiding it and feeding on stolen blood bags in the night-irregularly, I'll add-is only setting yourself up to suddenly lose control again."

Brunhilda stared forward, angry at Emily for talking to her about this but mostly angry at herself. Emily wasn't wrong-Brunhilda was going longer and longer between her meals.

"I don't want her to know," Brunhilda said. "It's one thing for a vampire to consume blood-that's normal... but it's another thing entirely for a human to do it."

The word cannibal clawed at her thoughts. Her mind dredged up memories she'd spent years burying-scenes of the old world, when food ran out and kindness was the first casualty. She hadn't killed for her food, but she didn't want that to change.

"Dumb," Silas said, voice dry and clipped. He didn't elaborate.

Brunhilda exhaled through her nose, heavy and tired. She wished, not for the first time, that any of this could be simpler. That she could explain. That she wasn't becoming exactly the thing she used to hate.

She hoped-prayed-that five bags would be enough to hold her together on the road.

...

By the time the sun cracked over the horizon the next morning, casting gold over the sleeping city, the car was already packed and humming quietly in the parking lot. The motel room was already empty-sterilized of every trace of them. Brunhilda had compelled the front desk agent to erase all records of their stay and ordered the room thoroughly cleaned, ensuring not a single thread of hair would remain.

Before they left, they completed one final spell.

The pair sat cross-legged on the floor, the worn baby blanket stretched carefully between them. Its frayed edges and softened threads thrummed with the weight of memory and something older still. As Brunhilda pressed her magic into it, the fabric pulsed back-a beat waiting to be called home.

Freya murmured the incantation, her voice low and clear, her hands gripping Brunhilda's. The words hung in the air, tugging gently at invisible threads. The blanket grew warm beneath their fingers, glowing faintly as the spell stitched itself into its weave.

"There," Freya whispered, brow furrowed in concentration.

The single drop of blood they'd spilled on the map crept across the paper like a living thing and came to rest over Little Rock, Arkansas.

Brunhilda's fingers drummed lightly against her thigh. "I know that area," she said, gaze narrowing. "There's a pack up there-been there for decades, keeping to themselves. Hayley's probably with them. They've always been good about sheltering their own."

Freya's eyes lit up. "Then we should go. We can be there in a few hours."

Brunhilda hesitated, her gaze lingering on the faint glow of the spell. "She's not heading toward us. She's not moving. She's settled. Maybe... maybe we shouldn't interfere. We've got other things-Dahlia, Mikael, your siblings. I don't know if dragging Hayley into this now is the right call."

"She wouldn't be dragged into anything," Freya said softly, but firmly. "You miss her. I can see it. And I don't like seeing you like this."

Brunhilda's throat tightened.

"I don't want to lose the chance to know her," Freya added, even quieter now.

Brunhilda folded her arms across her chest, bracing against the ache blooming inside her. Freya's words were a spell of their own-soft, persuasive, greedy in the same way Brunhilda was. Dangerous.

"It's not a good idea," Brunhilda muttered.

"It is," Freya said, with such conviction it almost sounded like a promise. "And even if it's not, what could it hurt?"

Brunhilda traced the edge of the blanket with her thumb. She could try to rationalize it all she wanted-but the truth was simple: she missed Hayley. She'd been downplaying it for weeks, even to herself. But now that her location had been revealed, the pull was undeniable.

She missed all of them. Her people. Edwina and Eira. The coven she'd grown up with. Bonnie. Hayley. Davina too. And oh, what she wouldn't give to storm into the coven grounds and steal Davina away before it was too late-before the Harvest claimed her. But Davina was only thirteen. If Brunhilda took her now, the girl would never forgive her. So, she'd wait. She'd come back before the Harvest. She would be there, another person in Davina's corner. She promised it to herself.

Brunhilda cut a glance toward Freya, who was already grinning-victory all over her face.

"Fine," Brunhilda said with a huff. "We'll go. But only to give her the album and my number. I'm not dragging her into anything until the mess with Dahlia is handled."

"Of course not," Freya said, slinging her bag over her shoulder.

"And we're not stopping for snacks."

Freya raised an eyebrow. "You said that last time. We still stopped."

Brunhilda rolled her eyes but couldn't stop the smirk curling her lips as she grabbed the keys.

Truthfully, she was already picturing the curve of Hayley's smile, the sharp edge of her humor, the way old friendships might click back into place like bones snapping into alignment. She told herself this was about strategy, about having another ally. That it was practical. Necessary.

But the flutter in her chest told a different story.

...

The drive stretched long and winding, the road unraveling beneath their tires like a ribbon coming unfurled. Twelve hours through the green belt of the South-past sleepy towns and half-forgotten crossroads, through rolling hills and thick woods that clung to the edges of the highway.

They passed cypress groves that shimmered silver in the morning mist and pine forests that ran endlessly along the horizon.

Occasionally, Freya would lean out of the window just to feel the wind slap her face, laughing when it whipped her hair into her mouth.

Brunhilda never complained. She never did when Freya laughed like that.

They traded music along the way-though neither had much to offer. Brunhilda hadn't properly listened to a radio in years, and the last song Freya remembered was nearly a century old. Freya preferred slow, haunting melodies. Brunhilda shouted through the bubblegum hits she barely remembered, the lyrics mangled by time. In between, they bickered about directions and snack choices-because of course, Freya had won that argument, and they had stopped for snacks multiple times.

Freya found herself enjoying the road trip more than she expected. She had spent so long asleep, so long missing the texture of ordinary days-the endless stretch of a highway, the blur of green and gold passing by, the quiet between the bursts of happiness. She felt like she was flying when the wind ran through her hair.

And Brunhilda, who so often felt older than Freya despite the truth of their circumstances, had been enjoying it too. But she was jittery. Eager. Her grip on the wheel tightened the closer they got.

"You're nervous," Freya teased, one booted foot propped on the dash.

Brunhilda shot her a glare. "I'm not."

"You are. It's cute."

"Stop talking."

But the truth was written all over her. Brunhilda was terrible at hiding how badly she wanted this-how much she missed Hayley, even if she hadn't said her name out loud in days.

They rolled into Little Rock late that night, a few hours behind schedule. Freya had insisted on stopping at every roadside attraction she deemed "culturally significant." The sun was already bleeding into twilight by the time they found a modest motel off the highway. Brunhilda compelled a room-buzzing lights, stiff sheets, and a lot number that stank faintly of bleach-but it was quiet. Private. Good enough.

The next morning, golden light spilled over the flat sprawl of the city. They sat cross-legged on the motel carpet, casting a more exact locator spell with the baby blanket, a single candle, and a drop of blood. The magic bloomed between them like breath on glass, warm and insistent, pulling west into the city's heart.

The trail ended outside a dive bar.

Brunhilda pulled the car into the gravel lot and stared at the warped wooden sign dangling from rusted chains. A tired neon letter blinked behind smudged windows. An empty beer bottle rolled at the curb. A few older wolves had been lingering nearby, but ducked back inside before they could be noticed.

And then-there she was.

Leaning against the rusted bed of a pickup truck. Sharp-eyed. Bristling with don't-come-near-me-energy. Closed off. Seventeen, maybe. Arms crossed and posture tense, like she was waiting for someone to start a fight so she could finish it. One boot heel lazily scuffed circles into the gravel. Her hair was pulled back into a high ponytail.

Hayley.

But not her Hayley. Not yet.

She looked young-impossibly so.

Brunhilda came to a full stop in the shade of the awning, heart beating far too fast for someone who wasn't supposed to be sentimental. She studied Hayley like she was something fragile under glass, like if she got too close, the illusion might crack.

She didn't speak.

Freya elbowed her lightly. "Don't freeze on my now."

Brunhilda glanced sideways, muttering under her breath, "It's nine in the morning. Who goes to a bar at nine in the morning? She's, what? Seventeen? They're... they're supposed to... they should be protecting her better than this."

"She's a werewolf, not a baby," Freya said with a smirk. "Now go say something before I do it for you."

Brunhilda nodded and moved to get out of the car. Freya stopped her before she could leave, having suddenly thought about something. Freya's hand hovered, like she wanted to grab her sleeve and stop her. "Remember to use diplomacy."

Brunhilda's sharp grin flicked over her shoulder. "I always do."

Freya didn't look convinced.

Brunhilda stepped out into the twilight, boots crunching on gravel. She kept her hands loose at her sides, her posture casual but not careless. She didn't move fast. Wolves didn't like fast.

Hayley spotted her immediately.

"Can I help you?" she barked, chin lifted, eyes hard. She glanced behind Brunhilda, clearly gauging exits.

"Hayley," Brunhilda breathed, stopping a few paces away. "I was looking for you."

"You a cop?"

Brunhilda couldn't help it-she tilted her head back and laughed.

"I'm a friend."

Hayley's eyes narrowed. "No, you're not. I've never met you before."

"I am," she said. "I promise-your birth name Andrea Labonair."

But Hayley was already moving.

"That's cute." Hayley said flatly. "You think some name I've never met is going to mean something to me? Try harder."

Brunhilda had forgotten how prickly Hayley was when she met new people.

The witch gave the werewolf a large toothy smile-she remembered a time when their positions were flipped. When they first met each other, Brunhilda had thrown Hayley against a wall. She had apologized profusely after they had grown closer after Hayley had saved her life-now, in presence of this young version she could admit that they hadn't just been allies... they were friends.

It was bittersweet. She'd never see that version of Hayley ever again.

Freya's voice rang out across the lot. "Hilda-!"

"I'm fine," Brunhilda called out to Freya, watching patiently as Freya frowned but closed the sedan door again.

"I know your family," she tells Hayley, her hands touching Hayley's forearm. "They didn't abandon you. They lost you. You were taken as a baby. Marcel Gerard-"

"Who the hell is that?"

"-hid you away. You were adopted, renamed, and they didn't even tell you what you were. But I know. And I know where they are."

Hayley's jaw clenched, but she removed the pressure on Brunhilda's throat and took a step back. "Why would I believe you?"

Brunhilda reached into her bag and slowly pulled out the worn photo album Mary and Eve had given her. She held it out, her hand steady. "Because they sent this for you. They've been waiting."

Hayley snatched it from her like it might vanish if she hesitated. She flipped through the photos-black and white portraits, faded color shots, moments of laughing faces around smoky bonfires, people who looked like they could have been hers, but she hadn't been given the option.

"You're full of shit," Hayley muttered, but her hands trembled on the edges of the pages.

"I promise you that I'm not."

Hayley's chin tilted up again, defenses slamming back into place. "Let me guess-you want me to just hop in your car, drive off to some second location like an idiot? Fuck you, I've seen Forensic Files."

"Wouldn't be the first time I kidnapped someone," Brunhilda joked.

"Oh, you're a lunatic."

Brunhilda shrugged. "Probably."

"You seriously think I'm going with you?"

"I seriously think you're curious enough not to let me walk away without hearing the rest."

Hayley looked at her, suddenly furious, and then-before Brunhilda could react-she lifted her. Threw her over one shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Brunhilda yelped, startled, but too caught off guard to fight back.

Freya, in her shock, lost precious seconds before opening her door.

"I'm fine!" Brunhilda shouted from over Hayley's shoulder, voice muffled by her own hair.

Hayley hauled her to the passenger seat of the pickup, shoved her in, and peeled out of the lot.

Freya was left blinking at the empty parking space where her soulmate used to be.

Hayley didn't say a word as she sped through the streets, heading out past strip malls and into a quiet industrial lot. She threw the truck in park.

"Get out."

Brunhilda did-grinning, because honestly? This was going better than expected.

Hayley hopped up onto the tailgate, gesturing for Brunhilda to stay standing. Which, frankly, was delightfully rude.

"Alright," Hayley said. "We're out of earshot of the guys. Start talking."

...

Freya found them ten minutes later.

She was shaking, her eyes narrowed. Though she calmed the moment she saw Brunhilda sitting upright and not bleeding, her steps were sharp with restrained fury.

"You-" she pointed at Hayley, "-abducted my witch."

"That's such a strong word," Brunhilda said. "I don't think I was abducted... maybe just relocated with enthusiasm?"

Hayley, unfazed, didn't even glance up from where she was flipping through the photo album again. "You should have defended 'your witch' better then. She was awfully easy to abduct."

Brunhilda, still perched on the edge of the tailgate, lifted a hand lazily. "She didn't bruise me, if that's what you're worried about."

"You're enjoying this," Freya muttered, glaring.

"Wildly," Brunhilda agreed.

Hayley finally looked up, her eyes flinty. "Is this one your keeper?"

"Yep," Brunhilda popped the 'p'.

Freya exhaled hard through her nose and pinched the bridge of it, muttering a curse in Old Norse. Then she crossed her arms.

Hayley stared down at the album some more and then looked at both of them for a long, quiet moment. "Did you really come all this way just to find me?"

"Yes," Brunhilda said simply. "And not for any ulterior motive. You're not bait. You're not leverage. You're... Hayley."

Hayley blinked once, but her cheeks were a little pink. "You're a weirdo."

Brunhilda smiled. "You're not the first to say that."

There was a long beat.

Then Hayley asked, quieter this time, "And they're really still out there? My family?"

Freya nodded. "Some of them are wolves. Some aren't. Some are dead, but the ones that are still alive are waiting."

Hayley swallowed hard, then glanced down at the album again. "I don't know if I'm ready to see them."

"You don't have to be," Brunhilda said. "You don't have to do anything right now. But... if things change-if you want to find us-" she held out a number on a piece of paper, "this is my phone number."

Hayley stared at the scrap of paper in Brunhilda's hand for a beat too long. Her jaw flexed once, twice, like she was working through something heavy behind her teeth.

Then she said, quietly but firmly, "I want to go with you."

"No," Brunhilda denied immediately.

Hayley's brow lifted. "Excuse me?"

"I'm not putting you into that kind of danger," Brunhilda said, folding the paper back in half and tucking it into Hayley's palm. "And where we're going? It's not safe. It's not just witches and curses and old vendettas anymore. We're past that. This is world-ending stuff."

Hayley's eyes darkened. "You think I haven't already been through hell?"

Freya stepped forward then, her tone softer but her gaze unwavering. "She's not lying, Hayley. This isn't just dangerous-it's apocalyptic. We're going up against monsters older than civilization. Things that bend magic like paper and turn time inside out. If you come with us, you might not come back."

Hayley didn't flinch. "So what? You think because I'm seventeen, I'm fragile? I've been on my own since I was thirteen. I've broken every bone in my body monthly for years. I've been hurt by people who were supposed to love me. I've watched my friends get hurt, disappear, and never come back. You want to talk about monsters? I've met them. And I've survived."

There was a beat of silence.

Then, quieter: "If... if you're not lying that means I trusted you, or at least some version of me did. And I choose to believe in that version of me. I'm not going to sit around and hope you live long enough to come back. And like hell am I going to sit here waiting for another stranger to show up and tell me what I've missed."

Brunhilda looked at her long and hard, the sharp line of her mouth twitching as if caught between admiration and dread.

"If you come with us," she said finally, voice quiet, "you listen to everything I say. No running off. No trying to play the hero. You don't die on me, understood? If I tell you to run then you do it. No questions asked."

"Yes, ma'am" Hayley smiled-and it brightened her dour face. Brunhilda caught herself looking at her and realizing all over again just how young she really was. She was still a kid. And if this timeline played out the way Hilda remembered, Hayley hadn't yet stumbled into the mess that would eventually lead to Hope. She probably hadn't even thought about having kids.

"Now tell me about this whole 'the world's ending' thing, so I can decide how much to regret my decision."

And Brunhilda folded immediately.

Chapter Text

Brunhilda had driven for most of the morning, her knuckles clutched tightly on the steeling wheel, and refused to entertain allowing Freya or Hayley to take over.

She didn't trust Hayley's road rage—not after watching her get into a shouting match with a garbage truck the first day of their trip—and she especially didn't trust Freya, who had assured them with far too much confidence that her brief experience behind the wheel of a Ford Model T would "translate just fine" to a modern car on a modern highway.

"You do realize," Hayley called from the back seat, her feet kicked up on the window despite Brunhilda's earlier protests, "that if you die in a fiery crash, neither of us know how to where to find this Mikael guy, right?"

"I'm not the one you should worry about dying in a car crash," Brunhilda replied, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel in time with the radio. "From where I'm sitting, you're the squishiest of us—and statistically, most fatalities occur in the front passenger seat."

"Squishy?" Hayley scoffed. "Okay, witch. Get back to me when you've broken all 206 bones in your body."

"—and even if I did die," Brunhilda continued smoothly, "I'd return. If only to haunt you specifically."

"Only me?"

"I'd make you my full-time project."

"Sounds exhausting," Hayley muttered.

"Sounds like a privilege," Freya said lightly from the passenger seat, hiding a small smile behind the rim of her drink.

They passed stretches of rolling hills and mist-laced forests, the kind that looked like they hadn't changed in a hundred years. At gas stations, Freya always returned with armfuls of snacks she insisted were "for the road," though most never made it past the next town.

Hayley, predictably, had opinions about everything. She bickered over music, grumbled about Brunhilda's refusal to stop every twenty minutes, and eventually succeeded in bullying her into turning what should have been a two-day drive into a six day long bender across middle-America.

She read voraciously the entire time. Brunhilda had been bullied into compelling a new novel to add to her growing collection at every shop they stopped in. On day three, Hayley had officially finished the most recent A Song of Ice and Fire novel and immediately demanded Brunhilda tell her how the series ended.

Brunhilda had shrugged. "I think there was one more book before everything collapsed. Maybe two. But the world kind of ended before George got around to finishing it."

Hayley had stared at her in horror, then ordered the car to stop so she could storm into the woods and scream.

After that, she stuck to finished series only.

When the roads got quieter and the radio dissolved into static, they passed the time with stories. Hayley told them about odd jobs she'd worked over the years—dishwashing, fixing motorcycles, a short-lived stint as a receptionist until the doctor realized she couldn't answer phones without swearing.

briefly working as a receptionist in a doctor's office until it became obvious she had no idea how to answer the phone professionally.

They laughed. They argued. They shared snacks and songs and silence, and somewhere between state lines and snack stops, the road trip became something else—something warmer, and dangerously close to a memory worth keeping.

They bickered often, but the kind that softened around the edges—Freya snapping about Hayley stealing the front seat "even though they'd agreed to switch at the next stop", Hayley accusing Brunhilda of being a "snack fascist" for rationing the good chips, and Brunhilda threatening to hex the entire car if they didn't stop trying to tell her how to drive.

On the fifth day, they pulled into a state park to let Hayley stretch her legs. "I'm not getting back in that car," she announced after twenty minutes of hiking and a failed attempt at tree-climbing. "You'll have to drag me

On the fifth day, they pulled into a state park to let Hayley stretch her legs.

"I'm not getting back in that car," she announced after twenty minutes of walking. "You'll have to drag me out by the ankles."

Brunhilda eyed her with amusement, arms crossed. "Don't tempt me."

But Freya, sympathetic—or just tired of Hayley's complaints—agreed. "Let's just stay here tonight. There's no one around and I'm sure there's an empty cabin somewhere."

It fell to Brunhilda to handle their accommodations, and she went to compel a staff member to get them the keys to one of the empty cabins and mark it down as paid for. They let Brunhilda to a small building half-hidden hidden in the trees. It had sagging floorboards and dust in the corners, but the beds were intact, and the water ran clean. Close enough to comfort.

That evening, they built a small fire in the fire pit outside, gathered around with steaming mugs of instant noodles—Freya's choice. Brunhilda pretended to enjoy hers, though the smell of powdered broth made her stomach roll. She hadn't had any blood since New Orleans, and it was beginning to wear on her. Her limbs felt heavy, and her magic stretched thinner each day.

Freya leaned her head on Brunhilda's shoulder, the warmth of her seeping through the fabric of her shirt. Without thinking, Brunhilda draped an arm around her, pulling her close.

Hayley arched a brow from across the fire. "You two always like this? All soft and clingy?"

"Don't be jealous," Brunhilda said dryly.

"I'm not," Hayley said, poking the fire with a stick. "Just trying to figure out if this is a 'girlfriend' situation or a 'trauma bonding' thing."

Brunhilda snorted. "Neither. I've only known her for a few weeks."

Freya elbowed her. "A few incredibly important weeks."

Hayley squinted at them. "Wait—hold on. Didn't you know her in that other timeline? The one you came from?"

"I knew of her," Brunhilda said. "I never actually met her. I was preoccupied and she was asleep or dead for most of it."

"Huh," Hayley said. "How did we meet then?"

Brunhilda glanced into the fire, a small smile tugging at her mouth. "You beat the shit of me the first time we met—and then you saved my life."

Hayley blinked. "Seriously?"

"You dragged me out of a house that I had set on fire," Brunhilda said, tone light.

"Why did you do that?"

"Well," Brunhilda said, "I was sorta trying to kill you for the whole... beating thing."

Hayley snorted. "So, what? We went from enemies to besties then?"

Brunhilda shrugged one shoulder. "Eventually. After that, I kept finding reasons to be near you. I got attached."

Hayley snorted. "You make it sound like I'm a stray dog."

"No," Brunhilda said. "You were meaner."

That got a laugh out of Hayley, low and surprised. The fire cracked between them, casting flickering shadows on their faces.

Eventually, the fire started to burn low and the laughter slowed.

Hayley had stretched out in the dirt beside the firepit, using her jacket as a pillow, eyes closed. Freya had wandered toward the tree line, needing a moment of quiet with the stars overhead as she pondered what tomorrow would. And Brunhilda—

Brunhilda sat alone on the cabin's rickety porch, elbows on her knees, trying not to give in to the gnawing pulse at the base of her throat. She was light-headed. It had been too long since New Orleans. The five bags had barely carried her through. She could feel her body starting to shake—not visibly, not yet—but beneath the surface, she was unraveling.

The ghosts always came when her control slipped.

Silas arrived first, she felt his presence like a hand at her throat—familiar and fond, but so very mean.

"She's soft," he said. "The girl. Freya."

Brunhilda didn't answer.

"She wants to believe she'll let you go through with it, but this won't end well. Not for her. Not for you."

Brunhilda dug her nails into her thigh and whispered, "She's already made her choice."

Silas rolled his eyes. "Don't confuse a different brand of trauma with purity. She's sweet, yes. Sweet and desperate to be loved. But she's still dangerous, love. You're getting swept up in the glow."

Brunhilda glared out at the trees. "She's helping me."

"Is she? Or are you just letting yourself believe that because it's what you want?"

A second voice—warm, thoughtful, and stubborn—rose beside her. Tessa now.

"Now, Silas," Tessa clucked. "You're so quick to distrust everyone. Not everyone is a disloyal snake skating by on his good looks alone like you."

"Is that a compliment?" he asked, raising an amused brow.

Brunhilda closed her eyes. For a moment, just one, she let herself lean into their argument. Like it was normal. Like she wasn't bone-tired and starving and pretending she didn't want to reach out and snatch a vein.

"I'm not saying throw yourself at her feet," Tessa continued. "I'm saying I've watched her. And I think... I think she's a good friend. The first real one you've had in a long time."

"She's a Mikaelson," Silas warned. "They will always choose someone who shares their last name."

"You're both exhausting," came Emily's voice, dry and cool as mist. "You act like she asked for your opinions."

"Don't act like you don't have one," Silas said.

"Oh, I do," Emily sniffed. "But I'm not touching this with a ten-foot pole."

Brunhilda exhaled through her nose, rubbing her temples. The ache behind her eyes pulsed like a migraine building.

"You really think she'll let you kill her father tomorrow?" Silas asked flatly. "Do you really think she won't falter? Do you really think she won't hesitate—when it's him or you?"

"She won't," Brunhilda said quietly.

"She might," Silas replied.

Brunhilda started to try to shut the door on their connection, but Silas waved her off—he had never done that before. He had always let her push him back.

"Forget Freya for a moment," he said. "You need blood, now. You're going to burn through your body's reserves before we even reach the man. And every little thing you compel—every gas station clerk, every motel owner, every shadow you smooth over with that magic of yours—it's all burning through what's tethering you to our power."

Brunhilda's stomach twisted. She could feel it. The edge. Her connection to the dead was fraying—barely a whisper now, like trying to speak through water. She hadn't realized how much power she was using to keep the illusion of control in place. Her hands shook more than usual now.

"Go hunt," Silas said. "Or fall apart. Either way, I'm getting ready to say 'I told you so.' I want you to remember that."

"I'll feed after Mikael," she muttered.

"No," Silas growled. "You won't make it to Mikael. You're gambling. Again. You are going to lose."

"You're so dramatic," Brunhilda muttered.

Tessa reached toward her, not touching, but close. "You don't have to be a martyr. Not to impress Freya. Not to protect Hayley. You won't save anyone by dying slowly."

Brunhilda buried her face in her hands. "I'm scared."

"Then be honest," said Emily. "With her. With yourself."

The fire popped loudly out in the pit—Hayley shifting in her sleep, Freya walking back up the hill, her face tilted to the stars.

Brunhilda blinked once—and the noises of her ghosts disappeared.

[...]

The road to Charlotte, Virginia was quieter now.

It wasn't just the thinning traffic or the dense trees pressing close to the winding roads—it was something in the air between them. The laughter of their road trip had faded to a hum beneath the weight of what lay ahead.

Brunhilda gripped the steering wheel tighter than usual, her knuckles pale against the leather. Freya sat beside her, uncharacteristically silent, her thumb worrying the edge of the map they'd stopped needing hours ago. In the back seat, Hayley had fallen asleep, one arm draped lazily over her face to block the sunlight that pooled through the window.

The day was warm, sunbeams filtered through the clouds in uneven shafts, catching dust motes and the drifting wings of gnats in their lazy spirals. The air smelled of damp stone, loam, and old iron. The humidity clung to the skin like a shroud would, heavy, as though the world itself was reluctant to exhale too loudly in a place like this—lest it wake the creature sleeping here.

The cemetery had no gate, no proper signage—just a rusting chain draped haphazardly between two leaning posts and a nearly invisible footpath cut through the brambles. The street behind them was nothing more than a stretch of cracked asphalt riddled with potholes, it was the kind of road that hadn't seen regular use in a decade. A few of the headstones were still visible from the treeline, their faces weather-worn and slick with moss, leaning into each other like old soldiers who had grown tired of standing alone.

Emily had been talking for nearly ten minutes straight by the time they pulled to a stop beside the old fence. Her voice, soft and lilting with that ever-present undercurrent of disappointment, carried easily through the cabin of the car.

"She used dark magic," Emily murmured, as if confessing it anew. "Power she should never have touched. It cut her loose from us. You know what that means, don't you, child?"

Brunhilda didn't answer. She simply turned off the engine and let Emily keep going.

"She knew what it would cost," Emily said, her voice falling to a hush, as if even now the trees might be listening. "But she did it anyway. For Miranda. For that baby."

Brunhilda nodded absently. She had heard this story before. More than once. But she let Emily speak it again, the way someone might rethread a fraying memory to keep it from falling apart entirely.

Maybe Emily needed her to remember it properly. Or maybe—just maybe—Emily had been spending too much time around Silas and had grown to enjoy the sound of her own voice. There was a dry note of performance to the way she told it now, a storyteller's rhythm now that she had enough practice.

Brunhilda rested her hand on the gear shift, gaze fixed on the mausoleum ahead. She wasn't sure what she'd expected—maybe something grander, more imposing.

The mausoleum wasn't much to look at. It had once been grand, no doubt—built by a family with money and ego to spare—but time had been unkind. The stone was crumbling along its edges, patches of ivy climbing up its western face like a slow strangulation. One of the marble columns at the entrance had snapped at the base and now lay half-buried in the dirt, a broken tooth jutting from the earth. The bronze door, which had once gleamed with pride, was now dulled to a sickly green, its hinges warped with rust. The family name—PICKETT—was carved above the threshold in gothic lettering.

"She bled herself dry," Emily continued, her voice laced with both pride and bitterness. "The spell was too big for one person to hold—but she did it. She held it. Long enough to save them."

Mikael Mikaelson—one of the most terrifying creatures ever to walk the earth—was waiting for them in there. Unmoving but not dead. Not yet, but he would be soon.

She would rest easier knowing he was gone.

"And it cost her everything," Emily finished before leaving her to deal with this on her own.

Freya looked at the mausoleum through the windshield, tucking her hair behind her ears.

"This it?" she asked.

Brunhilda nodded. "You okay?"

"Fine," Freya said. Brunhilda wasn't sure that was the word for it. "Let's go."

Brunhilda reached back and shook Hayley awake while Freya stepped out of the car, already walking into the tomb. The werewolf startled awake with a glare, but gathered her snack and current book with no verbal complaint—though Brunhilda could read the non-verbal one in her gaze.

The air inside was cold, damp, inside the mausoleum. Dust floated lazily in the fractured light from a broken stained-glass window.

And there he was.

Freya had already pulled off the slab that was covering her father. His skin was ashen, dried and dark veins spiderwebbed beneath the surface like ink stains that time had failed to wash away. His lips were cracked and colorless, his eyes sunken into deep hollows, though Brunhilda knew they would snap open the moment he tasted life again.

Layers upon layers of thick, iron chains coiled around him like the skin of some great serpent, rusted but still fiercely strong, woven tight across his chest, his wrists, his throat, his legs—every limb pinned, every avenue of escape sealed.

The metal had been enchanted, Emily said—Abby Bennett had not taken any chances.

He was utterly still in his grand coffin.

For all his legendary rage, all his monstrous cruelty, he now looked almost small. Brunhilda knew better than that though.

Even in this defeated state, even after decades of desiccation, Mikael radiated danger. The room seemed to hold its breath around him, stone walls leaning in as if straining to contain him, as if they too feared what would happen if those chains were broken.

Brunhilda crossed her arms, her mouth set in a tight line as she watched Freya slowly approach him. Hayley lingered back near the entrance, her arms wrapped around herself as if unsure whether to go wait in the car.

Freya knelt beside the body, her fingers trembling as she brushed against the rusted chains.

"I know he was a monster," she said quietly, as though afraid the stone walls might judge her for it. "I know what he did horrible things to Niklaus. To Elijah. To Kol. And I know... I know I never really knew him. I was with him for all of—what?—five years? And still..."

She swallowed, her jaw clenching hard enough to ache.

"I just thought I'd get more time," she admitted. "I thought there'd be a moment where we would reunite. I thought maybe... maybe he could've been different with me."

Brunhilda's gaze softened, but she didn't move.

Freya looked back over her shoulder. "Is it alright if I say goodbye?"

Brunhilda's response was quieter than usual. "Of course."

Freya turned back to Mikael, her voice low.

"You don't know me, not as I am now," she whispers, Brunhilda can barely hear it. "You were cruel, and you were broken, and you hurt the people I love. But you're my father. And even if you never thought of me—not even once—I still thought of you. I... I wish you'd been someone I could have loved. And I wish you'd known me."

A thousand years apart. A father she remembered as warm, as loving, as the one who loved her more anything. The man who fell apart when she was no longer there. The same man Brunhilda knew as the Destroyer, the vampire who razed cities to find his runaway son, the monster whose love had curdled into cruelty.

Freya sat there for another long moment, as if waiting for a whisper, a flicker of movement—any sign that he'd heard her.

But the body stayed cold. The mausoleum stayed silent.

Freya finally rose and stepped away, her throat tight as she wiped at her face with the sleeve of her jacket.

"I'm ready," she said, her voice strained but certain.

Brunhilda nodded and drew closer to the corpse. She worked efficiently, her hands working swiftly to unravel the thick, iron chains that bound Mikael. The desiccated Original lay still, his grey skin stretched taut over dark, vein-lined bones, utterly immobile.

"Can't... can't we find another way?" Freya asked as she watched another layer of chains come away from her father's body.

"There is no other option," Brunhilda said.

It was a lie—she was sure there's a way around the need for this. There was always a work around, but Brunhilda wanted this man dead. She wanted the risk he poses to her and her plans and her world gone.

She remembered being nineteen, standing hidden beneath the dense canopy of the Mystic Falls forest, her hands gripping the edges of a basin of water, scrying through the veil of time. She had wanted to see him, the hybrid that she kept missing when she tried to catch him, the legend whispered about in dread. What she saw instead was a father, towering and brutal, dragging a child—Klaus—by the arm, snarling words Brunhilda could not hear but could feel, sharp and venomous.

She remembered Klaus, so small then, gasping, his arms thrown up to shield himself as Mikael's blows rained down. She remembered the crack of bone, the way Klaus trembled and choked on tears, the way Mikael struck him again, and again, and again.

She remembered thinking: good, I'm glad his dad is dead.

She had been so glad then that Klaus had killed him. A vampire fed only on other dead things, but who razed entire cities to smoke out his prey. Who carved through innocents like wheat beneath a scythe. Who would not stop. Who would never stop—until Abby Bennett made him.

She could not abide his survival—not even to bring joy to Freya's face.

"You should leave," Brunhilda says, not answering her. "I can finish this on my own."

Freya's lips quiver just a bit.

"No," she says harshly. "If I'm condemning him to die then I won't run from the sight of it. If I am to stomach my father's murder then I will stomach it every part of it."

Brunhilda shrugged and continued her work.

Freya said nothing after that, her throat too tight, her breathing shallow. She simply watched—watched as Brunhilda's pale fingers unwrapped the layers of iron links that had bound the Destroyer for two decades, each chain clattering to the cracked marble in a slow, dreadful rhythm.

With each chain that fell away, Freya felt something unravel inside her too.

Brunhilda's jaw was tight, her gaze sharp and distant. She moved like this wasn't the first time she had done something like this.

Finally, the last chain falls away.

Freya's breath caught. It was real now. The moment teetered, seconds stretched impossibly thin.

Brunhilda's hand disappeared into the pocket of his jacket and closed around the white oak stake. The wood was cool beneath her fingertips, but it pulsed with lethal promise—a reminder of its singular purpose. She pulled it out and leveled the stake above Mikael's heart, her expression unreadable, her grip steady.

And just as she moved to bring it down—

"No!" The word tore from Freya's throat, raw and desperate. Her magic flared instinctively.

In a single heartbeat, she flung her hand out and Brunhilda's body was yanked across the mausoleum by an unseen force, crashing hard into the opposite wall. The stake clattered to the floor, skittering out of reach.

Brunhilda had barely registered the cry before the telekinetic wave slammed into her, hurling her across the tomb like a rag doll. She crashed into the stone wall, her skull cracking against it with a nauseating thud.

"Predictable," Silas muttered dryly inside her head, his voice cutting through the ringing in her ears. "I told you so."

Hayley is already sprinting to her side—she crouched beside Brunhilda, pressing her hands gently against her friend's shoulders.

"What the actual fuck, Freya!" Hayley screeched. She was pressing her hands all over Brunhilda, checking for wounds. "Jesus, are you okay? Talk to me, please."

Brunhilda's head lolled slightly toward the sound, her vision swimming. She feels sick, she feels wet. She's losing blood—fuck, she thinks. She thinks she can see Silas leaning against the cold stone wall, a smirk playing on his lips, as if watching an inevitable tragedy unfold for his own amusement.

That's new, she thought and her vision blurred—

The mausoleum melted away and, for a moment, she wasn't in Charlotte anymore—

She was back in Mystic Falls.

Back in the 1990s, where the air felt thinner, laced with the sharp ozone crackle of something unnatural trying to right itself. The world around her shifted into washed-out autumn hues, like old film stock. The trees stood brittle and orange along Wickery Bridge, and the wind carried the faint sound of a baby crying.

She saw them—Abby Bennett and Grayson Gilbert—rushing down the narrow driveway of the boarding house, urgency in every step. They looked younger than she remembered, harried but determined, as they climbed into an aging station wagon. Abby's fingers gripped the doorframe with white-knuckled tension, her eyes flicking back toward the house like she expected it to explode. Grayson was already behind the wheel, engine sputtering to life.

And in Abby's arms—a bundle swaddled too tightly, too protectively.

The child.

Brunhilda knew who it was before she even saw the sliver of pink blanket: the baby meant to trick Mikael into chasing a ghost trail. Not a real child and certainly not the one Mikael wanted—but a decoy. A fragile, living lie stitched together with desperation and dark magic. It wasn't even meant to survive the full journey, only long enough to misdirect the Destroyer.

Abby glanced over her shoulder as if she could feel Brunhilda watching. Her lips moved, whispering something—a spell, a plea, a farewell. Then she pulled the bundle closer, her hand cupping the back of its head, and slammed the car door shut—

She could hear Emily trying to reach her, the ghost's voice sounding like it was muffled in a jar of thick honey.

Brunhilda blinks, her vision is unblurred but there are now black spots—dark fissures running across her sight. On the other side of the room, Freya was kneeling beside Mikael, pouring blood from her wrist down over his cracked lips.

"Run," Brunhilda slurs. "Hayley you need to run—he will kill—"

"I won't leave you here."

Tears streamed down Brunhilda's face, hot and unrelenting. She was certain she was a mess of blood and snot, her vision swimming with it. Her limbs felt impossibly heavy, her bones sluggish and uncooperative—but she forced herself to move. If Hayley wouldn't run on her own, then Brunhilda would make her.

She pushed off the wall, trying to rise—but her body gave out before she got halfway. She collapsed forward with a sickening thud, her arms hitting the ground first, her chin cracking hard against the cold stone.

Hayley let out a keening sound—half a gasp, half a cry.

"I told you to drink," Silas says. He almost sounds sad,

In the folds of her mind, Brunhilda was still watching Grayson and Abby facing this man in an attempt to give a little girl a few more years, was watching Marcel bleeding at his hands, was watching villages burning at his fingertips.

A sudden roar tore through the mausoleum.

Mikael's body jerked violently upright, a raw, guttural gasp tearing from his throat as the bloodlust wrenched him back into the world. There was barely a breath between resurrection and instinct—no moment of clarity, no flicker of recognition. He lunged at Freya.

His hands locked around her throat, driven purely by a predator's muscle memory. There was no hesitation. No mercy. He didn't see her. Not yet.

Brunhilda tried to push herself upright, but her body refused. Every joint screamed in protest, and the muscles in her neck throbbed from the impact. The floor shifted beneath her like the mausoleum itself had been torn loose from time, adrift in something ancient and wrong.

Then came Silas's voice. It was muffled and syrupy, as if he were speaking through water. His voice was an idle sort of cruelty. "You never listen. None of you do. And look where that's gotten you—laid out like a rag doll while this family reunion goes to hell. Not even able to save the girl you let Freya talk you into bringing along."

She clenched her jaw, grinding her teeth as she fought to stay present. The rising tide of frustration mingled with pain, fogging her vision, slowing her thoughts. Somewhere in the mess of her mind, she heard Emily—sharp, urgent, her voice cutting through the static.

"Hilda! Focus. You need to get up!"

Tessa's voice followed, quieter than usual, but not unkind. There was an edge of worry in it, though she tried to hide it behind her usual clipped tone.

"You're going to get them both killed if you don't move."

Brunhilda forced her eyes open wider. She could see Freya's feet scrabbling against the floor. She could hear Hayley's strangled yell. The cold stone burned against her palms.

But Brunhilda could barely feel her legs. She could barely feel anything—only the hot, throbbing ache radiating from the base of her skull like a fault line. Her heart pounded violently in her chest, but her body refused to listen.

She blinked hard, dragging herself back—inch by inch—toward the present. The memory of Abby Bennett slipped from her like smoke through her fingers, vanishing into the fog of pain and confusion.

The present crashed in waves. Freya's strangled gasps. Mikael's guttural snarl. The scrape and scatter of loose stone beneath their feet as they struggled for breath, for footing, for control. Time buckled and stuttered around her like a cracked mirror—distorted and refracted, impossible to hold steady.

"Do you not recognize me?" Freya choked out, her voice breaking under the weight of panic. "Can you not see me—the daughter you thought died so long ago?"

His face is a sudden mask of rage. "You lie!"

Freya flinched like he'd struck her, but stood her ground, eyes brimming with tears. Her voice shook, but she pressed on.

"You named your sword Rathul, after the early morning sun," she whispered. "Its hilt was golden—like my hair. You told me it would remind you of me when you were away... that I would be by your side in battle."

Mikael froze, his grip loosening just slightly.

"The night before you left for war, you christened it with goat's blood," Freya whispered. "When I woke, you were gone. I never saw you again."

Brunhilda, still sprawled against the cold stone, was wrapped in Hayley's embrace. Her breaths were shallow and uneven, each one dragging like it had to be wrestled from the air. Across the room, she saw Mikael's face begin to shift—his rage faltering beneath the sincerity of the moment.

"It's been a thousand years," he rasped, voice cracking at the edges. "How is this possible?"

Freya's tears spilled freely now. "I was taken. By Dahlia. I'll explain everything—just... please. Just say you believe me."

Mikael's hand, still hovering near her throat, trembled. Slowly—hesitantly—he lowered it. Suspicion cracked beneath the pressure of grief, the recognition sinking fully in. He dropped to his knees in front of her like a man too heavy to stand, his fingers reaching out to cradle her face, reverent and shaking.

"My beautiful Freya," he whispered. "My daughter."

The dam broke.

Freya collapsed into him, sobbing openly as she gripped his wrists like a lifeline. Mikael wrapped her in a fierce, crushing embrace, his chest heaving under the force of grief and wonder and something too tangled to name. It was the kind of reunion that cracked open time itself, old wounds bleeding fresh beneath the weight of impossible return.

Brunhilda—still half-slumped, half-sprawled against the unforgiving stone floor—watched it through the haze of swimming vision. The moment twisted away from her like smoke, just out of reach, as though she were being written out of her own story in real time.

Run, Hayley, please, she kept thinking. Over and over, like a heartbeat.

"Couldn't they have waited to do this until you weren't dying?" Hayley's whisper is gobsmacked, horrified.

Don't make me laugh, Brunhilda thought, wheezing.

She thinks one of her lungs must be collapsing—her ribs feel wrong. Pain pulsed from the base of her skull—hot, deep, throbbing—and radiated down her spine.

Still, she fought. She blinked hard, dragging herself inch by inch back to the present, letting the lingering memory of Abby Bennett and the rest slip like water through her fingers. Around her, sounds sharpened again—the clatter of boots on stone, the ragged breath of two people trying to forgive a century of loss. Mikael's low voice. Freya's sobs. The present was still happening.

She pushed herself upright, barely, palms scraping the stone, her body screaming in protest. Brunhilda reached out—grabbing the stake in her hard.

I am going to end him, she thinks. It will kill me, but he will not leave here.

The stake felt heavier now. Like it knew what she hadn't done.

Hayley tried to hold her tighter and made a noise that finally broke through the spell that was cast over the two in the center of the room—Freya suddenly broke away from her father. Her boots scuffed against the cracked floor as she rushed to Brunhilda's side, falling to her knees beside her, hands frantic and firm against her shoulders.

"Hilda. Hey—hey, stay with me," Freya begged, voice hoarse with guilt and panic. "I didn't—I couldn't let you kill him. I couldn't."

Brunhilda wanted to speak. Wanted to say You should have. Wanted to say He will never change. Wanted to say You promised. But her throat burned. Her chest was too tight, lungs filling with blood. The words stuck like glass behind her teeth.

"I've got you," Freya whispered urgently. "You're okay."

But Brunhilda wasn't. Not really.

Brunhilda's lips part, but she can't quite find the air to speak. Her throat burns. Her chest feels tight, like something is slowly collapsing inside her. Her body wasn't healing like it was supposed to and her mind is still slipping, blinking in and out of the now and the could have been like film reels skipping frames, trying to play two endings at once.

She would have done it. She would have ended Mikael, would have used the dust of him to finally rip Freya free. It was brutal, yes, but it would have been done. And Freya—Freya, who had agreed to this, who knew what was at stake—couldn't let her finish it.

Freya had chosen him.

Of course she had.

Brunhilda's stomach twists, but she pushes the feeling down. Bury it. No room for it now.

Above her, Mikael's eyes narrowed. Suspicion returned to his features, dulling the edge of softness. "Who is this?" he demanded. "Freya, who is this woman?"

Brunhilda's vision narrowed further, tunneling in on the faces above her as if the room were collapsing inward. Her world was shrinking—too much light, too much noise, and her heart pounding louder than thought.

Brunhilda's fingers twitched. Her voice barely more than a breath: "Promise me—Freya—don't let him hurt her—"

Freya hushed her, running her fingers in her hair. Hayley still held her close, glaring at Freya with molten heat.

"She's my—"

But the rest never reached her.

The edges of the world folded in like wings closing, and Brunhilda let herself fall—finally, completely—into the dark. The white oak stake slipped from her hand, landing beside her with a dull, accusing thud.

And silence took her.

Chapter Text

Brunhilda woke to the dark.

The black was as far as her consciousness could grasp—and in that dark, she found no malice but also no comfort. Just an absence, a void that did not press in or consume, but simply existed. There was no edge to it. No floor, no sky. Only stillness, and the peculiar sensation that she was both freezing and burning at once. Not warm but cold and hot layered side by side with no space in between. Her body felt distant. Or maybe it wasn't there at all.

Her awareness drifted, disembodied—like smoke unraveling through a void too large to name. And then, slowly, ache by ache, she began to take shape. Fingers clenched. Joints flared. Her heart thudded somewhere deep, slow and dull, like it was moving through water.

In all things, a balance could be found. Homeostasis. The natural state of all things. It could be found in her too—in this moment between being unmade and remade, between dreaming and dying and waking again.

This wasn't a place meant to be wandered while wounded. The real world was still out there—bleeding and soaking into stone—but here, her mind moved without tether.

Each breath she managed pulled her tighter into herself. Clarity followed. Her limbs remembered weight.

And so, she walked.

Each step she took sent ripples through the dark beneath her feet. Her boots met no ground, yet she moved forward. And with every step, the darkness thickened—rising like ink in water, swallowing what little light remained. No wind. No sound. Not even her own footsteps.

The darkness is still stretched long and wide. Brunhilda walks through it blindly. Her footsteps make no sound. There's no beginning, no end—only that sense of being watched by something too large to name.

And then, a shift.

It doesn't feel like a door opening. More like something giving way inside her.

And then—light.

Brunhilda shielded her eyes, blinking against the hard light of a sudden sunburst.

The heat wrapped around her. The landscape was dry, cracked—a terrain of dust and wind-blasted stone. It felt older than anything she'd ever walked on before. Brunhilda squinted into the light and realized she was standing just outside a training circle. A crowd was gathered—young and old witches alike, robed figures murmuring in disapproval or awe behind them.

In the center of the circle stood a girl.

She was maybe thirteen. She stood like a tree would—rooted to the ground and straight, tall for her age and painfully thin, but proud. Her chin was high. Her dark curls were half-unraveled, sweat clinging to her temple. Blood trickled down from a shallow cut on her cheek, but her hands did not tremble.

She had just defeated her final opponent, an older boy whose smugness had curdled to horror moments before she disarmed him with a flick of her wrist and sent him sprawling to the dirt. He had yet to rise.

Brunhilda could feel it—her raw magic humming in the air, curling off her in little sparks. The crowd didn't cheer. They stepped back. Her father, tall and hard-jawed, stared with a tightening mouth. Her mother folded her arms tightly across her chest. No one met the girl's gaze, though her eyes searched each other like she was waiting for someone to say that she had done well. That she was more than enough.

No one did.

The memory skipped.

Now it was evening. The camp had gone quiet, though fires flickered in distant braziers and someone was singing drunkenly nearby. The girl walked alone down a side path, a winding foot-trail that disappeared into the brush. She was humming to herself, a song without words, kicking small stones from her path. She was too proud to pretend she didn't care that no one had spoken to her after the Trials.

The boy appeared before she could finish the tune. Brunhilda recognized him. The boy who had lost.

"Qetsiyah," the boy said.

She stopped a few feet from him. She said something—a joke, maybe, a jab. She was still basking in her victory. Her smile was too wide.

He didn't answer. He stepped forward.

Brunhilda stood still, watching this world unravel around her. She knew this was a memory. She knew she couldn't change it, but her stomach knotted all the same. Her body tensed, her breath catching. She wanted to scream at the girl to run, but she couldn't. She could only watch.

The boy grabbed her by the wrist. Qetsiyah startled, confused. He shoved her hard and she stumbled, falling to her knees. Her magic sparked around her hands but sputtered out uselessly—she hadn't expected this.

The ground bit at her palms. His breath was hot against her cheek. His hand pressed into her back.

She twisted, snarling, but he was too heavy. Her small, strong body buckled beneath him. His fingers dug into her skin. Her voice broke as she cried out, but it echoed back to her in the wilderness, unheard.

And then—silence.

The boy collapsed. Dead.

Qetsiyah didn't move. She lay there, her body curled around itself, shoulders shaking.

They found her like that, long after the moon had risen. The boy's body silent and still. Brunhilda could feel the judgment that slammed down like a hammer when they pulled him off her.

The memory changed again.

"You killed a boy," her mother said.

"He tried to hurt me," Qetsiyah's voice was thin, small.

"You would have healed," her mother replied flatly. "No one can heal from death."

"I didn't mean to—"

"Does that make it better?"

The slap from her mother was sudden and Brunhilda flinched before Qetsiyah could hit the ground.

When she opened her eyes again, the world shifted, spun—

The dark did not part. It only folded. Layers of shadow peeled back, and Brunhilda was dropped, gently but without mercy, into the middle of it.

She stood in a stone-walled hut.

The air was thick with rot and flies buzzed near her. A single shaft of light pushed through the window, catching the dust that hung like cobwebs in the air. There was a bed in the corner. Two forms laid on it—one small and one much larger.

Brunhilda took a step forward, slow, cautious. Her boots scraped ash off the floor.

And then she saw him.

The boy was so small she nearly missed him—curled tight beside the unmoving body of a woman, his knees drawn to his chest. Silas. No older than eight. His hair was wild and matted, his face streaked with filth. His little hands clutched the hem of the woman's tunic.

He wasn't crying. Not anymore. Maybe he already had, for hours, for days. Maybe he had run out.

His mother's corpse was pale and bloated, her mouth hung open and one eye collapsed inward, leaving only a rotting hole. The flies moved in little clouds from her throat and her scalp and the soft, damp space beneath her arm. She was not freshly dead. She had been rotting for some time.

And Silas lay beside her still.

His bones showed through his skin. His belly was bloated—not from food, Brunhilda realized, but from hunger. He must have been there for days. Alone.

Across the room, an old metal basin caught rainwater leaking through a hole in the thatch. Brunhilda watched as the boy crawled toward it—limbs trembling, movements mechanical.

He drank with both hands cupped.

She did not speak. She could not. She only watched him drink and return to her—to the body—to curl against what used to be warmth. She watched as he lay in silence, a faint twitch in his jaw the only hint that he was still awake. That he was still alive. The boy stared up at the ceiling.

Then, softly—so softly she almost didn't hear it—Silas spoke.

"I think," he whispered to himself, "no one's coming."

His voice was paper-thin, brittle like old parchment. It had no tremble, no fear. Just certainty.

"I think I'm going to die too."

Brunhilda's hands tightened at her sides. Her fingers ached.

The memory broke and the next was made of candlelight.

Brunhilda found herself in a narrow room with stone walls and no windows. Shelves lined the walls, each crowded with apothecary jars, strips of parchment, bowls still dusted with chalk. It smelled like copper and oil and mugwort. The scent of ritual.

At the center of the room, a desk. Wooden. Carved. Covered in scraps of metal and twisted lengths of wire. Two small iron molds rested at its edge.

Emily Bennett stood before it, sleeves rolled, fingers stained with something dark. She was working in a tense silence.

Her hands moved like clockwork. Magic gathered around her, quiet but precise—threaded into every movement, every breath. She had been at this for hours. Maybe days. Brunhilda could feel that in lingering weight of her magic in the room.

Two rings sat cooling on a velvet cloth. One finished. The other nearly done.

Emily exhaled through her nose, wiped her hands, and reached for the last piece: a single thread of hair, wrapped in white linen.

She hesitated.

Then unwrapped it.

Her lips moved silently as she pressed the strand into the band. The spell sealed with a shimmer—so faint Brunhilda nearly missed it. And just like that, it was done.

Brunhilda stepped closer.

Emily didn't look up. Her eyes were locked on the rings, but she didn't touch them.

A door creaked.

A man entered—brisk, humming to himself, boots loud on the wood. Johnathan Gilbert. He was smiling. He picked up one of the rings with a whistle.

"You actually finished it," he said, turning it over in his palm. "You really are something remarkable, Miss Bennett."

Emily smiled. It was tight. Controlled.

"I finished two," she said. "One for you. One for your wife."

His eyes lifted, surprised. "You didn't have to—"

"I know," Emily interrupted. "But I did."

He grinned but didn't thank her. Just slipped the ring onto his finger, admiring it like a man admiring his own reflection.

"You're a marvel," he said. "You know that?"

Emily didn't answer.

He said something else—something light, something thoughtless—and left with the pair. The door swung shut behind him.

The silence returned.

And the witch tilted her head—

She looked at Brunhilda then.

"You think I'm foolish," she said. "You think I didn't know? That he didn't love me? That he never even thought of the possibility?"

She wiped at her cheeks, rubbing away tears that hadn't fallen.

"Katherine told me once that I was a fool for this kind of love," Emily said. "She said that it would burn through me and leave me a pile of ash. That no spell, no matter how powerful the witch, could undo the ache of being seen as merely useful instead of cherished."

Her hands rested on the desk now, clenched tight. 

"She was right. I knew she was, but I did it anyway."

Brunhilda blinked, and she was somewhere else again.

The candlelit room was gone. Now she stood in a wide circular chamber carved of sandstone, the walls etched with runes that shifted subtly as if reacting to the hum of magic in the air. The ceiling arched high above her, ribbed like the inside of a great beast's ribcage. Torches burned blue in sconces along the walls, casting a strange glow across the stone.

Qetsiyah was older now—sixteen, perhaps seventeen. Her frame had filled out and she looked strong, dangerous in a certain light. She wore deep indigo robes. At her side was a girl with warm brown eyes and thick dark curls pinned behind her ears—Amara. The girls were sat next to each other at a long table of polished obsidian, surrounded by men three times their age—the Travelers' Council.

A withered elder at the head of the table raised his voice to drone on about tradition, stability, order.

Qetsiyah snorted.

"That spell you just praised?" she said, her voice calm, almost bored. "It wastes power. The incantation can be shortened by at least two lines if you know what you're doing. But of course, you wouldn't."

Gasps rippled through the chamber like wind through dry grass. Amara's hand jerked and she blinked, her mouth going slightly agape.

"Qetsiyah," she whispered, eyes wide.

But Qetsiyah stood, spreading her arms. "You all demand progress, but punish it when it arrives in a form you did not anticipate. You want brilliance—obedient brilliance. That's not what I am."

One of the Councilors stood and snarled, "Sit down, girl."

Qetsiyah sneered. "Make me."

And then, with a flick of her hand, Qetsiyah lit the air with magic. She didn't harm them—just made her point. The torches flared, the walls trembled, and across the Council table a bowl of sacred water boiled over in a hiss of steam. She didn't smile this time.

Brunhilda shifted her gaze—and noticed Amara. The girl had not stepped back. Instead, she reached forward and touched Qetsiyah's wrist.

"That's enough," she said gently. "Let them be small. You don't have to shrink to match them, but don't burn yourself to prove your light."

Qetsiyah stared at her for a long moment, then sighed and let the magic settle. The torches dimmed. The stones calmed.

Later—Brunhilda didn't see how the time changed, but suddenly they were in Qetsiyah's private chambers—Amara was helping her peel out of her robes, brushing ash from her hair.

"They think I'm monstrous," Qetsiyah said, her voice low.

"I think you're extraordinary," Amara said without hesitation.

Qetsiyah looked at her, startled.

"You say that like you mean it," she muttered.

Amara tilted her head. "Of course I mean it. You're my friend."

Friend.

Qetsiyah turned away, suddenly overwhelmed. She set her hands on the windowsill, breathing in deeply. Below them, the city was bathed in gold.

"I think," she said, quietly, "that you might be the only one who's ever meant that."

Brunhilda felt something in her chest ache.

The darkness rose again to take them.

Brunhilda felt the shape of something behind her. She turned.

There was a boy—no, a man. Brunhilda's gaze locked onto him.

Stone walls rose on every side, their curved lines and frescoes worn with age, painted over with smoke from a hundred candles. The chamber flickered orange with firelight, the air dense with the scent of crushed herbs and half-burnt parchment. She was in a temple—no, a study.

Silas was older than the last vision, but he was not yet immortal. He was sitting at a table littered with scrolls, half-written spells, charmed objects in varying states of activation.

He leaned forward, scribbling with impatience. The flick of his quill was sharp, almost angry, like he was trying to fight the parchment into understanding him. His expression was pinched, hungry—but not for food.

"Silas," a voice drawled from behind him.

Brunhilda turned in time to see Qetsiyah. She was only a few years older than she had been with Amara. Dark curls cascaded over her shoulder in a loose braid. Her robes were deep green, trimmed with silver thread that shimmered as she moved. She walked with the easy grace of someone who'd never had to ask for a seat at the table—someone who built the table herself.

"You're angry—you've been burning parchment again," she said lightly, crossing the room to peer over his shoulder.

Silas didn't look up. "You told me my formulas were wrong. I'm fixing it."

"You're obsessing," Qetsiyah countered, reaching out to pluck the paper from under his hands. He grabbed for it, but she lifted it just out of reach. "You've already corrected it six times."

"Then perhaps you should let me be," he snapped, eyes flashing.

Brunhilda watched them, transfixed. There was tension here—like iron drawn taut, not yet brittle but approaching it.

Qetsiyah raised a brow. "Would you rather I left you to embarrass yourself in front of the Council again?"

Silas stood. He was taller than her now, older than he had been when they first met, but the irritation in his face was still laced with that old envy, that festering ache for control. "I could surpass them all if I wanted to. You know that."

"And yet you haven't." Her voice was mild, but Brunhilda heard the challenge in it. "You chase power like a dog chases its own tail."

He rounded on her, furious. "You speak as if I'll never be your equal."

Qetsiyah stared at him for a long moment. Then, with surprising softness, she placed the parchment back on the table and said, "You are the closest thing I have to a partner, Silas. The others bore me. They speak of balance and tradition as if it were the only way. But you—you want more. You are like me."

Silas's breath hitched—not quite a gasp, not quite a scoff. He looked away for a moment, toward the arching stone windows, where light lit the room. Brunhilda, watching from the sidelines of memory, noted how young he still looked. Not in body, not anymore—but in spirit.

For a moment, it seemed like he might lash out. His hands clenched, his shoulders tensed. But then, as if something inside him stuttered and stalled, he relaxed all at once. The fight left him in a single exhale.

He smiled, but it was hollow. "One day, they'll call me the greatest witch who ever lived."

Brunhilda watched Qetsiyah's lips press into a thin line. "If that's what you want to be remembered for."

"I want to be remembered," Silas said, his voice sudden and raw, like he hadn't meant to say it aloud. "I don't want to vanish."

"In this too we are the same," Qetsiyah said.

Silas watched her. He didn't speak. And when Qetsiyah finally left, it was quiet—just the rustle of his robe as it slipped out the doorway.

Brunhilda exhaled. She hadn't realized she'd been holding her breath.

From the dark edges of her mindscape, the memory dissolved like ink in water. The room faded and she was moving again, pulled forward—toward the next fragment of this sweet undoing.

Brunhilda stood at the edge of a vast courtyard. Smoke curled from braziers and the sky above was orange and red with the approaching evening.

In the center of it all was Qetsiyah, Silas, and Amara.

They were older—perhaps twenty, maybe more. The fire of youth remained in all three of them, but it was controlled now, tempered.

Qetsiyah wore a robe dyed deepest scarlet, the hem embroidered in gold thread. She had grown into her command. Her posture was flawless and her gaze was cold. Amara's robe matched hers. Silas stood just across from her, magic humming at his fingertips. There was no audience that day. Just the three of them, and a silence thick with tension.

"You don't listen," Qetsiyah snapped. "You twist my lessons. You think knowing the steps makes you a master of the dance."

"I was not made to follow," Silas said, and he grinned a devastating smile—throwing in a wink that made both girls flush.

Brunhilda watched from the shadows, heart hammering. There was something dangerous there—not just between them, but beneath them. The magic crackled in the air, too tightly wound.

"You always want more," Qetsiyah said. "And I always wonder—what part of yourself are you willing to sell to get it?"

Silas met her gaze. "Any part you're not using."

It was a crude line, and he knew it. He wagged his eyebrows at the witch. Qetsiyah did not laugh, and her frown became more severe.

Amara stepped into their moment like sunlight slipping between stormclouds before the storm in Qetsiyah could explode—still young, still beautiful, her expression joyful.

"That's enough," she said. "You want the same thing—we all do—there's no need to pick at each other."

Silas didn't look away, but Qetsiyah did. Her voice, when she spoke again, was rougher. "He never listens."

Amara's eyes softened. "Then let him learn the hard way. But don't become cruel to match him. That's not the woman I admire."

The storm broke. Qetsiyah exhaled sharply and stepped back, her shoulders dropping just enough to release the tension. She turned her face toward Amara, and for a flicker of a moment, there was something like peace between them.

Brunhilda stepped closer, unsure if she was still meant to watch—still meant to be there—but no one looked her way.

The memory jumped, subtly, and she was inside a smaller room—low-lit, warm with the smell of cedar and honey. Qetsiyah sat on a cushioned bench, her back to the door, a thick manuscript laid across her lap.

"You ever think about what we could be, if we were different people?" Amara asked, voice soft. She sat across from her, feet tucked beneath her.

Qetsiyah didn't look up. "Why would I do that?"

Amara smiled faintly. "It is fun—it helps the mind to think of these sort of what ifs sometimes."

"Oh," Qetsiyah said idly. "And what would this other version of you be like?"

"Kind. Whole. Unafraid. Free."

Qetsiyah paused. Then, very slowly, she closed the book and set it aside. "You are those things already."

Amara's expression shifted—she looked as if she might cry.

Qetsiyah leaned forward. Her voice was quieter now. "You are my only true friend. If nothing else in this world is real, that is."

It hit Brunhilda like a blow—because she knew what came next. She knew how this ended.

And still, Qetsiyah smiled.

Brunhilda wanted to reach out and warn them. Wanted to stop the avalanche that had already begun to fall. But she could not move. She was only a witness.

And then—slowly—the scene began to unravel. The stone walls bled into shadow. The warmth faded. Amara's voice, echoing with some long-forgotten reply, became a distant thing.

Darkness coiled at the edges of her vision. Brunhilda blinked once, and the light was gone.

The memory unfolded slowly. Brunhilda didn't land in it—she slipped in, like a breath through parted curtains. The sound of hooves echoed soft and steady against a packed road. Gravel ground beneath wooden wheels.

Inside the carriage, the light was golden and fading.

Emily was asleep.

She lay with her head in Katherine's lap, one hand curled under her cheek, the other resting gently over her stomach. Her chest rose and fell in an unhurried rhythm. The laces of her dress were slightly askew from the heat, and a loose curl clung to her temple.

Katherine didn't move. She watched.

Her hand hovered just above Emily's skin, not quite touching.

Outside, the sun was nearly gone. Fireflies blinked against the trees lining the road. The world was quiet in that hush-before-night way, where nothing breathed too loud for fear of waking the dark early.

Katherine's voice was soft, though she was the only one awake.

"You trust me too much," she murmured to the still air. Her fingers drifted down, barely brushing the edge of Emily's sleeve. "You close your eyes and forget what I am."

Emily didn't stir.

There was a quiet bitter hurt in the way Katherine watched her.

Brunhilda watched, and something sharp caught behind her ribs.

Outside, the road shifted—gravel turned to packed earth, then again to gravel. A wheel caught on a rock. The carriage jolted.

Emily stirred.

Her eyes fluttered open slowly and she looked up at her, blinking, before a smile pulled at her lips.

"Were you watching me?"

Katherine scoffed. "No."

"I was dreaming," Emily said, her voice warm and full of sleep. "About a house on a hill. And the smell of fresh bread. It felt... safe."

"That's ridiculous," Katherine murmured, brushing her thumb across a crown of Emily's head. "You've never baked anything in your life."

Emily grinned, eyes still half-lidded. "And yet, it was still me in the dream."

Katherine's fingers paused just under her chin. Her smile faded, just a little. "You shouldn't let yourself rest like that around me."

"You say that every time." Emily's hand came up to cover hers. "And every time, I remind you that I trust you."

Katherine doesn't answer.

The carriage slowed. A voice called out from the front—something about the house, the turn ahead. Katherine didn't look. Her gaze was still on Emily.

Emily sat up slowly, her hand still holding Katherine's for a moment longer than necessary. She adjusted the fall of her dark curls with practiced ease, began tying the ribbon on her bonnet.

The carriage rolled to a stop.

"What lie will you live this time?" Emily's tone was careful.

Katherine looked at her, amused, "I am a tragic orphan. I lost my poor papa and mama in a fire three months ago."

The vampire offered her hand as they stepped down together. "Now come along, dearest Emily. It's time to become someone else."

Emily snorted.

And with that, the memory slipped from Brunhilda's grasp and the next slipped in.

She found herself standing on pale stone, the floor beneath her cool and smooth, etched faintly with symbols worn from use. Moonlight spilled through an open archway, casting shadows like bones across the walls.

A table stood in the center of the chamber. Long, wide, littered with scrolls, iron bowls, small glass vials catching the light like stars trapped in oil.

Qetsiyah was speaking.

She stood at one end of the table, back straight, hands clasped tightly in front of her. Her voice was low, steady, calm in a way that felt dangerous.

"One more moon," she said. "I've mapped the stars and everything points to this being our chance, Silas."

Silas leaned against the far wall. He wasn't looking at her—he was watching the door, as if expecting someone else to walk through it.

"You don't seem excited," Qetsiyah said.

He blinked. Slowly turned his head. "I am."

"Then say something."

He did. But it wasn't what she wanted. "I apologize—I am... I am just tired."

"You'll see," she said, not acknowledging his words, already thinking of what their lives will be like in a month's time. "When it's done, the world won't be able to look away from us. No one will be able to stop us."

He didn't smile. He said nothing.

Brunhilda felt it—the way the memory bent around him. His grief hadn't happened yet, but it was already there. Like a bruise forming under skin before the blow landed—the same way a character destined to die haunts a play from the very first line.

The scene disappeared.

Now it was night.

Brunhilda was outside now—standing in a narrow grove surrounded by low, twisted trees. The earth beneath her feet was dark and wet. The stars were smeared behind clouds, and there was a sound in the distance like thunder, except it wasn't. It was screaming.

And blood. So much blood.

Silas was kneeling in the grass.

His hands were red, soaked to the wrist. His fingers pressed helplessly against a wound too deep to close. Amara lay in his lap—dark hair tangled across her throat, eyes glassy and wide with terror. Her breath rattled, shallow, wet. This is fake, Brunhilda reminds herself. Qetsiyah tricked Silas with this falsehood, a fake Amara for him to hold in his arms as she died.

He was whispering something again and again—

Stay with me. Please. Go no where I cannot follow. I cannot live with out you. All the songs were about you, and now all the tragedies shall be too.

The grass stained her skin. Blood soaked through his robe. He leaned close like it might keep her warm.

Qetsiyah walked into the clearing like a storm trapped in the shape of a woman. Her hair was loose. Her hands were steady, but her mouth was trembling.

"You lied to me," she said.

Silas didn't look up.

"You were meant to stand beside me, Silas," she went on. Her voice didn't rise, but the wind did. "We were going to rule the world together."

"I never wanted that," Silas said. His voice was thin and ugly with his despair.

"You could have said something."

"I did," he said. "You didn't listen."

"You should have loved me." Her voice snapped now, high and vicious. "I would have made you a god."

"I didn't want that," he spat. "I only wanted her."

He cradled the woman tighter. Her mouth was parted, but she made no sound.

"You loved me once," Qetsiyah said.

He looked up at her, and Brunhilda saw the moment it happened—the split between the boy and the thing he would become.

"I never loved you," he lied.

Brunhilda noticed it immediately for what it was, but Qetsiyah heard it only as truth.

Her eyes went wide. Her breath caught. And then—just like that—she broke. It wasn't rage. It was something much colder. She did not scream, the wind did that for her. Her hands lifted.

The world cracked.

The scene tore apart, ripped from her sight.

Brunhilda didn't arrive so much as fall into the space—drawn forward, pulled like thread through a needle. The darkness faded, not into light, but into stillness. A stone altar. Low-burning torches. Dust swirled in lazy spirals.

Two figures stood alone.

Qetsiyah's silhouette was sharp against the flame. Her shoulders shook and she looked angrier, somehow, than she had with Silas.

Amara knelt in front of her. She was not chained. Not gagged. Her hands were folded in her lap. Her eyes were open and dry.

"You betrayed me," Qetsiyah said. "You knew what he meant to me—what you meant."

"I know," she said.

"Was it love? Was that it? Was it a whim, a cruel joke you were both playing on me?" Qetsiyah demanded, her voice was on the edge of hysterics. "Tell me Amara—did you truly hate me all this time?"

Amara tilted her head. "It was not so simple."

Qetsiyah's hands trembled. She hid it well.

"I would have given you the world," she said.

"I didn't want the world," Amara answered. "I wanted you, I think—but I also wanted him. You would not let me have both, so I made a choice, Tessa. I see now that I chose wrong."

There was a long pause. Qetsiyah exhaled slowly, then raised the talisman between them.

"Then you'll have this instead," she said. "A curse. A binding. You will be an anchor now to a new order—tethered to every soul who dies. You will feel each one pass through you. You will carry them. Forever."

Her voice grew sharper, breaking at the edge.

"You will never be alone again, but neither will you ever be whole. You will scream until your voice shatters. And when that's gone, you'll scream in silence. You will remember me long after your body turns to dust."

"Do you remember," Amara whispered, her legs had already begun to go cold and unmoving, "when I told you that I once dreamed we were different people?"

Qetsiyah stiffened.

"In the dream," Amara went on, the grey had already climbed to her waist, "you were happy and the sun shone a little bit brighter for virtue of you living under it. The wine was always sweet and the flowers always in bloom. And in the dream, I was brave. In the dream, we were happy."

Qetsiyah's throat worked. She said nothing.

Amara reached up, touched her hand—just briefly—for the last time.

"I hope," she said, "that if we are reborn, our ending will be a different one. A happy one, maybe. I think I would like that."

The light swelled, and Brunhilda was pulled away before she could see who cried first.

The eight-year-old version of Silas was back. He was still beside the rotting corpse of his mother.

"I'm too afraid to fall asleep," he said to no one. He was staring out the window of their hut. "If I dream, I'll see her again. But if I die—I might see nothing."

He turned his head, the slow drag of it unnerving. And for the first time, he looked directly at Brunhilda.

"Do you know?" he asked.

Brunhilda's throat was dry. "Know what?"

"What comes next? After we die?"

Brunhilda looked down at him and she felt sympathy rise from somewhere deep inside of her. She smiled at him, tearfully. "Do you want to know a secret?"

Silas smiled back, toothy and his skin pulled taut over jutting cheekbones. "I love secrets. I am very good at keeping them."

"You don't die here, Silas," she reached out and patted his cheek. "You survive this, and you live for a very long time."

"Oh," he said. "Is it a happy life?"

"The happiest," she lied.

Finally, the boy let his eyes slide closed, a large smile on his face. Just a little boy again, curling in on himself, nestling into the bones of the world like he belonged there.

And the memory shattered.

A field.

The light hit her like a slap. Not sunlight this time—but moonlight. Harsh and pale and blinding, cast down from a full moon so large it swallowed the sky. The air smelled like iron and fire. The ground beneath her feet was blackened and hard, scorched by spellwork and fear.

Inadu laid at the center of the clearing.

She was bound by twelve men, each one holding a cord stretched taut from her wrists, shoulders pulled back until her bones looked like they might crack. Her feet were bare. Her mouth bloodied. Her eyes—black and endless—stared directly at Brunhilda.

"I did not want to die," Inadu said. "Was that so wrong? To want to live? To cling to it at the expense of all other things? 

The wind picked up. The grass bent low, bowing like it feared her.

"You witches and your precious vampires—you all tussle over immortality, but I never asked for forever." She is unblinking, her teeth bared. "I wanted the one life. One where I would suffer no man, no law, no restraints."

Inadu's mother stepped into the circle.

Brunhilda didn't need to be told who she was. She wore a cloak of crow feathers and elk-hide, her hair bound with bones. Her eyes were dry. Her grip on the axe didn't shake though there were tears falling down her cheeks.

"You know she told me that this was a mercy," Inadu said. "That it'd be quick—like falling asleep."

She laughed—bitter and bright, teeth flecked with blood.

The ropes pulled tighter. One of them bit into her wrist hard enough to draw blood. She still did not blink.

"They said I was born wrong," she continued. "My father told me that my magic burned through my mother's womb and that is how they knew I was to be a curse. That I came into the world screaming and greedy and cruel, that the fire followed me from whatever hell I crawled out of."

The men began chanting. Low and low and low, a sound like grinding stone.

"I made them afraid. That's all this was. That's all it's ever been."

She looked at Brunhilda then. Really looked.

"And you—you thought you could use me like firewood? Feed me to your little spell? Kindling, is that what you thought I was?"

The wind howled now. The circle trembled.

"You thought you could use me to make this jump easier?" she sneered. "Burn me to fuel your little spell? I am not yours to burn, witch."

Brunhilda tried to speak. She couldn't. The magic in the air stole every breath.

Her mother stepped forward.

The axe gleamed in the moonlight.

"Tell me, little witch," Inadu looked at her—her mother brought down the axe once, twice—and sneered, "what am I hungry for? If I am so empty and hollow, then what do I want to fill myself with?"

Brunhilda's hands curled into fists.

"I'll tell you," she said. Her voice was yelling now between blows from her mother's axe. "I want out. I want to run, unchained and unhunted. I want to rip this world apart with my teeth until the sky bleeds and the bones of it crack beneath my feet."

She smiled then. Right at Brunhilda.

"I have my roots in you now, little witch," she said. "Can't you feel them—digging deeper and deeper in the truth of you? Into your marrow, you blood? You pulled me into your spell and thought I'd stay quiet?"

Her mother brought the axe down, splitting her skull in two.

The field went silent.

And Brunhilda felt the memory tear apart like a fault line cracking open beneath her feet.

There was no sky now. No ground.

Only the black.

It pressed in from all sides, thick as pitch, swallowing sound and shape alike. Brunhilda didn't know how long she'd been falling—only that when she landed, she landed hard. The breath tore out of her chest. Her magic sparked, dim and useless in the dark.

A voice followed.

"Well. That was dramatic."

Inadu.

She stood a few feet away, bare feet soundless in the dark, the crack in her skull from the blade still glowing faintly with red light, but somehow she didn't look hurt. She looked furious.

"You're dead now," Inadu said, stepping forward. "Not all the way, maybe. But enough for me to take what I want."

Brunhilda backed away.

"You don't belong here," she whispered. "And I will not let you take me."

"I belong wherever you are," Inadu said. "You invited me, little witch. You thought to use me and now you're here—weak, dying, alone."

Her eyes gleamed black in the void.

Brunhilda turned and ran.

There was no direction—but she ran anyway. Feet pounding into nothing and her breath caught in her throat.

Inadu laughed behind her, high and echoing. "There is nowhere you can run that I will not find you."

The dark bent around her, swallowing sound. Shapes flickered in the distance—ghosts of memories. Hands reaching. Faces screaming. Magic fraying like torn fabric.

Brunhilda tripped—

And landed into light.

She hit the ground on her side, hard. The stone beneath her was smooth and cold, dust swirling around her as she scrambled upright.

They were in a Silas's cave now.

The ceiling arched high above, domed and lined with carved runes. Torches flickered along the walls, throwing long shadows across the stone—though by the time Brunhilda would make it here, two thousand years in the future, the only source of light would be a single crack in the foundation.

Silas sat on his altar. His eyes, once defiant, looked dulled now—burnt out from grief or guilt, or perhaps both.

Qetsiyah stood across from him, watching him with a gaze that had once held wonder. Now, it only held resolve.

"I offer forgiveness," she said.

Silas refused to look at her, but she stepped forward anyway.

"You can take it," she said. "The cure. A short mortal life with me. But you'll never see her again. I've made certain of that."

She placed the vial in his hand.

"Or you can live forever and suffer alone."

Silas looked down at the cure, then up at her. His eyes burned. "That is not a choice at all."

The memory began to shimmer at the edges. Brunhilda could feel Inadu stirring behind her.

She turned—

Inadu raised her hands, power pulsing in jagged threads between her fingers, but someone else moved first.

Tessa's hand snapped sideways—and she threw Silas the blade from her belt.

Steel flashed through the air.

He caught it mid-air, graceful and bored. Without ceremony, without hesitation, he turned and drove it into Inadu's side.

She howled.

A sound that was all pain and fury unspooled in one ragged scream. The walls of the chamber groaned and the air bent with the force of it. Brunhilda staggered back as the memory began to crack apart.

Inadu collapsed and the world began to fall in on itself—stone splintering, shadows sweeping across the floor like rising water.

She had already started to stand again, her face contorting into a mask of rage.

"I'm getting real sick of all these comebacks, Inadu," he muttered, brushing imaginary dust off his sleeves, still holding the bloodied blade. "Face it, babe—it's time to retire with the rest of the one-hit wonders. Leave some living for those of us who aren't raging killjoys."

Tessa turned to Brunhilda, her voice sharper than before, urgent and sharp as a spell. 

"Run."

Brunhilda didn't need to be told twice. She bolted immediately—her feet pounding across a collapsing dreamscape, memories shattering like glass beneath her heels. She ran without a destination, only a direction—away.

She ripped through memory after memory, through Inadu's fury, through blood and fire and endless, echoing rage. The past clawed at her, tried to drag her back, but she kept going until it loosened its grip and gave way to something deeper.

Something darker.

The world went silent.

No ground. No sky. No truths to be exposed, no memories to walk through. Just black. An endless, empty dark that swallowed her whole.

Still, she kept moving. Her legs didn't tire, but her heart did—slowed by the weight of all the pain she had carried here.

And then—she wasn't alone.

In the blackness, crouched like a forgotten doll, was a girl.

Amara.

She was sobbing quietly, her long dark hair clinging to her face, tears spilling down in steady rivers. The sound was soft, almost drowned by the thick, dreamless dark around them. Her shoulders shook with each breath, and when she looked up, Brunhilda was struck by how tired she seemed. Like her soul had been wrung out and hung to dry.

When she finally spoke, it was in a whisper so fragile Brunhilda almost didn't catch it. "He asked me to find you."

Brunhilda blinked. "Who?"

Amara's eyes didn't rise. Her voice broke.

"He's never asked me for anything before," she groaned, her head clutched in shaking hands. "Everyone else—all they ever do is ask or beg or scream."

Brunhilda took a step forward. "Amara—what are you talking about?"

Amara didn't answer. Her brown eyes were glossy, glassy, almost translucent. The tears kept falling, as though they never stopped crying anymore. She looked at Brunhilda for a long, aching moment—and then she was gone.

In her place stood a boy.

Dark haired, small, no older than fourteen. Familiar.

Henrik Mikaelson.

His hands were at his sides, and his head was tilted slightly to the right, like he had been waiting for her all along. He smiled at her—easy, sweet—and something in her chest ached.

"I'm truly dead then?" she asked, though she already thought she knew the answer.

Henrik shrugged, like it wasn't a big deal. "Just a bit."

She let out a shaky breath.

Henrik smiled. "Don't worry. I don't think it'll stick."

There was something oddly comforting about his voice. Light, boyish, but weighted by a wisdom far older than his years. His eyes—soft, thoughtful—rested on her like he was reading something only he could see.

He was still smiling when he said, "You're not what I expected."

"I get that a lot," Brunhilda huffed—half a laugh, half a sob.

"You're not going to ask what I expected?"

"You're, like, twelve," the witch said. "I don't need a medieval pre-teen criticizing me too."

"I'm much older than I look—certainly older than you," he said lightly. "But you already knew that, didn't you."

There was a pause. Something shifted in his expression, wistful and distant, and he sighed.

"I wish we could've met in another life," he said softly. "One where I lived. Where I grew up. Maybe we would've crossed paths in some other world—one where I wasn't stuck like this."

She nodded—certainly if he had lived then things would have been very different. "You think about that a lot?"

"All the time," he said quietly. "More often recently—since you fell into this world."

A long silence stretched between them.

He broke it with, "I would've liked to meet you in that different version of our story—the one where I grew up."

She looked at him, surprised.

His smile was gentle, but it didn't reach his eyes.

"But I'll make do," he said.

Another silence.

Then, more carefully: "What's your plan now?"

Brunhilda exhaled through her nose, her arms folding tight across her chest.

"I'm not sure if I want to help Freya anymore," she admitted. "She has always wanted a family. She has one now. Let her deal with Dahlia on her own."

Henrik shook his head. "You can't do that to her."

Brunhilda didn't respond. Didn't even look at him. Instead, her voice sharpened—clinical now, detached, as if reading from a checklist that never seemed to end.

"I have to kill Mikael," she said. "I need to find the rest of the white oak, wherever that is. I need to deal with this world's Silas. I need to free Amara and I need to save Sheila—otherwise Emily might find a way to kill me for good. I need to destroy both versions of the Hollow—whatever's left of them."

She hesitated, only for a breath.

"And I don't know what I'm going to do about Cade yet."

Henrik watched her, quiet.

Then he said, almost gently, "I know where the white oak is."

Brunhilda turned to him, her breath catching—because of course he knew. Of course the boy left behind knew the secrets everyone else had forgotten.

"You do?" she asked, voice low.

"It's in Mystic Falls," Henrik said and Brunhilda rolled her eyes—of course it was. "They cut it down decades ago. They turned it into a bridge and a sign."

"I spent so long looking for it last time," she groaned. "I wasted so much time."

She opened her mouth to ask other things about this world, but Henrik gently interrupted, tilting his head as if he heard something far away.

"You're waking up." He said after a moment. "I have one last thing to ask—if you are willing, I'd like to add one more thing to your list of promises."

"Sure—why the hell not." She snorted. "It's not like I'm not already bogged down with them. What's one more on top of what I've promised Silas, and Emily, and Hayley, and Freya."

He laughed. It was light and real and a little sad.

"I want you to keep them safe," he said. "My family. As much as you can."

She opened her mouth to answer, but he held up a hand.

"Actually... I have a second favor to ask for," he said quickly. "As payment. For the white oak."

Brunhilda raised a brow. "Are you... bartering with me?"

"Yes," he smiled. He tried to look casual, but his voice tightened. "I want you to promise you think of me from time to time."

The words landed softer than she expected. No dramatics. Just a boy asking not to disappear.

Her throat closed.

Henrik shrugged like he was trying to make it easier. "Most people don't remember me anymore. I was so young when I died... I didn't get to do anything important."

"You were important," she said, quietly.

He looked at her, hopeful but unsure.

"You'll remember me?" he asked.

She nodded once. "I'll remember."

The darkness began to lift, almost imperceptibly, like dawn crawling over a distant horizon. It didn't vanish all at once. It peeled back in layers, shadows thinning, pressure easing from her chest. The weight of the void loosened its grip on her limbs. She could feel the pull now—faint, but insistent—the thread tugging her back to her body, to blood and breath and pain. Henrik noticed it too. His gaze flickered upward, thoughtful.

"Before you go," he said, trying to sound nonchalant, "you really ought to stop compelling everyone you meet."

She blinked at him.

Henrik smirked. "You're dead right now—even if it's temporary. Which means every command you gave, every suggestion, every nudge—they're all gone. They will remember everything."

Brunhilda's eyes widened.

"Oh," she breathed. "That's—actually a problem."

"Yeah," he said. "You've made a right mess of things."

"Great," she muttered. "Just what I needed."

Henrik chuckled, his smile lopsided. "Don't worry. I have faith that you'll figure it out."

Brunhilda exhaled slowly. She watched him for a long moment.

"Will I see you again?"

He nodded, soft and steady. "Yes. When you die next—I'll be here."

"You said when, Henrik." She frowned, suddenly feeling a little annoyed with the youngest Mikaelson. "You were supposed to say if."

Henrik gave her a flat look. He didn't even give her the respect of saying it out loud. Just lifted his eyebrows as if to say: We both know it's not a matter of if, dumbass.

Brunhilda huffed. "You'll wait for me then?"

He looked up at her, a flicker of something ancient and weary passing through his boyish face.

"Always."

And the dark lifted.

Brunhilda closed her eyes—

—and began to wake.

Chapter Text

When Brunhilda finally woke, there were tears spilling down her cheeks.

The feeling in her chest was brittle—shivering, sharp-edged. Her bones remembered where she'd just been before her mind caught up. There was still an ache in her magic and a deeper one in her teeth, a tightness behind her eyes like sorrow had followed her back, as if the lingering hurt from the Other Side hadn't quite let go yet.

The seat beneath her was unfamiliar. Too cold to be her bed. Too firm to be stone. Her head rested against something warm—someone warm—the rhythm of breath rising and falling beneath her cheek.

For a long moment, she didn't move. Didn't breathe too deeply. Just listened.

The world around her was hushed. Not silent, but stilled—the in-between quiet between waking and slumber, when everything holds its breath. The steady hum of the road thrummed under the tires. Leather creaked as the car shifted and somewhere up front, someone muttered low under their breath. A turn signal clicked once, then stopped.

Beneath her, a heartbeat pulsed soft and steady.

Hayley.

Her cheek rested on denim. Her body was sprawled awkwardly across the backseat, head pillowed in Hayley Marshall's lap. The girl had slumped against the window, arm wedged beneath her head, cheek pressed to the glass. Even asleep, her expression was wary—brows drawn, mouth parted in a faint grimace. Her shoulders were hunched like she hadn't quite let the fight go.

Hayley's hand rested on her shoulder, firm and unmoving, holding her like they belonged to each other.

Brunhilda didn't dare move.

It hit her like a blow to the chest.

Hayley looked exhausted and tense, like she'd spent the hours Brunhilda spent in the Beyond waiting for claws around her throat.

A cold ache bloomed low in Brunhilda's stomach. She'd promised to protect her. Not because Hayley needed it—she could survive most things—but because she was one of Brunhilda's precious people.

Brunhilda's eyes ran across the werewolf. No scent of blood. No bruises. No ash. No signs of harm. The girl's pulse fluttered steady beneath her skin, and the knot in Brunhilda's throat loosened. A breath slipped out—sharp, quiet, and frayed at the edges.

She wasn't dead.

Gods. She had been so sure.

Mikael hated werewolves. Not just hated—he loathed them with that old, primal disgust, the kind that bled from a time before he'd risen from death, when the evidence of his wife's affair brought home his youngest son's corpse. Brunhilda had been certain that, by the time she woke, Hayley's body would be cold. Tossed aside like all the others Mikael had carved through.

But she wasn't—she was asleep, alive.

She tried to shift—just enough to sit up, to brush the hair from her face—but pain lanced through her wrists.

She froze.

Fingers flexed behind her back, testing.

Rope.

No—cord. Nylon, maybe. The kind sold in camping stores and survival kits—tight enough to hold, but loose enough not to make her bleed. Familiar.

Too familiar.

Recognition crawled down her spine a beat before she turned her head.

Her backpack—shoved hastily against the far door—was open. The flap hung loose, one strap twisted. Half its contents were scattered across the floorboard.

Her lighter sat exposed. Her grimoire, though still inside, had shifted just enough to show its corner. The multitool was gone.

Someone—no, Mikael—had gone through it. Dug through her things like a soldier rifling a corpse. And he'd used her own rope against her.

Her jaw clenched.

There was something particularly violating about that. Not just the binding, but the invasion. The assumption that her bag, her tools—her failsafes—were anyone's to touch. Brunhilda didn't carry much. What she did keep was hers.

And Mikael had picked through them like a butcher choosing a cleaver.

She shifted one shoulder, testing. She rolled her wrists slightly. The knot was neat. Competent. Too professional to be Freya. Too clean to be Hayley.

Definitely Mikael.

Of course it was.

The silence inside the car was heavy. Not peaceful—suffocating. She lay flat, spine twisted uncomfortably, cheek still pressed to Hayley's thigh.

Tied up like an animal.

It was overkill. It was cruel. It was... prudent, smart even.

And that was the part that made her want to scream.

She didn't blame Freya—not entirely—and she certainly laid no blame on Hayley. She blamed herself and Mikael. This had his name etched into every inch of it—blunt, brutal, and boring in the way all paranoid violence tended to be. He was the kind of man who saw a witch as a weapon that would need to be restrained.

Brunhilda almost laughed.

She'd just spent a month waking and falling into... not love, but affection—with a woman who had just let her psychotic father tie her up as she was dying from Freya-inflicted-head trauma. She'd drunk cold blood from hospital bags to avoid slaughtering anyone in public. She'd put aside everything to make this work.

And this was the thanks she got?

She continued to look around, cataloguing everything she saw and what she could remember.

The stake. She didn't know where it was.

Panic flared—sharp, fast, like a match struck too close to dry kindling. She bit it back, forced stillness. Forced calm.

It was probably on Mikael.

She could knock him out. Even this drained, she had enough magic to fry his brain for five seconds—long enough to send the car spinning off the highway and into a tree. The thought was tempting.

But Freya and Hayley were in the car.

Brunhilda wasn't sure either of them would survive the crash.

And she didn't want to hurt them.

The betrayal rose slow and heavy in her throat. She'd trusted Freya—not with everything, but enough. Enough to believe that she would have said "we'll talk when she wakes" instead of immediately dragging out the rope.

Instead, she'd been bound with her own supplies. Tied like a dog.

She blinked hard. Her vision swam.

It wasn't just exhaustion. Or rage.

It was grief.

That was the part that made her sickest.

She could go to Bonnie.

The thought came half-formed. Half-hope. The Bennett line was always tangled in fate, always near the heart of the world's endings and beginnings. Bonnie might help. Might still care. Might believe her.

But the hope crumbled before it took shape.

This Bonnie was barely sixteen—she might even be younger. Brunhilda couldn't recall her birthday. She would still be soft around the edges, still years away from what she'd become. She hadn't buried anyone yet. Hadn't saved anyone. Hadn't been broken and reforged into the woman she had known.

She was still a girl. Still bright. Still hopeful.

This Bonnie wasn't hers.

Brunhilda's eyes burned.

She remembered their first meeting—her Bonnie, post-End. After Davina died. After she stumbled upon her childhood commune, the bones of it, filled with corpses. Brunhilda had been running on vengeance and bad ideas, hollowed out to her bones.

Brunhilda had been so sure she'd hate her. The visions had all said she would.

But the first time they met, Bonnie had looked at her—not with judgment, but with something sharp and sad. She'd said, "You look like someone who's already buried too many people to stop now."

And Brunhilda had laughed.

And then cried.

She shook the memory off like a wet cloak, heavy and clinging. That Bonnie wasn't here. This one hadn't made her mistakes yet. Didn't know what her hands were capable of.

Brunhilda shifted slightly, testing the bindings again, eyes flicking toward the front seats. She catalogued everything: the weight of her body, the pulse hammering in her temple, the dry tangle of her breath against the hum of the road.

The front seat was too quiet.

Not peaceful—just tense, brittle, like the silence that settles in just before a bone snaps in two. It hummed beneath the skin, a low warning.

Mikael's hands rested lightly on the steering wheel, fingers draped loose, like he had nothing to prove. But Brunhilda saw the truth in his shoulders—braced just slightly with every turn of the road, like even the air was an enemy he didn't quite trust.

He hadn't spoken since she'd waken.

Neither had Freya.

She didn't look back. Not once. She kept adjusting the air vent—toward herself, then slightly away, then back again—as if indecision might pass for a purpose. Her movements were careful, her posture rigid.

Brunhilda didn't move. Not yet.

The rope around her wrists had gone tacky with sweat and time. Every subtle jostle sent a sting along her skin. She could still taste dried blood at the corner of her mouth. The air around her smelled thick—old metal, rust, and the faint sourness of magic stretched too thin.

"I know you're awake, witch."

Brunhilda blinked, slow and deliberate. She considered playing dead, but her eyes found his in the rearview mirror. He was already watching her—had been for some time.

Of course he hadn't spoken sooner. He'd been waiting. Watching.

Dick.

She shifted slightly—just enough to stir Hayley in her sleep. The girl mumbled something, then tightened her grip on Brunhilda's shoulder without waking. Brunhilda didn't shake her off.

"Tying me up was a bit of overkill."

Mikael didn't flinch. "It was that or break your hands."

He said it plainly and Brunhilda's jaw tightened. She didn't reply.

Freya spoke then, voice low. "I'm sorry."

Still, she didn't look back.

"I couldn't let you kill him," she added, softer now, like the words tasted wrong. "I know I've probably ruined everything—"

"Everything is fine," Brunhilda snapped.

It spilled from her lips too quickly, too thin, to be true. It was a bad lie—nothing was okay about this—and her voice betrayed her.

She wasn't afraid of Mikael. Not exactly. But she was tired—tired in the way only someone freshly made anew from a stint on the Other Side could be.

Tired of waking up bruised and bound. Tired of fighting ghosts she never asked to carry. Tired of being something between a girl and a grenade.

She could've lashed out. Could've set the car on fire. Could've turned every mirror into a window and let Inadu crawl through.

But she didn't.

Because the witch scared her senseless, and because she didn't know how far her supposed immortality went. She certainly didn't feel like testing it against the man who made Klaus Mikaelson afraid.

Inside her skull, Silas stirred—dry and sardonic. "Immortal doesn't mean invulnerable, sweetheart. You're me, but you're also you. That means breakable. My squishy little witch."

Brunhilda didn't respond—she was still human in all the worst ways. She gritted her teeth and kept quiet, eyes flicking back to the road.

Eventually, Freya murmured, almost too soft to hear, "You scared me."

Brunhilda didn't answer—that made two of them.

...

Mikael spoke eventually—calm and measured. "Freya has told me much about your plans. About Dahlia."

Brunhilda's glare pinned Freya like a butterfly to cork.

"Yeah," she said, voice low and cutting. "Seems like Freya's told you an awful lot."

Freya didn't turn. Her shoulders stiffened just slightly, and she adjusted the air vent again—for the third time in the past ten minutes.

Mikael ignored the tension. Or perhaps he simply didn't care. "And I'm willing to help," he continued, like he was announcing the obvious. "To kill Dahlia. To sever the line. I know now what she did—what she is."

Brunhilda narrowed her eyes. "And how do you expect for us to kill her without viking ash?" Her tone was too smooth, too brittle. "Unless you're planning on volunteering."

Mikael didn't hesitate.

"The abomination's ashes should suffice for your ritual."

His voice was almost gentle. Like he was offering something reasonable. Like he wasn't talking about murdering his son—blood related or not.

Brunhilda and Freya reacted at the same time.

"Absolutely not—"

"—fuck no!"

Their voices overlapped—Freya's strained, almost pleading and Brunhilda's sharp, furious. Different words, different tones, but unified in this purpose.

Hayley jolted upright at the sound, eyes wide and unfocused. Her hands flew up on instinct and landed in Brunhilda's hair, searching for wounds. They trembled—just slightly—but enough for Brunhilda to feel the motion ghosting along her scalp.

Hayley didn't speak. Still half-asleep, still catching up. But she was listening now—her breath shallow, her eyes locked forward.

Freya's voice broke through the silence—brittle, unsteady. "He's my brother."

"That creature is nothing to you," Mikael hissed. "I am your father—he's just something some beast fucked into your mother—"

"He's more than any of that," Brunhilda snapped. "If Klaus dies, hundreds of thousands of vampires die with him. They don't just collapse. They combust. They rot in their homes. Fall dead in the streets. And Nature reacts. Hard."

Mikael glanced at her in the mirror. "Explain," he commanded.

Brunhilda exhaled—half sigh, half snarl. Equal parts exhaustion and fury.

"Klaus's sireline stretches across the globe," she said. "Entire networks of vampires—centuries of magic, compulsion, bloodlines—tied to a single thread. You cut that thread, and the entire system collapses. You don't just kill a few old monsters. You kill predators that have shaped ecosystems for over a thousand years. Genocide. Power vacuums. Panic. Witch lines go feral trying to fill the gap. And humans—humans remember what was done to them."

She paused. Her voice dropped.

"And when Nature sees that many apex predators die at once?"

Another beat.

"It panics. It rebalances. Badly."

She closed her eyes. Her throat ached.

"Last time, it started with famine. Rivers dried. Crops failed. Forests began to rot from the inside out."

A breath.

"And then the plagues came."

The car fell silent.

Brunhilda was already tired of explaining this. Again and again, like repetition would somehow make it matter more.

She briefly considered making a flyer—Hi! I'm from a sort-of future. Here's what you need to know about saving the world!—just something to hand out the next time someone looked at her like she was being dramatic.

Mikael said nothing.

Too quiet.

Then, finally: "I do not care how many vampires die."

The words hit her like a slap.

She turned her head slowly toward the front, voice low and fraying at the edges. "You should. Because when that many predators die all at once, the world doesn't correct—it culls."

A pause.

"Everyone."

Mikael didn't look back at her. He kept his eyes on the road, expression unreadable. Then, slowly—like someone delivering a eulogy instead of an answer—he said, "I cannot abide Klaus's survival. I have hunted him for far too long. I have bled for this too deeply. I cannot live in a world where he is allowed to continue."

Brunhilda's heart thudded in her ears. She stared at the back of his head, pulse racing, wrists raw against the cord, and the knowledge settled into her like a stone—she'd been right. Completely, utterly right about him. Mikael was not even a man, he was just a thing that had lived too long and had learned nothing from the experience.

The look she shot Freya was sharp—I told you so.

Freya didn't meet her eyes.

Her jaw clenched. She kept her focus fixed on the dashboard like she could divine absolution from the air vents. There was shame in the way her shoulders curled inward—but also defiance. As if she were still trying to convince herself this had been necessary. That tying Brunhilda up, letting Mikael dig through her bag, letting him speak of Klaus like he was already ash—had somehow been part of a greater, painful logic.

The silence returned, pressing in from all sides. Even the hum of the engine felt muted. The tires rolled too softly against the asphalt. It was the kind of quiet that made your own heartbeat feel loud.

Then—

Grrrggh.

Hayley's stomach rumbled loudly. It echoed through the silence like something dying.

Hayley's face flushed instantly, color blooming across her cheeks. She scowled harder, probably hoping to pretend it hadn't happened. Freya exhaled sharply—not quite a sigh, more a release of tension that had nowhere to go. Her voice came clipped and cold.

"Find somewhere to stop," she snapped at Mikael. "She needs to eat."

It wasn't a request.

Mikael didn't reply. He simply flicked on the turn signal and took the next exit, smooth and silent as ever. The gravel crunched beneath the tires, dust rising in lazy plumes as they pulled into a nearly abandoned gas station. The windows were dirty and the sign flickered. There was a single pump and no one outside.

He parked.

"Go inside," he said to Hayley. "Get your food."

Hayley shook her head, her bad attitude already roaring to life. "I don't have any money."

Mikael sighed, sharp and disdainful—like the inconvenience personally offended him. He opened the door and stepped out, stretching like a man made of coiled knives.

"Fine," he muttered. "I'll compel you something."

He didn't look back at Brunhilda, but his next words were clearly meant for her. "The werewolf will stay with me, witch, so don't get any ideas."

Brunhilda didn't dignify it with a response. She leaned her head back against the seat and stared at the ceiling, letting the pulse behind her eyes throb without resistance.

Before Hayley stepped out, she paused—just for a moment.

She leaned back toward the open door, eyes scanning Brunhilda's face. "Are you okay?"

The words were soft, sincere. Brunhilda almost said yes, but she did not want to lie to Hayley.

She deflected instead.

"Get something with protein," she said instead. "You'll feel better."

Hayley frowned. She lingered, clearly wanting more, but Mikael called for her—sharp and impatient.

She left.

Gravel crunched beneath their steps as they moved toward the store. Brunhilda exhaled, shaky and uneven. Her fingers twitched against the nylon cord.

She was already trying to think ten steps ahead—mapping spells, leverage, escape routes—but it was harder now. Everything felt slower, fogged at the edges. Like her magic was underwater and her thoughts were struggling to swim.

Her bones felt hollow.

Freya didn't speak as she unbuckled her seatbelt. The door creaked open, gravel crunching underfoot as she stepped out and circled around to the back. The door opened beside her. Freya slid into the seat slowly, cautiously, like approaching a wounded animal. Her fingers hesitated at first—hovering above Brunhilda's wrists, knuckles pale with tension—before she began working at the knot.

The cord scraped as it loosened, sticky with dried blood and sweat. Each tug sent pinpricks of pain lancing up Brunhilda's arms. She gritted her teeth and stayed silent.

Freya didn't rush. Her movements were slow, precise. Intentional.

As Brunhilda's fingers slowly began to regain feeling, she shifted—just enough to scan the car. Her eyes moved from the backseat to under the driver's chair, then to the passenger footwell.

Her backpack was still there—half-unzipped, contents disturbed. Gutted like a carcass.

She didn't catch sight of the white oak stake anywhere. Her stomach twisted. Mikael probably had it on him.

Freya pulled the last knot loose and slipped the cord away, coiling it in her hands with a kind of reverence. She didn't say sorry—not out loud—but something in the careful way she gathered the rope, like it might burn her fingers, made the apology clear.

"I know you have no reason to trust me anymore," Freya said softly. "But I'm happy you aren't dead."

Brunhilda let out a sound that might have been a laugh if it had anything behind it. Hollow. Crooked. Not even bitter—just empty.

"Anymore," she said dully. "I'm not dead anymore."

Freya flinched.

Her face went ashen and she shut her eyes, just for a moment. Her breath hitched in her throat before she nodded—once, shallowly.

They didn't speak again.

Outside, the heat pressed down like punishment. The air buzzed faintly with insects. Dust clung to the hem of Freya's jeans as she helped Brunhilda out of the car.

They walked slowly—across cracked pavement and overgrown gravel—to a rusted metal picnic table beneath a dead tree. No building in sight. Just a sun-bleached billboard looming above the treeline like a forgotten commandment:

"YOU ARE LOVED.

ALSO: REPENT."

Brunhilda stared at it for a long, quiet beat.

She wasn't sure if she wanted to laugh or scream.

They sat—Freya on the same side as Brunhilda, but with as much distance as possible. The wind stirred just enough to rattle the brittle branches overhead, and the limbs creaked with the movement.

They waited in silence for Hayley and Mikael to return, the quiet stretching thin and taut between them. The sky was too blue. The light too sharp.

Then, softly, Freya said, "I won't let him hurt her."

Brunhilda didn't respond.

Freya turned toward her, voice firmer now. "I mean it, Hilda. I won't let my father hurt your friend."

She said it like an offering. Like it might balance the scales.

Brunhilda's fingers dug into the edge of the table. Her nails scraped rust. She had to physically hold herself back from lunging across the bench—grabbing Freya, not to harm her, but to shake her. Then why did you let him touch my things? Why did you let him tie me like an animal?

She breathed in, tried to settle.

The breath caught. Stung. Her lungs ached. Her ribs felt bound from the inside out. The trees blurred at the edges. Light shimmered and fractured, patterns her brain couldn't follow. She smelled blood—sharp, metallic.

Not from the table. Not from Freya.

It was in her head.

It's not real. You're not bleeding. You're not bleeding.

Her vision swam. Nausea crashed over her like a wave.

Why am I not getting better?

She bit the inside of her cheek—copper bloomed across her tongue.

Inside her skull, Tessa sighed. "Do you really trust Silas to heal a head wound properly?"

"Shut up," Silas said, lacking his usual heat. "It's time to stand up, sweetness. Get off the bench and drink someone already. Rip off your little leash, take off running, and tear into the nearest warm body. It'll make you feel better. I promise."

Brunhilda's jaw tightened—but there was no one around aside from Freya. Inside the gas station there was Mikael and Hayley, and some young kid with a face full of pimples. She could... she could go for the kid, she supposed, but her stomach rebelled against the idea and she wasn't sure if she'd be able to get inside of the store and have her fill before Mikael stopped her.

I'll find someone at the next stop.

The thought made Silas sneer, throwing up his hands deep in her mind. "I am cursed! Cursed to spend eternity in the skin of an idiot."

Brunhilda sat still and forced herself to breathe through it.

In.

Out.

Again.

The scent of blood clung faintly to her thoughts, but she pushed it back—pushed past the gnawing hunger, the ache behind her eyes, the raw tightness in her throat. Her body felt hollow and stretched thin, but she wasn't spiraling. Not yet.

She blinked rapidly, willing her vision to steady. The trees came back into focus. The shimmer of light stilled. The nausea dulled.

She could manage this. She had to manage this.

Gravel crunched underfoot.

Hayley appeared first, cradling a greasy paper bag like it held something sacred. Mikael followed, slower, empty-handed. He said nothing, but the weight of his gaze wrapped around Brunhilda like a cloak—oppressive and heavy. Even once he sat at the far end of the table, arms folded, she could feel him watching her.

Hayley didn't hesitate. She deliberately slid onto the bench beside Brunhilda—positioning herself squarely between her and Freya. The blonde witch's face twisted, just slightly, like she'd tasted something bitter but refused to spit it out. A complicated expression that was not quite hurt or defensive, but close.

Hayley ignored it. She opened the paper bag and started unpacking: a half-dozen chicken strips, mozzarella sticks with their cheese already congealing, and a pair of napkins that had long since surrendered to grease.

The smell hit Brunhilda's nose—salt, oil, something processed and overcooked—and her stomach clenched, confused by whether it wanted to recoil or devour. Hunger curled in her gut, low and restless, but she ignored it. She wasn't sure food would stay down anyway.

"Here," Hayley said, nudging one of the chicken strips toward Brunhilda's hand. "Eat something. You look like death."

Brunhilda stared at it. The breading was pale and limp. The smell alone made her stomach clench. Her ribs throbbed. A dull, persistent ache that hadn't let up since she woke.

She shook her head. "I'm fine."

"You're not," Hayley said, matter-of-fact. No judgment. No room for argument. "Just eat a little. For me."

Brunhilda managed three bites. The food was dry and salty, nearly flavorless. Her stomach twisted, threatened to send it right back up—but she forced it down. Then wiped her hands slowly, deliberately, like that could make her feel less like a yawning grave.

Hayley didn't press. She just turned back to her meal, devouring the rest of the chicken and mozzarella sticks with the focused hunger of someone who'd once gone without long enough for it to leave an imprint.

They sat like that for a while—a family with a broken axis. The dead tree above them cast crooked shadows across the pavement. Mikael said nothing, staring off across the lot like he might see a ghost rising on the horizon. Freya picked at a napkin, folding and unfolding it into nothing.

Eventually, Brunhilda stood.

"I need some air," she said.

Mikael looked at her, then at Freya—who gave him a look that said don't. He nodded once.

"Take your moment, witch," he said. "But know there's no place you can run that I won't drag you from."

She didn't answer.

The road shimmered under the heat as she paced the edge of the turnout, boots kicking gravel. The sun turned everything gold and hard. She couldn't remember the last time it felt this hot.

Her ribs still ached. Something was wrong—even this drained, she should be healing more than this, shouldn't she?

"Why not feed from Freya?" Silas asked, his voice curling around her bones. "She owes you. Gave your body to her father like a bargaining chip. Bet she'd let you drink just to earn back a scrap of favor."

Brunhilda clenched her jaw.

"No?" he continued. "Then what about your pet werewolf? She'd let you. She trusts you."

She spun on her heel, walking faster. The wind stirred—hot, dry. Each step sent a low echo up her spine, the bloodlust was worse today, closer to the surface. It made her limbs feel too long and her skin too tight.

Silas had said it before, and now her body was echoing the truth. She could survive knives and crashes and spells—but it still took something from her. Still left behind marks that didn't always fade.

She hadn't fed since—

She couldn't remember.

That wasn't a good sign.

The gravel crunched beneath her boots. Overhead, a vulture circled, dipping low once in the heat-thick sky. Her breath rasped in and out. Her throat was dry again.

Back at the table, Hayley leaned back on her elbows, face tipped toward the sky, pretending not to watch. Freya's eyes tracked her, quietly apologetic. And Mikael—

Mikael didn't look at her at all, but she knew that he was listening.

She began to walk back to the table—one foot in front of the other. Every step was a reminder that she wasn't dead yet, but something in her was starting to slip.

And if she didn't feed soon—

She didn't finish the thought.

...

By the time they made it back to the car, Brunhilda's body was betraying her with every step.

The sun had baked the gravel into something hostile and shimmering, and her boots felt heavier than they had twenty minutes ago. She wasn't limping exactly, but her gait was uneven—legs dragging slightly, movements delayed, her limbs no longer responding with their usual instinct.

When she reached for the car door, her knees buckled.

She caught herself—barely—one hand bracing against the metal. The door jostled under her weight. Her other arm swung wide, catching nothing but air.

"Hilda!" Hayley's voice split the silence. She was beside her in an instant, arms catching Brunhilda around the waist before she could collapse completely.

"I'm fine," she muttered, trying to wave her off.

"You're not," Hayley replied, looking furious and confused.

Freya stepped in, eyes flicking between Brunhilda and Mikael. "Why isn't the blood working?" she asked, voice clipped and rising. "You gave it to her at the mausoleum—why isn't she healing?"

Mikael's gaze swept over Brunhilda, impassive. "I don't know," he said simply.

Freya looked stricken. Her hand hovered, uncertain, like she wanted to check Brunhilda's pulse again.

Brunhilda froze.

What the fuck?

The rage settled in Brunhilda. They... they gave her Mikael's blood. She didn't say it aloud. But she made a mental note, etched hard into the back of her skull: under no circumstances can I let myself die, not until he is out of my system.

Inside her head, Silas gave a theatrical sigh.

"It didn't work," he said, "because it's completely worthless. You can't become a vampire. You're healing using my power—a power, I remind you, that you functionally starved into worthlessness."

The relief was immediate and consumed her so thoroughly that she didn't notice Mikael step forward until he was pulling her from Hayley's arms.

"We're restraining her again," Mikael said. "She's too weak to fight, yes—but I won't take chances."

Freya stepped closer to them. "She's barely standing," she snapped. "She couldn't cast a spell if she tried."

"I'm not interested in tests of what she can't do," Mikael said evenly. "If you'd rather I not knock her unconscious, then tie her hands. Otherwise, I will."

A beat of silence.

Freya inhaled sharply. "Fine."

Mikael nodded once and stepped back.

Brunhilda didn't resist as Freya circled behind her, fingers slow but steady as she drew the cord. This time, the knot was looser. Not slack, but forgiving. Not nearly as cruel. With enough time—and discomfort—Brunhilda could probably work her way free. It wasn't much, but it was something.

Still, the nylon bit into her skin. Her shoulders ached.

"It hurts," Brunhilda said, hoping—just a little—that it might tug at Freya's guilt to rethink what she was doing.

"I know," Freya looked stricken.

She was gentle when she helped Brunhilda lower herself into the seat, her movements careful, almost ceremonial—like lowering someone into a crypt. She buckled the seatbelt, adjusting it so it didn't press too hard against the worst bruises. Still, sitting with her arms twisted behind her sent a spike of pain up Brunhilda's side.

...

They'd barely merged onto the highway when Mikael spoke again, deceptively calm.

"I have decided to wait to kill the boy... until you've found a way to protect his sireline."

Brunhilda turned her head slowly. Her neck ached. "Someone already tried that," she said flatly. "In the future I'm from. It didn't work."

"I believe you'll figure it out," Mikael said, almost indulgent.

She stared at him, face blank. "Then you'll be waiting centuries."

Mikael smiled back at her through the mirror.

"I have all the time in the world."

Brunhilda wasn't sure what to say to that, so she continued to rage in silence.

After a few moments, Freya cleared her throat, her voice careful. "Would you... settle for Klaus being neutralized instead of killed?"

Mikael didn't respond immediately, but the way his hands tightened around the steering wheel said enough.

Still, he let her continue.

"In 1914," Freya said slowly, "I went to a party with Kol."

Brunhilda raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

"That was the year he was daggered," Freya continued. "He was trying to make a weapon that would put Klaus down—not kill him. Just... incapacitate him. Permanently. I didn't understand it at the time, not until Hilda explained the daggers to me."

"When I snuck into Mary-Alice's cottage," Freya went on, "she told me Kol had been experimenting. He was trying to transmute silver into something that could be used against a werewolf."

Brunhilda winced as Mikael's grip on the wheel tightened again. There was a soft snap as the plastic cracked beneath his fingers—his knuckles whitening at the reminder of Esther's betrayal.

The golden dagger, Brunhilda realized, a think half-remembered from a conversation with Davina. Clever boy.

Brunhilda let them continue talk. She didn't trust Mikael not to kill Klaus the second her back was turned—but if this bought her time, she'd allow it. For now.

Freya kept her eyes on the road. "If we can finish what Kol started... we wouldn't need to kill Klaus. He'd be... contained."

She was careful with the word.

At last, Mikael nodded once. "We'll find Kol," he said. "Once Dahlia is dead, we'll free him from his prison. He'll help us build this weapon."

Freya's expression dimmed. "We should release him now."

Mikael's face darkened.

"I don't trust the boy not to ruin our chances against Dahlia," he said. "He's reckless and thoughtless. He has always been... inconveniently brilliant."

Brunhilda shifted slightly in her seat. The rope bit into the tender skin of her wrists. She cast a sharp glance toward the front of the car and an something inside her coiled tight—an idea.

"We'll need Kol."

Mikael didn't look back at her, but his silence opened the door for elaboration.

"If you want to kill Dahlia without using Klaus's ashes," Brunhilda said, "you'll need his help. He's a lunatic, yes—but he's brilliant. And unpredictable. That's useful. Especially when the plan's only half-built."

What she didn't say—what she couldn't say with Mikael in the car—was that she had plans of her own.

She didn't trust Kol. Not even close. But she knew how to bargain.

And if she could wake him then maybe she could use him. Maybe he'd help her protect Hayley. Or himself. Or the world—because if anyone would understand the importance of that, it was Kol. If no one else in this cursed family did, he would.

Mikael was silent for a beat. "That won't be a problem. If I cannot use that creature, then I shall use myself."

"What?"

"I'll burn a small pieces of my own flesh over the next few days," Mikael said plainly. "That should suffice. I will heal."

The car went quiet.

Brunhilda didn't move, didn't blink. She seethed. Because damn it—that would probably work. It was an elegant, clever solution. A clean one, really.

And it had come from the worst person she knew.

He continued as if he hadn't just upended everything. "The soil is handled. I have already compelled a human to travel to Norway and retrieve it."

Of course he had.

"We haven't finished identifying the third ingredient yet," she tried again. "We have theories, but nothing solid... Kol could help us figure out what we're missing."

"I know someone who will be much more useful," Mikael replied.

Brunhilda didn't like the tone in his voice. Something in her blood ran cold. She knew that tone, that certainty. It was the sound of a man pulling back a curtain to reveal something terrible.

She swallowed hard.

Her voice, when it came, was barely a whisper. "Where are we going?"

"You," he said, his voice almost amused, "are going to resurrect my wife."

Chapter Text

Brunhilda did not speak for a long while. Her fingers twitched faintly where they rested in her lap, but otherwise, she remained still—a headache throbbed behind her temples, dull and rhythmic.

I need to start getting better at scheming, the thought came to her with such dry clarity that it nearly made her laugh. I keep making plans, keep throwing myself into the deep like I won't drown in its depths.

She could still feel every bruise lingering on her body—every place her magic stuttered and spat meager sparks instead of flames. Her ribs ached with every breath and her stomach rolled with nausea and anxiety. Her body had not caught up to her ambitions, and the world was not giving her time to recover.

This was supposed to be simple. She was supposed to save the world. That had been the entire point. She'd torn into space and time like parchment, had performed magic so dark she still felt the grime of it in her guns, and all for what?

Now she was watching her only chance at fixing it be wrenched away by some ghoul in a Viking's body.

Her voice, when it finally came, was thin and dry and unfamiliar in her own mouth.

"And how do you plan on making that happen?"

Mikael, ever the strategist, did not miss a beat. "As it happens," he said, his tone infuriatingly calm, "there are two very powerful witches in this car."

Brunhilda turned her head slightly, enough to catch the flicker of half of Freya's expression. She looked as though she had been slapped.

"Tell me you're not serious," Freya said, her voice low and dangerously steady. "You want me to help bring back the woman who gave me to Dahlia?"

"She has many things to atone for," Mikael said. "She will begin with helping to put her sister down. Even if I have to force her."

Freya's mouth twisted. "You don't get to—"

"You think I want to ask this of you?" Mikael's voice cracked—not with rage, but something full of grief. "Daughter, I love you. I would have burned the entire world to find you, had I only known you still existed in it. I do not ask this of you lightly."

His voice was steadier now, heavy with something like sincerity. "Esther will pay for what she did. To you. To us. But first—she will help to fix it."

Brunhilda felt something unravel in her.

Thread by thread, she was coming apart—and every hand in this car (save, perhaps, Hayley) was holding a knife.

Brunhilda pursed her lips, grinding her teeth so hard she was sure she'd crack a molar before the hour was out.

It was the only thing keeping her tethered.

That dull ache, pulsing through her temples, was the only sound louder than Mikael's voice still echoing in her skull. She stared forward, refusing to blink. Refusing to breathe. If she let herself do either, she might scream. Or cry. Or reach across the front seat and strangle him with the seatbelt.

Consequences be damned.

Hayley looked like she wanted to sink into the upholstery and die quietly. Her fingers picked nervously at a loose thread on her jeans, and her eyes refused to meet anyone else's. She was trying very hard not to exist.

Can I compel him? Brunhilda asked silently, her thoughts directed at the snide passenger who rested behind her ribs.

Silas, maddeningly unbothered, replied with something that almost sounded like a shrug. "If we'd had more time to practice? Maybe. You could've woven a decent illusion. Not perfect, but slippery enough to make him think it would be better to let you and wolf girl go. But not now. Not like this."

Because he's an Original?

"Because he's Mikael," Silas corrected. "You've only used compulsion on mortals and half-conscious witches. Mikael isn't a person so much as a sentient knife."

Brunhilda's fists curled in her lap, her knuckles creaking. So, what—play along?

"Or just kill him," Silas offered, like he was suggesting something easy. "Like a normal witch would. Snap his neck, sever the spine, set his body on fire. Nothing fancy. But you'd have to be fast. And I'm guessing you're not feeling very fast these days."

That part hit harder than she expected. Her stomach clenched.

"You're blood-starved," Silas said, matter-of-fact. "That's why Freya flattened you. Why your spells sputter. Why your wounds take longer. You're running on fumes and adrenaline and what little magic hasn't been siphoned off by your house guests."

His tone turned sharp.

"You want to survive? You need to feed. I don't care if it's your girlfriend or your werewolf tagalong—"

Don't call her that, Brunhilda snapped.

"Then feed, Hilda," he growled. "Or you're not going to survive long enough to make this righteous little vendetta of yours mean anything."

Brunhilda didn't respond. Her jaw was too tight, her tongue too dry, her body aching in places she didn't have the strength to name. The truth in his words coiled low in her gut, thick and shameful.

Up front, Mikael was still speaking as if he wasn't insane.

"If Esther does not agree to help," she interrupted him, "then what?"

Mikael didn't even blink. "She will see reason."

"And if she doesn't?"

He glanced back, not unkind but not soft, either. "Then she will die again."

The car went silent.

Hayley cleared her throat, the sound too loud in the sudden hush. "Okay," she said carefully, "so... I don't really understand magic. I mean, I get it, I guess, but... bringing someone back from the dead? That's—can you even do that?"

Freya, who had been brooding into the window with her arms crossed, perked up immediately—conversation that wasn't about Dahlia, Esther, or killing each other? She jumped on it immediately.

"It's complicated," she said, her voice warmer than it had been in hours. "But yes. In some cases. It depends—if there's a body and what condition it's in, how long they've been gone, what kind of death it was, if the soul is still accessible, if they were supernatural. Sometimes we use a ritual, but sometimes it's a trade."

Hayley blinked. "A trade?"

"A life for a life," Freya explained. "A tether, a substitute, a vessel. The price is always steep."

Brunhilda nodded slowly. "Magic doesn't make death disappear. It just... redirects it."

Hayley mulled that over, twisting her seatbelt between her fingers like a rosary. "Then..." she glanced over at Brunhilda, eyes sharp with something wounded but still hopeful. "Could you bring back my parents? They were werewolves, like me, that would mean that their souls would be... accessible, right?"

The car dipped into a sudden, deeper stillness.

Brunhilda's expression softened, her voice gentler than it had been all day. "It's not usually that simple," she said. "But maybe. After this—after we deal with all this—we can look into it. I'll help you try."

Hayley looked down at her hands and smiled. "Thanks."

For a moment, the silence felt almost like peace.

And then Mikael opened his mouth.

"She's more composed than I expected," he said. "The wolf blood usually makes them... volatile."

He said it without venom, without emphasis—just a simple, clinical observation. But that somehow made it worse. Like it wasn't cruelty. Just fact.

Brunhilda didn't dare look at him.

Because if she did—if she so much as opened her mouth right now—she'd snap and put him through the windshield. And gods help them all if he smiled, she wasn't above crashing the car out of spite.

Freya flinched visibly, her mouth opening and closing like she wanted to rebuke him, but couldn't quite find the words. Not yet. Not while her body still remembered obeying him.

Hayley's face, though, went still.

"I'm sorry," she said flatly, turning to him in the rearview mirror. "Did you expect me to start barking?"

Finally Freya muttered, "That wasn't necessary," but her voice was too soft, and she looked like she was saying it to the dashboard.

Brunhilda was still staring out the window, white-knuckled and seething. She exhaled through her nose.

Brunhilda turned toward Mikael slowly, her anger a tight ball inside of her. Her voice was strained, dry at the edges, like it had been scraped raw on the inside. "Do you have any of the required components for a spell like that?"

Mikael didn't even look up from the road. "I know the exact location where she died."

She blinked. "And?"

"And," he said calmly, "we can see what can be done using that."

Her jaw tightened again. "It doesn't work like that. You need something to channel. You can't just run a resurrection on a GPS coordinate."

"Then channel Freya," he replied, as if that were the simplest thing in the world.

Her eyes narrowed to slits. She imagined driving something hot and rusted through the soft white of his eye socket. Something with barbs.

Dick.

She turned back toward the window, jaw clenched, vision buzzing at the edges.

...

Time dragged. The road blurred beneath them, mile after mile of asphalt and tension thick enough to choke on. They had entered the mausoleum around one. Factoring in Brunhilda dying, the bleeding, the rest stop, the long, sullen silences—and the chunk of time she'd spent unconscious, dreaming through fever and static—it had to be around 5:30 now.

Twilight bled across the treetops.

They still had two hours left before they arrived in Mystic Falls.

Brunhilda hadn't been paying attention to the road, not really—but now her mind clicked into place like a snapped trap.

Mystic Falls.

Her stomach lurched like the car had swerved. But it hadn't.

It wasn't just the place where Esther died.

She was about to bring The Destroyer into the very town that held a whole stash of white oak. That housed Bonnie Bennett, still alive and terrifyingly untapped. That contained Elena Fucking Gilbert, cursed with the narrative gravity of a black hole. The town that had shattered the axis of the world because of a love triangle, ending with two Originals murdered—and Nature caught in its burning betrayal.

Her mind fired through a hundred scenarios at once. None of them ended well.

She was about to march Mikael straight into it. What if he hurt Bonnie? What if he killed Elena? What if—

And beneath it all the panic, a whisper.

"Feed," Silas ordered. "You are worthless like this."

How? she thought back at him desperately. We're on a highway with witnesses. I'm pretty sure I still have a concussion, I can't even stand without wobbling. How?

"Get away from him," Silas said. "I'll help you find something, even if it's something disgusting."

She took a breath, then another. Her limbs were starting to hum, not with power but with emptiness. She couldn't continue like this—couldn't even think like this.

Silas was right.

Fine.

She turned her head slightly, her voice a low whine. "I have to pee."

Mikael didn't glance at her. "Hold it."

"It's an emergency."

He didn't blink. "So was you bleeding to death. I'll pull over when we stop."

Her teeth ground again.

Freya shifted in her seat, annoyance crossing her face as she looked at Mikael. "Let her go to the damn bathroom."

Mikael muttered something in some dead language under his breath and veered the car slightly toward a gravel shoulder. "Fine," he said. "Go in the woods."

Brunhilda opened her mouth to say something biting—but the words never came. Silas shoved his awareness forward, riding the connection between them like a blade, and her lips moved without permission.

"Yes," they said.

With Mikael's approval, Hayley reached over and unbuckled her. As she began to work at the knots around Brunhilda's wrists, her thoughts erupted into a furious static.

What the hell was that? she snapped inward. Did you just hijack my mouth, Silas? You don't get to do that.

"Oh, I do when you're seconds away from saying something idiotic," he said coolly. "You're lucky I didn't make you curtsy."

Never do that again.

"Then maybe don't be so weak," he replied with a shrug she could feel in the back of her skull. "If you were stronger, you could have stopped me. So consider this more encouragement—never be this stupid again."

After a few moments, she was finally free.

She didn't bother to respond to Silas. She was too busy stumbling out of the car and into the woods, barely upright.

Her body felt hollowed out, scraped clean. Her heart thudded sluggishly in her chest like it had forgotten how to want. Leaves rustled and shadows stretched long and thin across the shoulder of the road.

Now what? she asked, her thoughts barely more than a rasp.

Silas didn't answer immediately.

Then—slowly—she felt it: a gentle pressure against her skull, like someone knocking from the inside with the flat of a knife.

"Use what's left," he murmured. "Just enough to call something close. There's wildlife. Make it come to you."

The trees thickened only slightly as she made her way down a small slope, one hand on a low branch for balance. The car was no longer visible—barely—through the trees, but it wasn't far enough for Mikael to count it as fleeing.

She bit her lip, concentrated. Her fingers curled inwards, magic trickling out like sap from a dying tree. She whispered a call—a lure, an illusion, something woven hastily from fraying instinct and desperation.

A doe stepped into view.

Its eyes were soft, too wide, too trusting—its ribs rising and falling with the steady rhythm of something that had lost whatever inside it had learned to be afraid of a predator.

It shouldn't have approached her at all.

But her magic reached out and wrapped around it like a blanket—like smoke, fog, a lullaby with broken notes, sung in the wrong key.

It hesitated. Its legs trembled once, and then it stilled.

She lunged.

The illusion peeled away mid-step. The deer startled, hooves jerking beneath it—but she was already on it, her weight dragging it sideways. Her arms locked around its neck, trembling with effort. She was too weak, too slow—but desperation made up the difference.

Her teeth clamped down with human force and feral intent. It wasn't enough. Her canines weren't sharp enough, her strength barely sufficient. The first puncture had her jaw straining, her neck burning as she bit down again and again. The blood, when it came, was warm—almost hot—and thick like syrup. It filled her mouth, coating her tongue, pooling behind her teeth.

She gagged, then swallowed.

The deer kicked once.

Its muscles spasmed beneath her fingers, twitching madly—its body remembering something her magic was trying to make it forget. For a second it surged with dying instinct, every limb flinching toward freedom.

She clenched tighter, whispering the fraying thread of her magic back through its spine.

Shhh, she thought, not kindly. Stay still.

And it did.

Its breathing slowed. Its legs stopped thrashing. But its skin still twitched where the nerves hadn't gotten the message.

The blood ran thin, then slower.

She didn't care.

She was gnawing now—her lips and chin slick with red, her teeth scraping across muscle. The meat was tough and stringy, and every bite filled her mouth with the taste of iron and gristle and fur. It was gritty, like biting into dirt-packed cloth. She could feel hair on her tongue. Glands. Bits of tendon.

Her teeth slipped against the hide more than once. She didn't stop. Just growled in frustration and brought her fists down, scrabbling at the deer's side until her fingers found a stone—it was jagged and blessedly sharp.

She drove it into the carcass again and again—breaking skin, splitting muscle, splintering cartilage. Blood splashed across her sleeves.

Her hands were shaking too badly to be precise. She tore at the wound like a dog, yanking flesh free with her nails and clamping her mouth over the mess.

She buried her face in it.

It was disgusting.

It was perfect.

Even as the blood slowed to a trickle, she didn't stop.

She cracked the ribcage open—used both hands and pulled, grunting as the bone gave way with a wet, fibrous snap. She scooped out what she could. Her fingers dug into the organs, slipping and catching on slick tissue. She pulled sinew and muscle apart with hands too soaked to grip anything properly. Everything smelled like copper and mud and something deeper—something wild.

She licked blood from her wrists, from her knuckles, from the base of her palm. She sucked it out of the creases between her fingers and the spaces between bones.

By the end, there was nothing dignified left in her.

Only the red. Only the pulsing throb of something ancient and starved finally being fed.

She didn't know how long she stayed like that—seconds, minutes, hours. Time slipped sideways, bending at the corners. She was shaking, feverish, high on the dull buzz of borrowed strength and animal terror.

Then—

A gust of wind, a presence that felt like a door being closed behind her.

She turned and looked at Mikael, who stood next to her.

She barely managed to wipe her mouth. Her hands, slick with blood, fumbled at her chin. She tried—gods, she tried—to keep it to her fingers, but she had forgotten that that was a concern at all during her mad feast.

"So," Mikael said behind her, voice calm and clinical. "This is what you've been doing."

She spun halfway, heart thundering like a trap sprung too late.

Before she could speak—before she could lie, or explain, or scream—

He knocked her out cold.

...

Brunhilda woke to the smell of moss and scorched pine.

The light was strange, distant, like it had passed through a dozen filters before it ever touched the clearing. She blinked against the brightness—dull, aching, headache-bright—and slowly sat up.

Her hands were covered in dried blood. The redness was caked into the creases of her, she could feel it smeared across her forearms, crusted over her shirt, still sticky beneath her fingernails. Her mouth tasted like rust and raw meat, like she'd tried to swallow coins and choked on them. There was something flaky against her gums—she spat onto the grass and rubbed at her lips.

Still red.

Still stained.

She wasn't tied up.

Which didn't make her feel better, because it meant either Mikael was overconfident, or something worse.

She looked around, and that was when the wrongness really started to sink in.

She wasn't in the car.

She was in a clearing—open sky above, towering trees shadows stretching long across the grass. The tree line was close, close enough to feel hemmed in, but the space around her felt deliberate. Known. Familiar in a way that made her stomach knot.

And it was darker now.

Not night—not yet—but summer evening-dark. The sky had turned that late golden blue, and the light had grown slanted and lazy.

She blinked hard, trying to orient herself.

The last thing she remembered clearly was the deer, the blood, the snap of her own restraint—

The rest of the trip must have passed with her passed out, covered in blood.

And someone—Mikael—had carried her here while she was unconscious.

Her body felt... rearranged, felt better. Not healed—just... reprioritized. Her limbs moved without screaming. Her lungs didn't burn with each breath. The stabbing pain in her ribs had dulled into a manageable ache. Still, there were splinters of something wrong—muscles not quite whole, joints still too loose or too tight.

Silas had been triaging.

The blood had been rationed—half toward healing, half banked away for spellwork. There was just enough to make her dangerous again, but not enough to make her strong.

She reached for her magic instinctively—and flinched. There was something else inside her. Something familiar. Something not hers.

Freya.

Brunhilda's magic wasn't alone—it was braided. Her power folded back on itself like fire catching oil, burning hotter than it should. And Freya was in there. Clear as breath, humming along her bones.

What the fuck, Brunhilda thought.

It was wrong. It was intimate.

Freya was channeling her. She could feel it.

"How?" she whispered, stunned. She hadn't given permission. She should've felt the intrusion. She should be able to shove Freya out of her body like an unwanted parasite—rip her magic up by the root. But instead...

It felt like Freya's magic had been irrevocably tangled with hers. Like they recognized each other, like Freya's magic had waiting for a thousand years and said finally. Their power was echoing each other, blazing hot in her chest, like matching chords in a song too old to remember.

"You're awake," said Mikael's voice.

She didn't notice him at first. Then she turned—and everything froze.

Mikael stood several feet away, relaxed, composed, and holding Hayley in front of him like a shield. His arm was wrapped around the girl's neck—casual, but not loose.

If Brunhilda blasted him right now, the force would break Hayley's neck before he even hit the ground.

Her pulse spiked. Her magic flared in panic.

Compel him, she thought, snapping inward. Come on, compel him.

She reached for it—dug her nails into the edges of her own mind and pulled. Not just her power, but everything she'd stolen and stitched together. Maybe... maybe the blood she had drank would be enough. She tugged in Silas, on Emily, on Qetsiyah. She wove them together with blunt force, shoved it outward—

Nothing.

Mikael didn't even twitch.

The compulsion rolled off his mind like water on a polished stone.

"Yeah, no," Silas voice snapped. "You thought that was gonna work? On him? You're out of your damn mind."

"It was an admirable try," Emily called out, even diplomatic. "But you're still too weak."

It should've worked, Brunhilda snapped.

"Should've, would've—doesn't matter." Silas said, "You don't have enough juice, sweetness. You're trying to craft a compulsion with nothing. You were barely holding yourself upright two hours ago."

Brunhilda's hands were shaking.

Then what do I do?

Qetsiyah answered first. "Freya. You're still tethered to her. You could use that—pull her magic through and sharpen your edge."

She'll feel it, Brunhilda shot back. She'll stop me.

"She might," Qetsiyah replied, sounding entirely indifferent.

What about the leyline? Brunhilda asked, grasping for another option.

"Now that's an idea," Silas said. "It's beneath your feet, just waiting. Pull from it. Wrap him in an illusion so deep he won't know he's dreaming."

"But she's still channeling you," Emily reminded her. "Whatever you pull on will get pulled into your loop."

"It'd be enough to raise the dead," Qetsiyah warned.

Brunhilda stared at Mikael.

She was watching Mikael—who hadn't moved.

He stood steady, calm, one hand still curled loosely around Hayley's throat, entirely uncaring that Brunhilda felt like she couldn't breathe.

Her lungs stuttered in her chest—shallow, quick, useless. The air felt thin. Her vision buzzed at the edges, narrowing like a tunnel she was being dragged through sideways.

She was trying to think, but her mind was a spiral.

Compulsion won't work. Freya's too risky. The leyline's a flare gun. Every choice makes it worse. Every path leads to blood. Hers, mine—

She wanted to move, to act, to scream.

But the options kept collapsing the moment she touched them—like doors that slammed shut in her face, one after another, until there was nothing left but walls.

She could feel her heartbeat in her teeth.

Silas, Emily, Qetsiyah—they're all talking but it's noise now, it's static, it's drowning me—

Her fingers twitched with magic that wouldn't gather. Her thoughts scattered every time she tried to hold one still. And Hayley—

Hayley was right there, and Brunhilda could see the bruises forming beneath Mikael's grip.

She needed to do something.

Hayley was right there, and Brunhilda could see the bruises forming beneath Mikael's grip. The way her face was paling, lips parting with the effort it took to breathe. The pulse fluttering too fast in her neck.

She needed to do something.

But what?

What?

Her breath caught. Her mouth opened—and for a moment, nothing came out.

Then—

"Please," she said.

Her voice was too thin, too raw. She hated how it sounded in her own ears.

"Please, just... let her go."

She didn't say I'll do anything, but the shape of it hung there, unsaid, in the space between her words, a humiliating ghost whispered between clenched teeth.

Mikael didn't acknowledge her.

Not a glance. Not even the flicker of a sneer.

He simply turned—slow, deliberate—and began walking toward a mossy rise at the edge of the clearing, dragging Hayley behind him without effort. Like she weighed nothing. Like she was nothing.

"This is where my family lived a thousand years ago," he said. "Before the forest reclaimed it. This is where Esther died."

Brunhilda couldn't breathe.

He had wrung begging from her and didn't even have the decency to gloat. He'd taken her fear, her helplessness, her love, and walked away with it—as if she didn't matter. As if Hayley didn't matter. As if none of it was real.

And Freya—

Freya stepped to her side, eyes distant, voice pitched low like she was trying to thread a spell through a needle.

"Uranus entered retrograde two days ago. The moon's nearly in alignment with the Seven Sisters. One more day and they'll match. I think we can use that—anchor it, channel it. It won't be perfect, but—"

"No," Brunhilda said. The word came out too fast, too sharp. "It won't work."

Freya blinked, startled. "It's not perfect, but—"

"You think perfection is the problem?" Brunhilda's voice cracked. "You think the stars being slightly off is what's going to stop this from exploding in our faces?"

Her hands clenched, and she could feel it—the tether.

That thin, pulsing thread of magic still strung between them, linking their spells like veins. It felt like a leash.

She scratched at it—just a little. Barely more than a twitch of thought, but enough to feel the way Freya's magic responded. Warm. Steady. Like a heartbeat not her own. Like something breathing beside her, unfazed.

How could she be calm?

Hayley was being dragged like a corpse through the woods. Brunhilda had begged. And Freya was reciting astrological mechanics like this was a textbook problem they just needed to solve.

Rage surged in her chest like blood trying to boil.

"I'm not saying the math is wrong," Brunhilda snapped. "I'm saying the goal is. Resurrecting Esther is a terrible idea."

Freya's expression shifted—somewhere between confusion and defense, like she was realizing too late that she might be on the wrong side of this.

Brunhilda stepped forward, her voice low but hard as iron. "She'll try to kill her children—all of them. That's not a guess. That's her purpose—her only purpose. She won't care about the cost, because she doesn't care. She doesn't care about you or Mikael, she already proved that when—if I have to remind you, Freya—she battered you away."

"She'll see reason," Mikael said, calmly. "Once I explain our plan. Once she sees what we're building. Her anger comes from pain. From that abomination she bled into the world, from dying by his hand. Once she knows he'll be put down—"

"You're a fool," Brunhilda snapped. "If you think she cares more about your plan than her own vendetta. She's not a grieving woman—she's a witch who turned her children into monsters—"

The sudden crack that echoed through the clearing turned Brunhilda's stomach.

Hayley let out a strangled scream and crumpled, her knees buckling beneath her. Her arm bent at an unnatural angle—bone clearly broken, twisted wrong.

Mikael let her fall.

Brunhilda screamed out for her.

It wasn't delicate. It was not dignified. It ripped out of her like something primal, like something wounded. Her hands sparked with wild, unfiltered magic. She moved on instinct—barely thinking—just reaching, reacting—

Mikael moved too fast to track.

In a blink, he'd seized Hayley again—this time by the throat. He lifted her off the ground.

Her feet scrabbled against the dirt, one arm hanging limp, the other clawing at his wrist. Her eyes bulged, mouth open in a silent gasp, breath sputtering.

Brunhilda froze.

One twitch, one flick of her wrist, and he would snap Hayley's neck like a twig.

"Finish the spell," Mikael said quietly, almost conversational.

Brunhilda's eyes flicked to Freya—furious, desperate, betrayed.

Freya's face had gone bone-white. Her eyes were wide and glassy, her mouth opening and closing in useless motion. Her hands trembled at her sides. She looked like a girl again—pale and paralyzed, trying to remember what hope had once tasted like.

"Father, please," Freya begged, stepping forward. "Let her go. Let Hayley go. She hasn't done anything."

"I can't do that," he said simply.

His grip didn't tighten, but it didn't ease either. Hayley's struggles were weakening by the second.

"She's leverage," Mikael added, still looking only at Freya. "You know what's at stake. I will kill this horrid little wolf in a heartbeat if it means sparing you from Dahlia's grasp."

"She's a person!" Freya cried.

His voice cracked—not from weakness, but something darker. Something sharp-edged and final. "Do you want to go back to Dahlia, Freya? Is that what you want?"

Freya flinched.

"You want to bring her to heel, don't you?" he pressed. "You want to be free? Or would you rather let that half-trained thing—" his eyes flickered to Brunhilda—"play god with your fate?"

Freya didn't answer. Her lips parted, but no sound came out.

"Your witch has no plan. No solution. She refuses to resurrect the only one who may be powerful enough to help us," Mikael said. "She's choosing—choosing to let you suffer. Choosing to let you fall back into Dahlia's hands, just to spite me. Choosing to risk your freedom, your life."

"She is putting you in danger, Freya," he continued. "I will not allow that. I will not lose you again."

He looked at Brunhilda now. Straight into her eyes.

"Time to make a different choice, witch, or you will see what your stubbornness will cost you."

Brunhilda's heart was pounding, her hands clenched so tightly that her fingernails broke skin. Her magic was jittery, begging to be used—but everything in Brunhilda screamed at her to keep him happy, if only so he'd drop Hayley.

"Fine!" she snapped. "Let her down. I'll do it."

Mikael's expression didn't shift. "You'll cast the spell first."

Brunhilda didn't say anything.

"Best to start now, girl," he ordered. "And if you try anything—if you flick your fingers the wrong way—your little werewolf goes with me."

Brunhilda stared at him and then looked at Hayley—still suspended, her face flushed red from the lack of air, her fingers twitching weakly at his wrist. Her lips were starting to turn blue.

Fury and horror, helplessness, rose up her throat like bile. Her jaw ached from how tightly her teeth were clenched. Magic sparked at her fingertips—hot, unstable, useless.

Then, with a breath that shook—

She nodded.

"Good," Mikael said.

He let Hayley drop—just let her fall.

She hit the ground gasping, one arm hanging limp and useless, the other clutching at her ribs. Before Brunhilda could even consider taking advantage of the opening, he had her upright again—barely. She was swaying, held up only by his grip, her legs buckling beneath her. Tears streaked down her cheeks, pain and fury mixing with every breathless gasp.

Freya looked torn—like she wanted to run to Hayley, but didn't know if she should move. If she could.

Brunhilda looked away. She didn't want to look at her—not anymore, maybe never again.

Silas, she snapped inward, sharp and urgent. I need a plan. He's going to make me do it. He's going to make me—

"Kill the girl," Silas said, sounding sympathetic, almost sad. "Kill her and then Mikael. You can bring her back later."

No, Brunhilda hissed. Give me something else, Silas. Something real. Anything. Help me. Give me something I can do.

There was a pause. Then Qetsiyah's voice called out.

"Sabotage it."

Brunhilda blinked.

"Layer in imperfections. Not obvious ones—tiny cracks, deliberate flaws in the structure. Just enough to make it seem sound."

Brunhilda didn't speak. She just listened—and underneath it all, her magic listened too.

"You can trick them," Tessa murmured. "Even her. Esther will think something's missing. Something essential. She'll believe it didn't quite take."

Didn't quite take...

"Bring her back wrong," she continued. "Not full. Not whole. Something between. Ghost-bound. Still tethered to the Other Side. She'll think the ritual failed to anchor her."

Brunhilda's pulse surged, her heart thudding with a new kind of fire.

A plan. A crack in the mirror. Just wide enough to slip through.

Mikael was watching her now, silent and expectant. Freya still wouldn't meet her eyes. Hayley wheezed softly in the crook of his arm.

Brunhilda stepped forward into the circle—pine needles crunching beneath her boots—her magic coiled behind her teeth.

She didn't look at Mikael when she spoke.

"Fine. Let's raise your dead bitch," she said coldly.

...

They cast the spell, but the world does not shudder.

There is no rupture in the veil. No crack of thunder, no golden pulse of resurrection magic to split the air and tear open the sky. The earth does not tremble. No dust stirs and rises, no swirling bones reknitting themselves into flesh.

Resurrection and summoning weren't so different, not really. Not where the bones of the spell were concerned. The framework was the same—beckon, anchor, shape, sustain. All she had to do was... lean. Bend the spell at just the right angle. Push the magic into a familiar shape—not one that called life back into the body, but one that beckoned a ghost across the veil. A tether instead of a door.

It was simple, almost elegant, the way one intent could be mistaken for another if you knew where to press. Even Esther wouldn't notice—at least not right away. Not until she reached for breath and found none waiting. Not until she tried to touch something and felt the world pass through her.

And even she would likely mistake the reason for it.

The air thins, not suddenly, but like something exhaling very slowly around them. A pressure builds in the clearing, invisible at first, and then undeniable. The kind of pressure that makes ears ring. The kind that feels like the moment before a migraine. Then, it tilts.

The world lists slightly off its axis, and the trees hold their breath.

The clearing darkens—not from clouds, not from dusk—but from presence. From the weight of something stepping too close. The veil doesn't open like a curtain, it folds like molten glass over itself, and through that fold, she comes.

Esther.

She doesn't arrive with fanfare. She doesn't descend, she steps into existence, like something not conjured but rather revealed.

Her presence prickles at the edge of the senses, the way cold metal touches skin before a cut. Her hair hangs in beautiful waves over her shoulders. Her green dress is of an ancient construction with the clean lines of a people more worried with making war than fashionable silhouettes. Her face is unreadable.

She's too sharp, too focused, too deliberate to be mistaken for a dream, but her outline blurs. It is clear that she is only half-finished. 

Mikael stares at his wife, as if waiting for the illusion to break.

"I don't understand," Mikael said. "This wasn't meant to summon your speter, you were meant to come to be—fully formed, real. Alive."

He stepped forward, suspicion rising, his hand tightening around Hayley's throat. His eyes flicked to Brunhilda—sharp and accusing. "This was not the deal, witch."

"The spell was sound," Brunhilda lied.

Esther's voice followed, smooth and measured. "No one has deceived you, husband."

"Then why are you not alive?"

Her gaze drifted to the ground. "My body," she murmured. "Niklaus still has it with the others, I imagine. So long as he holds it, I can't fully return. The tether remains."

Silence followed—heavy and cloying, thick enough to choke on.

Mikael's jaw clenched so tightly it clicked.

"What?" he spat. He looked like he could barely contain the rage coiling behind his eyes. "That creature has your body?"

Esther didn't blink. "Yes."

Mikael snarled—low and guttural, more beast than man.

His grip loosened, and Hayley dropped like a discarded object. She hit the ground hard, catching herself just barely, a raw groan torn from her throat. Her healing was too slow—bones still fractured, breath still shallow.

Brunhilda cursed under her breath and rushed to her side, falling to her knees and pressing a hand against Hayley's chest.

"Easy," she whispered, voice shaking. "Don't move. Just breathe."

But Mikael didn't look back—his entire world had narrowed to Esther.

"When our children fled," she said, "and you followed us with murder in your heart, Niklaus returned in the days after. He found what you left behind."

Mikael's face twisted.

"He recovered my body, brought it to Ayana and convinced her to help preserve it." Esther's tone didn't rise, but it deepened—layered with something bitter and strange. "She laid me to rest in the caves where my body would be shielded, untouched."

Brunhilda felt Hayley flinch beneath her hand.

Esther went on. "Centuries passed. Then, when they returned to the New World—when you chased them across oceans—he found me again. After they fled Chicago, he took me from the cave and added me to his collection of coffins."

Mikael's face went still. Then his expression darkened, his mouth curling into something bitter.

"Of course he did," he muttered. "The bastard would steal that from me as well."

His lip curled. His voice sharpened as the rage built and spilled from his lips, a furious tumble of words.

"Always him. Always taking. My time. My family. My honor."

His fists trembled at his sides.

"He parades your corpse like a crown, wears your death like a gift. And you—you gave him the power to do it."

Esther said nothing.

"All because you lain with a beast," he says, his rage is fully consuming him. "It was not enough for you to fuck the creature, you brought its spawn into my home. Our home. You brought filth into our bloodline. You let it feed at my table. Wear my name."

His gaze locked on Esther—hard and furious, burning with the kind of hatred that had nowhere left to go but outward.

Esther flinched—that made it worse.

Mikael took another step toward her. Esther took a step back, though he could not hurt her as she was. "You let it grow beneath your ribs. You let it crawl into our family like a rot."

"You don't understand—" Esther began.

"No," he cut her off, voice sharp as broken glass. "I understand perfectly. You chose it. You chose him. And because of that choice—"

His voice cracked, and when it returned, it was lower. Rougher. Closer to grief. 

"...You let my Freya be taken."

The words, such a sudden departure from the earlier thread of conversation, rips out of him—and he is a bleeding scab picked open for them all to witness.

Finally, a flicker. Esther's mask cracked at the edges. But her voice stayed measured, painfully so. "I did what I had to do to protect the other children."

Esther's eyes flicked away from him—shifted past him, to the blonde woman standing just beyond the fire of his rage. To the daughter she hadn't seen in a thousand years, to the wound that never stopped bleeding.

Her voice quivered, "I never wanted to give you up."

Freya didn't move. Her arms were stiff at her sides.

Esther took a tentative step toward her. Her voice trembled now—just slightly—and her hands fluttered before settling over her chest. "Freya, I swear—I didn't... I never planned—I had... I had other children, you have to understand. Dahlia threatened to take Finn. To steal Elijah from my arms the moment he was born."

She looked down, and for the first time, her voice cracked.

"I had to protect them. I didn't have a choice."

Freya's lip twitched.

"Mikael is right—you always had a choice," she said. "You just didn't choose me."

Freya said no more and Esther looked... bereft.

Freya's jaw clenched so tightly the bone stood out in relief. Her eyes flicked between the ghost of the woman who gave her away, and the shaking figure of Brunhilda on the forest floor—still cradling Hayley like something precious and dying.

She didn't go to either of them.

"We are going after Dahlia. We have two of three ingredients to make our weapon," she said finally. "The soil of your homeland, the ashes of a Viking, but the third—we're still missing it."

Esther met her gaze across the clearing.

There was a pause.

Then—softly, "It's me, Freya. It's my blood."

Freya flinched.

"We will need to find your body," Mikael said, the earlier rage still simmered in his eyes, but the words were measured—flat in a way that felt almost rehearsed. "Once it's recovered, you can return fully."

Esther nodded, her voice crisp. "He left my body in a warehouse in Chicago—alongside the other children."

Then Mikael continued, quieter, but not softer. "We may not be able to kill the abomination that murdered you," he said, flicking a glance toward Esther. "But Freya has a plan that should suffice all the same."

Freya didn't move, didn't blink.

"Our son, Kol, has designed a weapon," Mikael said. "A dagger, forged with elements strong enough to pierce even heart of your bastard. One that can put him down for a very long time."

The clearing held its breath.

Then—

"Abomination?" Hayley croaked.

Her voice was raw—hoarse from pain and fury—but clear. It carved through the silence like a jagged stone. She shifted in Brunhilda's arms, grimacing, her broken arm cradled tight against her chest.

"You mean your son?"

Brunhilda didn't speak. Couldn't.

Her whole body had gone rigid minutes ago, curled instinctively around Hayley like a shield. Her hands trembled. Her breath came too shallow. She was trying to focus—trying to anchor herself to the present—but her mind had split sideways, cracked open like a fault line.

She wasn't seeing this Hayley.

She was seeing the other one.

The older one.

The one from a world already swallowed by ash.

Her skin peeling away, turning to nothing. Eyes fogged with death. Blood bubbling at the edges of her mouth.

She had held her then, too.

She had held her like this—

"I'll say it," Hayley said, lifting her head and glaring at Esther across the clearing. "You're a terrible mother."

Esther flinched.

"You're standing here, talking about stabbing your son in the chest like it's logistics. Like it's just another task to check off a list."

Esther's mouth opened, already halfway to some excuse—"He's not my—"

"Yes, he is!" Hayley snapped, louder now. "You just don't like what he became. But that's not his fault. That's on you. You made him what he is. You made all of them."

Freya stirred—subtle, uncertain—and Hayley turned to her, eyes burning.

"And you."

Freya stopped.

"You're just as bad."

Freya looked stunned. Not ashamed. Not yet. Just someone trying to catch up to a conversation she hadn't realized she was already part of.

"It was Brunhilda who woke you. She's the reason you even have a chance to kill Dahlia. And what do you do?"

Hayley's voice thickened, trembling not from weakness but from fury barely contained.

"You stand here—next to the people who threw you away—and you're just going along with this? What the hell is wrong with you."

Freya looked stunned.

"She's saved you," Hayley went on, turning the words like a blade. "And this is how you repay her? By betraying us? By siding with them?"

Each word landed like a slap, and for a beat, the clearing held still—so quiet the trees themselves seemed to shrink back.

"Mind your tongue, girl," Mikael snapped. "You think this is a betrayal? This is my wife. My daughter. I have spent centuries mourning them. Grieving them. Siding with family is no crime."

Hayley barked a laugh, sharp and furious. "Then maybe you should remember that Freya has other family too!"

She jerked her chin toward Brunhilda, who was still on her knees in the grass, cradling Hayley like a prayer. Her head was bowed. Her breath shallow. She wasn't entirely present—still somewhere between timelines, clinging to a version of this moment that had ended in blood.

But her body remembered danger.

And when Mikael's gaze snapped toward her—when his jaw tensed and his shoulders drew back—

Brunhilda shifted.

Her spine straightened and her grip loosened.

She was still elsewhere, still swimming in grief and memory—but her magic knew. Brunhilda's heartbeat slowed. She felt it pulse through her, beat echoed against the cage of her ribs, counting down to something inevitable.

Mikael took a step forward.

And then—she let go.

The spell snapped like a bone—clean, brutal, and sudden. Just like Hayley's had.

Magic screamed out from her in a burst of raw, unshaped force. The tether to Esther unraveled in an instant, and the ghostly matriarch flickered—twisting into nothing, her form torn apart by the sudden break.

Power surged forward—pure, furious instinct—and hurled Mikael across the clearing like a ragdoll.

He crashed through a thick tree trunk with a sickening crack, splinters flying like shrapnel. The forest groaned around the impact.

And still—it wasn't enough.

He moved before the bark hit the ground. A blur of rage and immortality, he was already on her again, closing the space in a blink, his face contorted in fury.

Brunhilda reached him with her magic and twisted the air.

With a dry, brutal snap, Mikael's neck wrenched sideways. His body crumpled mid-step and hit the dirt with a thud.

Her breath came hard and uneven, chest rising and falling with effort, sparks still danced across her fingertips—little stuttering remnants of the magic she had unleashed. Her eyes burned. Her ribs ached. Her blood felt wrong in her veins—too fast, too hot, as if it still hadn't realized the fight was over.

Her gaze was fixed on Hayley.

She held her close—too close. Like she might disappear. Like if she loosened her grip, she'd crumble into nothing. Her fingers were stained with blood that wasn't hers, her arms trembling from exertion and something far older.

She knew where she was.

She knew it.

But her body hadn't caught up yet.

She told herself that again. And again.

Not her. Not that Hayley.

And that was when something shifted.

Not in the clearing—in her.

A ripple of warmth unfurled beneath her ribs.

Wrong warmth.

Not hers.

Freya.

Her magic slipped in fast, silent, and precise—like silk threads weaving through her consciousness.

Brunhilda barely had time to react.

Her head snapped sideways, eyes wide. She tried to twist free, to cast, to grab hold of the magic—

"I'm sorry," came Freya's voice, gentle and devastated.

And then the spell hit.

Her limbs locked.

Her body buckled.

The world tipped sharply on its axis.

She collapsed, the last of her strength torn away. The earth rushed up to meet her—pine needles, dirt, blood. Her vision dimmed at the edges. Through the blur, she could hear Hayley screaming at the other witch, could see Freya's hair moving with the wind.

And then—

Nothing.

Chapter Text

Brunhilda blinked once—and the world shifted.

Not with pain, not with the terrible stillness of dying. Just... a slant, like the dream-version of slipping on wet tile. One moment she was upright, her magic still wrapped around Mikael's corpse, and the next she was somewhere else entirely.

She recognized the mindscape immediately. The edges of it shimmered with memory and magic—her magic this time, not someone else's. She wasn't bleeding out on in a cemetery, she wasn't dying.

Just... overwhelmed, perhaps.

And so the mindscape held her—catching her before she could hit the ground.

Inadu didn't rise this time. She lingered somewhere deep in Brunhilda—but she made no move to take over. No whisper clawing at the back of Brunhilda's thoughts. No soft promise of shared flesh.

That alone told her enough to tell Brunhilda this wasn't the Other Side. This was a retreat. A pressure valve. A half-step sideways into a place where the rules bent just a little easier.

The sky above was a haze of purple and burnt umber. The ground beneath her bare feet was soft—not earth, but memory. Ash and wildflowers. Salt and shadow. She stood in the place that had made her.

Or what was left of it.

The bones of her coven's commune stretched around her, hollow and dead. The wooden walkways had rotted into splinters. The herb gardens lay overgrown, tangled with weeds and vines like some slow, creeping reclamation. Where there had once been laughter—girls' voices rising in song, in spellcraft, in wild defiance—now there was only stillness.

Brunhilda turned slowly, breath shallow. The training ring had collapsed in on itself, the protective circle around it blackened, stained. The nursery was just a scorch-mark. No crib, no beds. Just a half-melted charm dangling from a rusted hook, the sigils long since burned away. She knelt to touch the soil—it came fell from her fingers in grains of gray and red.

The scent of blood clung here, even in dreams.

How many times do I have to fail before someone decides I don't get to try again?

She rose slowly, her limbs moving like they remembered the rhythm of grief. She wandered through the ghost of a hallway, where once her sisters had painted scenes in a riot of colors, into the courtyard. Their colors had bled now, warped into dull smears.

She almost felt like she could hear them—Edwina, Eira, and the other girls.

How many people will I fail before they rise up and take their revenge?

And then—faint footsteps behind her.

"You've certainly made a mess of things," Emily said lightly.

Brunhilda didn't turn around. "Which part?"

Her voice was dull, carved out. How she hated this part of herself—the foolish part, the parts caused her to fail again and again, the part that quite learned how to fix things.

Emily stepped up beside her, arms folded. "All of it," she said simply. Then, softer, "But mostly the part where you keep acting like you're supposed to get everything right on the first try."

Brunhilda finally turned to look at her. "So what—'plans rarely go to plan'? Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

Emily sighed. "What I'm saying is that you're improvising with what you have—and yes, you've made mistake—"

"—a thousand of them," Brunhilda cut in. "I feel like I'm drowning in them, Emily. I can't... I can't seem to do anything right. What was I supposed to do? Snap his neck in the car? We would've crashed. Kill him in that clearing? I wouldn't have been able to get more than a mile before he caught me—and that's not even counting Freya."

She spat the name like a curse.

Emily gave her a look—sympathetic, but tired. "Like I said—no one sticks the landing in a situation like this."

Another voice cut through the silence, dry and unimpressed. "Some of us did," Qetsiyah said, leaning against a tree that hadn't been there a moment ago. She looked bored. "Briefly."

Emily turned and gave her a long, pointed stare. "And how'd that turn out for you?"

Qetsiyah smirked. "Oh, you know. Betrayal, death, eternal damnation in a prison of my own making. The usual."

Brunhilda groaned, already feeling sick with the overwhelming emotion of the past day. She sat down on the memory-soaked earth. It gave beneath her like warm moss.

"I don't know how to do this," Brunhilda admitted

Emily crouched beside her. She didn't reach out—never did, not even here. Comfort, with Emily, came quiet. A weight beside your own, just heavy enough to remind you that you weren't sinking alone.

"You're not supposed to know," she said gently. "You're supposed to try."

"That's not good enough," Brunhilda snapped, heat rising sharp in her throat. "Trying doesn't stop Mikael. Trying doesn't matter when Freya keeps folding every time he speaks. When the only blood I've had in days was from a deer."

A rustle to her left. Another presence, cold and silent, stepped into view.

"I did more with less," Silas said.

Brunhilda didn't look at him. "You were a monster."

"I was a monster with results."

The tone wasn't cruel, just maddeningly calm. Which, of course, made it worse.

He settled into a bench that also hadn't been there a moment ago—this place conjured memory like breath. He looked, as always, like a man who had once gripped the world by the throat and found it boring.

"You're running low," he said. "On blood, magic, patience. But mostly blood. Without it, you won't be able to channel enough of me to control him."

Brunhilda stiffened.

"But," Silas added, watching her, "you could hurt him. If it came to that."

"You think I should try?"

"I think you'd die if you come at him half cocked like you've been doing. Gloriously, maybe. But still dead." He tilted his head. "But with a plan..."

He trailed off meaningfully.

"My own magic's starting to come back," she murmured, almost to herself. "I can feel it under my skin—like nerves knitting wrong."

"It's not back-back," Silas said. "The deer helped. But you haven't fed properly, and dying shredded whatever reserves you naturally had. And even if you were at full power—you were a strong witch before we Merged, but you weren't built to take on an Original. Not without me helping."

He looked thoughtful, "And you know I hate to tell you, sweetness, but I did warn you."

"I know," she snapped, louder now. "I know I was reckless. I was stupid. But I don't know what to do now that it's already done."

"Enough moping," Emily cut in, her tone brisk—like a teacher tired of hearing the same excuse. "We need to think. If we keep circling the same argument, Mikael wins."

Tessa shrugged, arms crossed as she leaned against a memory-tree. "Didn't we already decide trying to kill him outright would be suicide?"

"We did," Emily said flatly.

Tessa raised a brow. "So?"

Emily ignored her, turning back to Brunhilda. "That doesn't mean you can't do something else."

"You're still a witch," Emily continued, evenly. "You don't have full access to us—not until you recover—but we're still here. And so are you."

Brunhilda's mouth twisted. "It's not enough."

"Maybe not enough to channel Silas—not enough to compel Mikael, and not enough to reach Qetsiyah or me for more than a moment," Emily said. "But—" she stepped closer, hands at her sides, calm in a way Brunhilda could never quite mimic—"you're still a witch. And Mikael is still just a vampire."

"A powerful vampire."

"Yes," Emily agreed. "But still just that—a powerful vampire. He's still bound by the rules of flesh and bone and magic."

Brunhilda swallowed.

"You can snap his neck," Emily continued. "And when he wakes up, you can do it again. You can lace the air with pain spells. You can make him bleed. You can freeze the nerves in his hands so he can't grab you. You can set his blood boiling just long enough to run."

She crouched again, eyes level. Her voice didn't shake.

"You incapacitate Freya—just long enough. You run. And when he comes for you—and he will come for you—you snap his neck again."

"That's not a plan," Brunhilda whispered. "That's a delay."

"So? It's time," Emily said. "Time enough to breathe. Time enough to think. Time enough to get Hayley somewhere safe, to drink, and then decide how you want this to end."

Brunhilda stared down at her hands.

They were shaking, slowly she nodded.

...

She blinked awake with blood on her lips and the sun in her eyes.

Her first thought was sharp and searing: they better be fucking scared.

Because if anyone had tried anything while she was under—if anyone had laid a hand on Hayley—then she was going to peel the skin from their bones and make them eat the strips.

Her second thought came slower, colder: How many hours had she lost this time?

How many choices were made without her? How many miles passed beneath these tires that she didn't remember? How many breaths did she miss while the world spun without her permission?

The car was still beneath her. The taste in her mouth was dry copper, the afterburn of something not quite enough. She remembered the deer, but only barely.

Fuck, they really need to stop knocking her out. Supernatural healing or not, she was starting to worry if they were trying to rattle her brain into soup. Her body ached in strange places—sore, not broken. That, too, felt worse somehow.

She shifted upright. Her wrists weren't tied this time. She filed that away with silent suspicion.

They were parked a mostly empty parking lot somewhere outside Columbus, Ohio—a fast-food joint welded to the side of a gas station. A neon sign buzzed above the entrance, winking in and out like it couldn't commit to existence.

Freya was outside the car now, crouched low beside the open back door on the driver's side. One of her hands was hooked under Brunhilda's arm, holding her upright with quiet effort. In her other hand was a crumpled paper bag. Brunhilda sat half-sprawled in the back seat, legs twisted awkwardly, her torso slumped but stubbornly forward—like even unconscious, she refused to fully fall.

Her head lolled against Freya's shoulder, dark curls stuck to her cheek with sweat. She looked pale, but her strength was returning rapidly with the rest of her awareness.

Hayley sat on other side of the back seat, leaned stiffly against the leather seats. Her arms were crossed, her stance tight and coiled like she was ready to spring at a moment's notice. Her eyes didn't leave Freya.

Her glare spoke volumes—accusation, fury, a raw-boned sort of protectiveness that curled in her like a snarl. Her arm was healed at least, but the skin was still pink at the seams of the break.

Freya's jaw was clenched tight, her expression unreadable—but her grip was firm.

She said in a soft, almost kind voice, "You're awake."

Brunhilda didn't answer. Her eyes flicked across the lot—no Mikael.

Freya let go of her and held out the bag. "Eat. You don't look good."

Brunhilda refused to take it.

The bag remained cradled in Freya's hand—sweaty and crumpled, the scent of meat curling in the heat. But she didn't move. Her whole body felt twitchy, electric at the joints, like her skin didn't fit right. Her thoughts skipped like stones across dark water, sharp and half-submerged.

And with Hayley safely behind her, alive and glaring, her resolve solidified.

"How long?" she asked, voice scraped raw.

"A few hours."

Brunhilda's tone was flat, her face unreadable. "Where's Mikael."

"He left us here," Freya answered. "Said he'd find his own food. He should be back in a few minutes."

Brunhilda turned her head slightly, just enough to glance back at Hayley.

"You okay?"

Her voice was dead even to her own ears.

She needed Hayley's answer—it would determine much about how the next few moments went.

The werewolf's mouth tightened. "I'm fine," she said. "Freya hasn't let him touch me since she knocked you out."

That earned the witch a glance. Freya looked away.

"I'm sorry," she said quietly. "I didn't want it to go like this."

Brunhilda didn't blink. She didn't breathe, there was a kernel of coldness lodged in her. How dare she apologize? After making Brunhilda disappear into that dark, after making Brunhilda go back to that compound, to a time when she was beyond worthless. After everything that stood between the gulf of them?

Freya's voice trembled as she went on. "He's willing to help. If bringing Esther back is the last thing we need for the spell, then... we have to do it. You know that."

Brunhilda's expression didn't change.

Freya pushed forward, desperate now. "And I know you won't do it unless he's around to make you. And I hate that. I hate that I can't fix this myself, but I don't know what else to do. Helping with this is the least Esther can do, after everything she's done."

She took a breath, as if daring to hope it might land. "If this means we can keep Mikael on our side—and Klaus alive—then I don't care."

There it was. That was the part that twisted something deep and black in Brunhilda's chest.

"You don't care," she repeated.

Her voice was soft now.

Freya hesitated. "I care about—"

"No, you don't," Brunhilda cut in. "You don't care about Klaus. Not really. You know him as the man who locked Finn away. Locked all of them away. You don't know the boy—you don't know what Mikael did to him, what Esther did. You don't see what he became because people like your father decided he didn't deserve better."

Freya flinched.

Brunhilda sat up straighter, every inch of her screaming. Her bones felt like metal cooling in her limbs.

Her decision was already made—and it tore at something in her, at that strange thread that had tied Freya to her since the moment their eyes had met in the bayou. She didn't understand how this still felt like a betrayal, even after everything Freya had done to her.

"You and Mikael can figure it out on your own," she said, ice creeping into every word. "Because I'm done. I won't be party to this. I won't help you raise that woman."

Freya's mouth opened and closed. Silence cracked between them.

Then—almost too soft to hear—"I'm sorry," Freya said again. "But I can't let you walk away."

The moment Freya's magic touched her, Brunhilda grabbed hold of it—using that strange thread to force it still, felt it bend in that I know you type of way. She pushed it back in the direction it came.

Freya went flying.

She crashed into the gas pump with a sharp grunt, metal groaning under the force. The pump buckled, cracked—just shy of catastrophe.

Hayley startled, but Brunhilda was already moving.

She shoved past the door and climbed into the front seat, fingers slamming the ignition with bruising speed. The engine turned, roared to life.

She hit the gas.

The car peeled out of the lot with a screech, tires slicing over gravel.

They didn't speak for a long moment. The sky was too dark, it was almost one in the morning. The road was empty.

Then finally—quietly, cautiously—Hayley asked, "Are we finally done?"

"Beyond done," she said, voice made of knives.

...

It happened too fast.

The road was half-swallowed by black, empty except for the faint glimmer of broken lines and the distant hush of the wind against the glass. The clock on the dash read something obscene and the world outside looked washed in ink, made it look desolate and dreamless.

It had been fifteen minutes, and Brunhilda was just starting to believe they might make it.

Then—

Eyes.

Glowing.

Not human. Not deer. But for a breathless heartbeat, her mind flickered—animal? spirit?—

And then she knew.

Her hands jerked the wheel before her thoughts could catch up.

The car swerved, hard, tires shrieking across the pavement as the shape came into full view.

Mikael.

Not winded. Not bloody. Just there—in the middle of the goddamn road, standing like a nightmare, his eyes bright and feral in the dark.

He moved.

The next second, the driver's side door was gone—ripped away like paper. Metal screamed. Cold air flooded the cabin. Her body twisted with the force of it.

And then—nothing made sense.

The car spun. Tires caught gravel and the whole world tilted, sick and roaring. She heard Hayley scream from somewhere behind her, and it was the sound that broke her.

This was her fault.

All the begging, all the planning, all the holding her tongue. The watching. The waiting. Trying to play clever while the monster didn't care what she did.

Was she going to kill Hayley?

She tasted copper. Smoke. Her hair whipped into her face as the car tore through the roadside brush.

Brunhilda couldn't breathe.

She must be a grave, a casket. A coffin carved for the things she loved. Why was it that nothing ever survived her?

Why had she thought that this new Hayley would survive her when the last one hadn't?

Brunhilda didn't know how to hold anything—how to protect anything—without killing it in the process. She had never learned how to love something without breaking it. Had never learned how to want without ruining.

She could still hear Hayley's scream behind her as the world began to slow, to stagger.

Would anyone ever be able to survive her?

The airbag exploded into her face.

Light. Noise. Pain.

And then—

Black.

...

She returned to her mindscape like she'd been dragged there—ripped from the waking world and slammed back into this most cruel memory, into the place that held all her failures in neat little rows.

The sky cracked violet above her. The trees bled shadow. The air smelled like smoke and burning herbs and every unfinished promise she'd ever made.

And she—

She screamed.

It tore out of her like she was an animal, teeth bared, like something ancient had finally cracked loose from its cage.

"You bastards!" she roared, voice hoarse with grief. "You gods-damned traitorous—monsters!"

She stomped through the half-dead clearing, kicking over phantom stones, scattering old bones and illusions. Her hands sparked with wild, unfocused magic, weaving light and fire and ruin that cracked the memory-sky in bright, searing veins.

"I'll kill her!" she snarled. "I'll kill Freya. I'll rip her soul into pieces and scatter it into the void—see how Esther likes that!"

Around her, her childhood home burned under the weight of her rage, the weight of this betrayal.

She whirled. "And Mikael—"

Her breath came in broken gasps.

"I'll make him suffer. I'll make him beg. I'll crack his ribs open and—I'll use his bones as kindling. I'll—"

She broke. Just for a moment. Her knees hit the ground with a brutal thud, dirt rising around her like a curse taking root.

"I don't even know if she's alive," she whispered. "I don't know—"

Her hands curled into fists. She pressed her forehead to the ash-soaked ground, trembling.

She saw it again—Mikael's hand around Hayley's neck, the threat always implied, always looming. And she had let it happen. She'd let him stay close. Let him breathe their air. Bargained with him like he wasn't perfectly designed to destroy what she loved.

She thought of every moment she could have stopped him. Could've snapped his neck. Could've set him aflame. Could've bound his limbs with a spoken word and left him rotting.

Could've ended him the second he raised his voice—

The second he looked at Hayley like she was a leash to keep Brunhilda in line.

And Silas—Silas had been right.

That was the worst part.

He had told her. Had whispered it in that low, calculating tone of his. That it would be cleaner to let Hayley die. That she could bring her back—control the moment, choose the terms.

But she hadn't. Because she'd hoped. Because she'd loved. Because she'd hesitated.

Just like she had when she met Jeremy Gilbert all those years ago—had seen a child's face, had seen eyes that had been so horribly hurt.

And now—

Now she'd have to live with it.

She could still see it—Hayley's eyes going wide in the rearview mirror, the sound of her scream, the weight of the car tilting into night and black and nothing.

Maybe Hayley was already dead.

Maybe she'd died screaming, thinking Brunhilda had killed her. That she hadn't fought hard enough. Hadn't chosen her soon enough.

Maybe Hayley's last thought was "She let him do this."

And if Hayley lived—

Then she'd know.

She'd know Brunhilda got her hurt. That she was used as leverage. That she was a pawn in a game Brunhilda should have set fire to the second it started.

"That was my mistake," she choked out. "Mine. I let this happen."

Her fingers dug into the ground. "I won't make that mistake again—just please, let her live. Let me keep this single thing. Let her survive me, let me not be her unmaking, her death—"

Her voice rang through the clearing, hot and sharp and trembling, begging some god she didn't believe in.

And when she lifted her head—

Silas was standing over her.

His expression was unreadable. No mockery this time. No clever grin. Just eyes like carved obsidian, cold and gleaming, reflecting everything she'd just admitted.

Silas bent down to her level.

He moved slowly, deliberately—not like a man comforting someone, but like someone witnessing something horribly familiar. His hands came to her cheeks, thumbs brushing the tear-streaked grime from her skin. His palms were cold, his eyes were old in a way that had nothing to do with time.

Brunhilda looked up into his face—and for one terrible heartbeat, she was him.

She was back in that moment, the moment etched deepest into his soul. The one he could never escape, and now neither could she.

She could feel it—

The weight of Amara's corpse in his arms. Her breathing leaving, her limbs cold, the blood still warm in places where it shouldn't be. The howl building behind his teeth as he stared into the face of the only person who had ever seen the depths of him and loved every horrible part—and realized she'd died because he too hesitated.

Because he hadn't ended the one threat at his back.

Because he hadn't killed Qetsiyah when he had the chance.

If he had—

Amara would've survived the act of loving him, of knowing him, of being loved by him.

And now, Brunhilda knelt in that same grief. That same knowledge. That same sickness in her bones.

"I'm going to kill him," she sobbed, voice cracking in half.

Her fists balled in the dirt. Her whole body shook, not just from anger, but from conviction. From clarity. She had never hated like this before.

"I tried to be clever. I tried to wait. But if I wake up and Hayley's still alive—if she's still alive—then I'm going to kill him, no matter what it costs me. If she's dead, I'll kill him too, but it won't be nearly as kind."

She was weeping now, but not weakly. Her tears were molten hot, burning the words into her like a brand.

"Even if it kills me. Even if it kills her. Even if Freya dies too."

She dragged in a breath, teeth bared.

"I don't care. I'll burn it all to ash if that's what it takes. I'll get her away from him. I'll drag her out of his hands if I have to carve them off him one cut at a time."

"Finally," Silas's voice said. "You finally understand."

He rose slowly to his feet, still looking down at her like something sacred had split open at his feet.

"All the power in the world means nothing if you're too afraid to wield it. If you're too busy weeping over what might break instead of being the one doing the breaking."

He tilted his head.

"This is the cost, sweetness. This has always been the cost."

His eyes glinted dark.

"Now get up," he said. "And when you wake up—end him."

...

Brunhilda woke up gasping.

No breath, no clarity—just sensation. A rush of cold air. The sour sting of blood drying on her lips. Her body felt stiff, wrong, like she'd been buried in herself and clawed her way back out.

The air stank of dust and magic long gone stale. Cold concrete pressed against her back. Something in her shoulder throbbed like a warning bell.

She didn't sit up right away.

She needed a minute.

A single, precious moment to gather herself—to breathe, to remember. Her head ached like her skull had been hammered from the inside, and every nerve in her body buzzed with something half-healed and half-feral.

She rolled her eyes to the side and saw it—

Esther's coffin.

It looked almost plain, but it is just as she remembered it being in her visions. It sat in the center of the room like a relic, like an altar. Untouched but somehow hungry.

She blinked again, taking in the space—high ceilings, corrugated walls, rust-stained girders. A warehouse. Cold and unmarked. She could just make out the sound of water nearby—industrial drainage maybe, or the sluggish pulse of a canal.

Chicago, she guessed.

She shifted, and pain bloomed through her ribs, sharp and immediate.

Silas had poured almost nothing into healing her. She could feel that now. His magic was coiled somewhere deep in her belly—waiting, simmering, not wasted on bruises or cracked bones. He'd known she'd need it whole.

And still—Gods, it hurt.

Her right leg burned from knee to thigh. Her hands felt stiff. She tasted copper again.

But she was alive—that was something.

Across the room, Mikael stood like a statue carved from grief and brutality. He had Hayley in his arms—cradled, but not gently. His grip on her was too tight, his knuckles pale.

Brunhilda tried not to look at Hayley's face. Not yet. She didn't want to see if her eyes were closed. Instead, her gaze cut back to the coffin. It sat between them like a question with no right answer.

No sign of Freya. No other coffins. Just her, Mikael, the girl she might've doomed by virtue of not being able to let her go, and the woman she'd sworn never to raise.

Her voice came out lower than she intended, ragged from disuse.

"Where's Freya?"

Mikael didn't even blink.

"She's in the car," he said. "Knocked out."

"Why?"

"She is too soft," he said evenly. "She would try to stop me from doing what needs to be done if you refuse."

His arms shifted slightly, adjusting Hayley's weight, and Brunhilda saw the unspoken threat beneath the action.

Brunhilda was furious. Not the kind of fury that burned hot and wild—but the cold kind. The kind that cleared her thoughts and left only one thing behind: precision. She wanted to tear Mikael apart, wanted to burn this warehouse to the ground with him still inside it, wanted to drag his spirit into the dirt and salt the ashes.

Every part of her ached with the need to do something—to make this moment cost him everything.

"And what is it," she asked, slowly, "you think needs to be done?"

Mikael looked at her, gaze hard as flint.

"You will open the coffin," he said. "You will bring my wife back."

He gestured toward the obsidian lid. "I already tried. It's locked with magic."

Brunhilda didn't move. She didn't even flinch.

Mikael's grip shifted, tightened.

And Hayley let out a soft, involuntary gasp.

That was all it took.

Her rage didn't leave—it just collapsed inward. Tightened into something too dense to carry, she couldn't breathe past it. Couldn't speak through it. Her mind spun in place, unmoored from reason, because suddenly nothing mattered more than that single sound—Hayley, hurt and in danger, because of her.

Would Hayley ever forgive her for this?

If she let Mikael kill her—if she sacrificed the girl just to get close enough to take him down—would she understand? Would Hayley hate her? Would she even come to understand why?

And then Hayley looked up, teeth bared, voice raw. "Fuck you," she spat at Mikael, venom threaded through every syllable. Her gaze darted to Brunhilda. "Run!"

It cut like a blade.

"I'll open it," she lied, forcing herself upright despite the burn in her ribs. "If you drop her."

Mikael didn't so much as blink. "No."

That was it—no justification given. There was no compromise in this... this thing. Just that one syllable, and the weight of all its consequences.

Brunhilda turned back to Hayley, her chest aching with a guilt she couldn't swallow down.

If she had just stayed out of it, Hayley wouldn't be here. She wouldn't be safe, not exactly—but she wouldn't be this. Wouldn't be Mikael's bargaining chip. Wouldn't be dangling on the edge of death for a cause that wasn't hers.

Brunhilda could've waited until after Mikael was dead, after things had settled. She could've approached her then, offered her something real instead of dragging her straight into the teeth of it all. She should've waited, but she let herself be swept, be convinced by a woman who had hurt Brunhilda in a way that she had not thought to expect.

"I'm sorry," Brunhilda whispered. The words felt small and sharp in her mouth. "I shouldn't have gotten you involved."

But Hayley—bloodied, furious, barely upright—didn't flinch.

"I don't regret it," she said. "If I die—yeah, I'll regret not meeting my family. But I don't regret taking the jump." She held Brunhilda's gaze, solid as ever. "I'd do it again."

And Brunhilda—she could've screamed, could've wept or reached for her or collapsed from the weight of it all.

Something unspoken passed between the girls in that moment. Hayley gives her a tearful smile, something bitter and—

"Now," Silas said.

The word echoed through her mind like a trigger.

Brunhilda didn't hesitate.

She reached for Silas—no, not him exactly, but the pieces of him that lived inside her. The lingering strands of his power still braided into her own after the merge, half-slumbering in the marrow of her bones. She called to them, her ghosts, commanded them, and felt them answer.

The magic flooded her.

It wasn't clean, wasn't gentle, wasn't painless. It hurt worse than anything had ever hurt before in her life. It surged through her like lightning through frayed wire, ripping down whatever healing had begun and replacing it with fire. Her knees buckled but she forced herself to remain upright, her nerves lighting up one by one as she tore open the barriers within herself.

Her mind lashed out—searching for more. She clawed at Emily's magic, yanked at Qetsiyah's threads, even ripped something from Inadu, pulled everything she could reach.

And then—

She threw it around Mikael like a net.

The illusion was crude, but strong—an echo of what she had used on the deer in the forest, layered with feels of safesafesafe—

Mikael blinked, just for a second, his eyes flickering with that primal instinct to melt and flinch all at once.

In that moment—that breath of hesitation—he let go of Hayley.

Brunhilda moved.

The spell launched from her and Mikael went flying. His body crashed into the far wall with a deafening crack of stone and steel. Dust exploded into the air. Something metal buckled.

But the backlash hit her just as hard.

The magic tore through her like a whip. Her legs nearly gave out and blood dripped from her nose, from her ears. Her body, still bruised and cracked from the crash, screamed under the strain. She tasted blood again—hers, this time—and her hands shook so violently she almost dropped to her knees.

Still—she stayed standing.

Barely.

"Run!" she shouted, her voice rough and raw.

Hayley hesitated, eyes wide, looking between Mikael's crumpled form and Brunhilda—still trembling, still alight with pain and power.

But Mikael was already stirring.

He rose fast, too fast—blurred at the edges, the sound of his feet skidding across concrete like a gunshot. His eyes locked on Hayley.

And then he lunged.

Brunhilda moved without thinking, throwing herself between them, magic flaring wild again. Her ribs flared white-hot with agony.

"Go!" she shouted, shoving Hayley back with a force that wasn't just physical. "You'll get us both killed if you stay!"

Hayley's jaw clenched, but something in her cracked—some final wall that had been holding her still—and then she ran.

Mikael flew at her, and Brunhilda barely had time to brace herself.

He came at her like a storm—no hesitation, no wasted movement. One second he was across the room, the next he was on her, hands at her throat, weight slamming into her like a battering ram. The air left her lungs in a wheeze as they crashed against the floor, stone and bone grinding together.

She clawed at him with magic, wild and sharp, but he batted the first spell away like it was nothing. Her second caught him in the ribs—just enough to stagger him—and she kicked upward, catching his thigh with a thrust of magic meant to cut. He snarled and came down harder.

She rolled, a line of magic whipping towards his face. He followed.

They tore across the warehouse floor in a brutal rhythm—blow, counter, magic, pure force. She struck him with a burning spell and he struck her back with brute force that cracked something in her side.

Pain lanced through her, hot and wet.

She kept going.

Spells sparked at her fingertips, every one of them a prayer and a scream. She aimed for his eyes, his throat, his knees. Anything that would give her space to breathe. Her body was shaking, her magic flickering like a flame too small to survive the wind. Her skin split under his nails, her ribs screamed with every breath, but still she moved. Still she fought.

And then—

His hand tangled in her hair, yanking her head to the side, and his teeth sank into her throat with a sound like fabric tearing and bone giving way.

She screamed.

The pain was blinding—white-hot and electric, her magic buckling under it, her vision swimming. Her legs gave out. Her arms faltered.

And suddenly—

He was gone.

Ripped from her.

Mikael flew across the room, slammed into a pillar with enough force to shatter the metal frame. He dropped to the ground with a heavy crash, momentarily stunned.

Brunhilda collapsed forward, choking on blood and air and disbelief.

She turned her head, blinking through the blur, and saw—

Hayley.

Standing next to her with a hot rage simmering in her eyes.

But she wasn't the one who'd thrown him.

Beside her—standing tall, calm, and impossibly furious—was Finn Mikaelson.

His expression was blank and Brunhilda's magic still thrumming faintly in the air around them, but his eyes locked on Mikael with a wildness. Brunhilda gasped, barely able to lift herself. Her throat was a mess. Her magic flared weakly, instinctively, in recognition.

And Hayley—brave, beautiful Hayley took one slow step forward and pointed at Finn, as if he was a guard dog she could order.

"Yeah, get his fucking ass!"

Chapter Text

Finn woke like stone shifting-as if he had been carved into the world. As if he were chiseled into being from centuries of forced stillness, left buried beneath layers of dust.

Full awareness crept in slowly. It was not the numb dark he'd been cursed to linger in, but something sharper. His mind thrummed, cold and quiet, stretched too thin. Then suddenly the tension released like the air itself had changed while he slept.

He blinked.

Sight-true sight, not just the shapes he had imagined to keep him company in the void... he had forgotten what that felt like.

The light was low, artificial, and hummed strangely.

He was in a room far too sharp, too perfect, in its construction. There was no sky. There was no dirt floor, just a single stone that stretched out impossibly big. He had not realized that humans were able to make stone like this, certainly not such a perfectly level one.

This place reeked of a strange chemical smell he had no frame of reference for.

And there, crouched above him, was a girl with blood and tears smeared over her face.

Werewolf.

He could smell that much. She was young, he noticed, but her race made her anything but powerless. Her hands shook as she pulled a dagger from another body, another coffin-Kol.

The metal slipped from his brother's chest with a wet, ugly sound. Kol didn't stir.

The girl now held three blades in her grasp-she held them with shaking hands.

She turned to Finn, eyes wide, lips parted. Her voice cracked.

"Kol?"

She said it with a strange tilt, an accent he didn't recognize.

He shook his head once. His own voice came slowly, like it was being dug out of the same dirt he'd been buried in.

"No," he said, in his own tongue. "The one you are freeing now is Kol. I am Finn."

She stared at him, uncertain.

"I thank you for freeing me from my prison," he added. It seemed appropriate. Polite, even. She had saved him from his torment, after all.

But she only blinked at him, wet-faced and startled, and then said something back-fast and frantic and utterly foreign. Her voice broke on the vowels. A sob caught in the back of her throat.

Finn frowned.

He recognized the tone, but not the words. Desperation. Pleading. Please.

It did not suit her, he thought.

She looked like a fighter. Someone who should be snarling threats, not choking on grief. The tears made her face look too soft, too desperate. It unsettled him.

Then came the sound-crack-from deeper in the warehouse. Flesh against stone. Magic screaming in the air like a trapped bird. The unmistakable rhythm of violence.

The girl's head snapped toward it. Her whole body tensed. Without a word, she grabbed his wrist.

It shocked him more than it should have.

He did not move at first.

She obviously didn't know what he was-what they were. That this body she touched so freely was built from blood and teeth, bound by magic so old it had no understanding of her language. She didn't know she was dragging a sharpened weapon into whatever firestorm she'd stumbled from.

And yet-her grip did not loosen.

Her fingers curled tighter, knuckles white. Her mouth moved again. Another rush of words. Still foreign. Still wild. Still please.

Finn looked at her.

Something old twisted in his chest. It felt like the beginning of a promise.

He followed.

The girl's grip never loosened. She stumbled once but didn't stop. She moved like someone who had already bled for this and could not bear to lose anything else.

They crossed the threshold into the next room-and Finn saw why.

The air stank of magic and blood. Burnt sigils still glowed faintly on the walls-wards torn apart mid-cast, their energy bleeding into the air like open wounds. Shattered glass glittered across the concrete. It felt like the aftermath of a war.

And at the center of it all stood Mikael.

He was clutching a woman's body, his hands braced like claws, his mouth buried at her throat. Blood poured down his chin. His teeth were bared. His eyes gleamed-not with frenzy, but with control. He was feeding not for survival, but for punishment.

And the witch-because she had to be a witch, judging by the wreckage-was still fighting. One hand clawed weakly at his chest, her nails leaving faint scratches down his skin. Her face was pale, blood-slicked, jaw clenched in pain.

She screamed, and the room echoed the sound.

Finn felt the magic in her like a hum beneath the floorboards, deep and buried and burning. She'd been powerful once. Maybe even dangerous.

Now, she was bleeding out beneath his father's weight.

Hayley shouted something beside him, but he didn't hear her. Not really. Because the woman on the ground turned her head. Their eyes met.

And the world cracked.

The bond hit like a spear through the chest.

A pressure behind the ribs. A pull in the gut. His soul unfurled-I know you! it crooned out in joyful surprise. A feeling in inevitability swelled in him, sliding between his ribs, sinking into the meat of his chest. It sang through his limbs, and with it came a kind of ancient knowing, and more than that-

A fury.

Finn moved without thought.

In a blur, he crossed the room and slammed into Mikael, sending him crashing into the far wall. Bone cracked. Metal buckled.

The werewolf called out, her voice sounding triumphant.

Finn flashed forward, hands grabbing his father's neck and-

Snap.

Mikael dropped.

The witch was gaping at him now, blood still pouring from her neck. Her limbs spasmed as her body fought to hold itself together.

Finn flashed to her side immediately.

He bit into his wrist-deep and clean-and pressed it to her mouth. "Drink," he said, though she wouldn't understand him. "Please."

There was no hesitation in her, and she drank.

Slowly, at first. Then hungrily, desperately. Her fingers tangled in the collar of his shirt. Her body arched as the blood took hold-he could feel it moving through her, dragging her back toward something like life.

Her body knits back together like a torn tapestry-imperfectly, but enough. It surprises him how slowly she heals. He watched her veins re-thread themselves beneath her skin. The wound at her throat puckered shut in jagged pieces. Not clean. Not complete. Slow-so much slower than a human drinking from him should've healed.

That surprised him.

She was something else. Something worse off than she looked.

Still, color began to return to her cheeks. Her fingers, still shaking, pressed against his chest like she meant to speak-but no words came.

Behind them, Mikael stirred.

Finn didn't hesitate.

He flashed back to his father's side, snapped forward in another blur of motion, and brought his hands to Mikael's head. One sharp twist-and the neck broke once more with a sickening crunch.

The body went limp in his hands.

The woman rose.

Not easily-her limbs moved like half-healed fractures-but she rose nonetheless. Rage burned behind her eyes, bright and sharp, a fire that hadn't died even when her body had nearly given out. There was something steady in the way she turned her head toward the werewolf girl.

She said something.

The girl answered quickly. Her voice stumbled over itself, breathless and rushed. She reached into a large pocket that rested in the middle of her overshirt and pulled out three daggers.

The woman barked out an unbelieving laugh, and her face split into a wide, breathless smile.

The werewolf smirked back.

The witch turned back to Finn and his father.

She was moving again, towards him this time. Or rather, towards Mikael. Finn still held his father's head in his hands, Mikael's body twitching at the seams, already slowly healing torn muscle back over shattered bone.

Finn's instincts surged.

With another brutal twist, his father's neck cracked for a third time.

The sound echoed off concrete like a snapped tree branch.

The woman murmured something under her breath. Finn didn't understand the words, but the tone was sharp-gratitude edged with exhaustion.

Then she crouched, fingers diving into Mikael's coat with surgical focus. She pushed fabric aside, tore open an inner lining, searched every pocket. A sound escaped her-frustration, raw and guttural.

Her hands stilled. Her shoulders sagged just slightly.

She turned to the werewolf again and asked something. The werewolf replied. Long. Rambling. Finn caught fragments of tone-apologetic, defensive, uncertain. She gestured vaguely toward the door. Toward the world outside. Toward away.

His soulmate's jaw clenched.

Her fingers twitched against her thigh. For a moment, she didn't move at all.

She said something low. Something that made the werewolf's grin grow larger.

Then she raised her hand.

Finn didn't recognize the magic she used-didn't feel it in the way he recognized most spellcraft. This wasn't an incantation. It was something deeper. It echoed through him, burned through him, as if he had helped cast the spell. Something that rose not from words, but from the bones.

Her pupils dilated. Her fingers curled as if winding invisible thread. Her lips moved, but no sound emerged. And around Mikael's body-the air shifted.

Not in temperature. In tone.

Like the room had gone off-key.

The spell took several long minutes to cast and during that time Mikael stirred, though not consciously. His limbs spasmed. His breath caught. His face twisted-not in pain, but in recognition.

His hands clenched like he was holding something invisible. Or being held.

Then Mikael's lips parted in a voiceless scream.

Finn couldn't see what she had done. Not fully. But he could sense the shape of it. Mikael flinched like a man reliving a beating. His fingers trembled like he'd been made a child again. There was something haunting in the expression that followed-shock, not terror. And then the fury of someone being made to wear his own sins like skin.

Then, quietly-like someone bracing for cold water-the witch asked the werewolf to give her something. She crossed the room and slid one of the daggers in her hand.

She reached down and without pause-cut.

The edge of the blade met Mikael's wrist and slid through flesh and bone in one clean, wet sound.

His hand hit the ground with a dull thud.

Blood pooled instantly, thick and dark.

She crouched again and retrieved the severed hand. She didn't flinch as she wrapped it in a scrap of cloth, tying it tight like a butcher preparing meat for long travel. Her hands were steady. Her face unreadable.

She looked at werewolf, spoke again-just one line. Finn caught the name "Freya" which made his heart jump in cautious hope, but nothing else.

Then she looked at him.

She said something that Finn could not understand. Her expression was expectant. She gestured to Mikael's body and when he didn't move.

Finn hesitated.

He didn't want to let go of his father in case whatever magic she had wrapped him in failed and he rose with a vengeance pointed at her.

Then her face twisted. She muttered another curse-he could tell by the bite of it-and crooked her fingers in a sharp little beckon, commanding him forward like a stray she intended to tame.

He hesitated, then moved.

Her smile flickered-small, satisfied, indulgent, as if to say, good boy.

Finn flushed.

It was only when Finn stood at her side did the witch raise her hand, flicking out her fingers. Though his blood had brought warmth back to her skin, the spell still made her sway-just slightly-as she summoned a spark.

Mikael's body ignited in seconds. The earlier illusion-whatever it was-held despite the immolation. His face convulsed, caught in memory. He didn't scream, but his body contorted as if one was ripping itself from his soul. He twitched and bucked like someone trapped inside their own mind.

The witch didn't watch.

She was already turning away, speaking quickly to the girl in that same sharp language. Finn couldn't parse the words, but the cadence was urgent-measured, like a general issuing commands. Her body swayed slightly as she spoke, the aftershock of spellwork still echoing through her limbs.

The werewolf nodded and pointed toward the corridor, toward the dark where the others still slept.

His soulmate cut her off-not cruelly, but firmly. She gestured to the fire, then to the ceiling-then towards a door. The blaze would slow Mikael's recovery-would force him to remake his body over the course of hours instead of minutes, but it would not stop him forever.

She said something about the building-he recognized one name. Klaus.

That alone was enough to set his jaw.

If this warehouse belonged to Niklaus, then it was only a matter of time before his spies arrived. Witches, no doubt. Possibly worse. Whoever this era's allies were, Finn doubted they were merciful. His brother had always been a collector of useful things-witches, weapons, grudges, the corpses of their siblings.

The witch eyes met his briefly. Her lips moved again-another command, maybe. Then she pointed to the werewolf, to him, and then toward the far end of the building.

Whatever she'd said, the shape of it was clear: Go with her.

She turned before he could object. Already moving back toward the hallway where the others were still sleeping in darkness and steel.

The girl muttered something under her breath and grabbed his arm again-less desperate this time, more like she was used to dragging things twice her weight. She pulled him toward the exit with a sigh and a glance over her shoulder, clearly annoyed.

Finn followed. Not because he was told, but because something in his soulmate's voice-even filtered through language he didn't understand-had settled in him.

...

Rebekah came back to herself slowly.

Waking from a daggered sleep was never gentle-more like drowning in tar and surfacing through fire. Her body was stiff. Her throat raw. Her limbs sluggish and aching as if they'd been bound to the stone floor rather than laid in rest.

She opened her eyes to the dark blur of a ceiling that didn't belong to her. She inhaled-and the first thing she registered was blood.

Fresh. Warm. Close.

The second thing she noticed-silence.

No Elijah's hand on her shoulder, murmuring reassurances in that infuriatingly calm tone. No Klaus, crouched nearby with some smug, cryptic remark about how long she'd been asleep.

Just the quiet throb of her own veins and the brittle, echoing ache of being gone.

Her vision adjusted slowly, the corners still heavy with dust and dream. The room was a warehouse-ugly and cold. She hated it already.

There was a voice nearby. A woman's voice. Low, controlled. With something dangerous curling beneath the syllables. She couldn't make out the words, but the tone wrapped itself around Rebekah's spine like silk-it was a pretty voice, Rebekah thought.

Rebekah's stomach growled. Her throat was a scrape of hunger and instinct. She was still piecing together the circumstances of her revival when she heard it.

Heartbeat.

Soft. Human. Weak.

Food.

Rebekah didn't think. She moved.

In the space of a second, she crossed the room to the woman who had spoken moments ago-teeth bared, senses fixed on the pulse like a wolf on a rabbit. Maybe Klaus had left her something to snack on. Wouldn't be the first time. Wouldn't be the last. He always was thoughtful like that-especially when trying to manipulate her. She'd seen this pattern before. A pretty girl. A bitten wrist. A little blood on the throat to say go ahead, sister, feed first.

But when Rebekah reached her-when she slammed to a halt just inches from the girl's face-everything stopped.

Rebekah's breath caught-it was like looking into fire and not realizing you were burning until the skin peeled back-

And Rebekah knew.

Her hunger evaporated.

It hit like a wave-no, like an arrow-straight through the ribs. Her breath caught. Her pupils blew wide. Her heartbeat stuttered once before re-aligning itself to a new rhythm that belonged to them.

Her mouth opened-maybe to speak. Maybe to breathe. Maybe to apologize.

And then-she was flying.

A blast of magic caught her mid-motion, flinging her back like a leaf in a gale. Pain ricocheted down her spine as she hit the floor. The wall had cracked. She had cracked.

Her ribs were already knitting themselves back together, but not fast enough for her liking. Magic always bruised in a way that brute strength didn't.

She coughed once-then again, harder. Something warm slipped from the corner of her mouth and she wiped it with the back of her hand, blinking through the ache blooming behind her eyes.

"Can't say this is quite how I always imagined this moment going," she muttered, voice rough with disuse.

She pressed her hand to the wall, pushing up with slow, uneven limbs. Her knees were still shaky from the blow, but her pride hurt more than her bones.

Across the room, the woman-her soulmate, gods help her-was watching with a flat, lethal composure that reminded Rebekah of Elijah. It was a kind of deliberate stillness that only came from power.

"Sorry," Rbekah said, voice still hoarse. "I thought you were lunch sent by my brother. Wouldn't be the first time Klaus left someone bleeding at my feet as a welcome-back gift."

Her soulmate raised an eyebrow. "Charming."

"I didn't realize you were one of his witches," Rebekah added, straightening her spine with what dignity she could muster.

That made the woman laugh.

"I'm no one's witch," she said.

Yet, Rebekah thought, eyeing her openly. Blood streaked her collar, her magic still hummed in the air like static. She looked feral and half-ruined and absolutely divine.

Rebekah had always imagined a soulmate would arrive wrapped in silk and softness-something gentle after centuries of cruelty. But looking at her, Rebekah thought, Yes. This will do.

"I'm Rebekah," she said, quieter now.

"Brunhilda."

Brunhilda didn't linger on the introduction. "Unless you want Klaus-or one of his actual witches-to track the trail of blood here and put you back to sleep, we need to move. Now."

She turned slightly, gesturing toward the exit with a tilt of her chin. "And the farther we get from Chicago, the better. Mikael won't stay down forever."

Rebekah blinked. "M-Mikael is here?"

Brunhilda didn't wait for Rebekah's spiral to continue.

"I set him on fire. It'll take a few hours for him to heal from that," she says almost casually, but Rebekah can identify a stressful twinge to her voice-what went unspoken was this has been a very difficult day, so please don't fight me on this.

Rebekah didn't answer.

There wasn't anything to say. Her brain felt like it had been dunked in ice water. Everything was happening too fast-soulmate, Mikael, fire-and now there was the sharp, unmistakable smell of burnt flesh hanging in the air like a warning.

Brunhilda turned away from her and pointed across the room.

Kol still lay motionless in his coffin, but there was no dagger in him-had... had Brunhilda released him too? His skin was less gray now-tinged faintly with something close to pink-but he wasn't breathing yet.

"Can you help carry him?" Brunhilda asked.

Rebekah didn't hesitate.

She moved before the question had fully finished leaving the other woman's mouth. The soreness in her limbs and the ringing from being slammed into the wall was already starting to disappear as she crouched beside her brother and hoisted him into her arms with practiced ease. Kol didn't stir. He was heavier than she remembered.

Probably because he's such a glutton, she thought spitefully, silently laughing.

Brunhilda led the way down the hall-her movements graceful, quick. Rebekah followed her, trusting that this woman, the one destiny had picked out for her, would not lead them astray.

Outside, the air hit cold and metallic. Rebekah squinted against the sunlight.

There was a car idling near the edge of the lot-dark, ugly, strange, probably stolen. The werewolf that Rebekah had smelled earlier stood by the passenger door, arms crossed, trying to look impatient. Finn stood nearby, still alert, still watching everything like a man waiting for his orders to make sense.

Rebekah eased Kol into the backseat, careful with his limbs. The werewolf-who introduced herself as Hayley-helped, and the two of them slid in beside him, a mess of elbows and tangled limbs. Brunhilda climbed into the driver's seat without ceremony.

The engine growled as she shifted it into gear.

Rebekah closed the door behind her and leaned her head back against the seat. Her pulse still hadn't calmed. She could still feel the bond between them humming like a second heartbeat, too close to ignore.

Brunhilda glanced back once, briefly.

"If he wakes up before we're clear," she said, nodding toward Kol, "try to keep him calm."

Rebekah huffed a breath and gave a shaky smile. "You'll come to learn, dearest, that my dear brother has never been calm a day in his life."

Brunhilda didn't smile. But something like amusement flickered in her eyes before she turned back to the road and hit the gas.

...

Kol came back to life like someone being dragged out of it.

The first thing he noticed was the ache-sharp and stinging, buried somewhere behind his eyes like someone had jammed a knife between his skull and spine and then twisted.

The second was the heat. Not fire, not yet, but that pulsing, slow burn that came from magic unspooling too fast after a long sleep.

The third was motion.

He was moving.

The world rattled softly beneath him, and above the pounding in his head, he could hear the unmistakable sound of tires on asphalt. A car. He was in a bloody car.

God, how tacky.

Nikky couldn't even splurge for a horse-drawn carriage to celebrate his waking?

How long had it been anyway?

His eyes fluttered open.

Everything was dim-tinted glass, cheap leather. He was slumped in the backseat, his head cradled against someone's lap.

He blinked. She had a familiar smell.

"Rebekah?" His voice came out cracked. "You're joking."

She hushed him instantly. "Stay down."

He ignored her.

Kol sat up-or tried to. His limbs felt like wet clay. His muscles hadn't quite remembered how to behave. But the smell in the car hit him full force and made everything else irrelevant.

Blood.

Fresh. Sweet. And-werewolf?

He blinked harder, breath catching.

"Did Nik break his bloody curse already?" he muttered. "Of course he did. Bastard."

He shifted forward, trying to make sense of the shapes in the car. Rebekah shoved at his shoulder. "Kol, stop."

He ignored her again.

Then his eyes slid up-to the front seat.

To the girl.

She sat angled toward the wheel, her hair stuck to her neck in drying blood. Her arm was resting on the steering wheel, casual as anything, but her head had tilted slightly-just enough for her eyes to find his in the rearview mirror.

And the world. Stopped.

Kol froze.

No heartbeat. No air. No coherent thought.

Only her.

Her gaze met his-and something ancient pulled tight inside him. The bond snapped into place with a force that made his vision blur. Magic surged through his chest, not his own. Not hers. Theirs.

It felt like coming home, felt like he had sunk into a warm bath, like he was wrapped in one of his mother's hugs, before she had let her husband murder him. He hadn't felt magic in a thousand years, Kol though, his mind moving quicker than he could catch up to it-

The mirror distorted her slightly, but it didn't matter. He'd know her anywhere. Even soaked in blood-especially soaked in blood. He would have known her a thousand years ago, he'd know her a thousand years in the future.

She lifted her hand, and he felt a twitch in her magic, her plan echoing through him-

He opened his mouth. "Wait-!"

She snapped her fingers.

The magic hit him like a hammer.

Kol barely had time to scowl before the spell dropped him.

Darkness swallowed him.

Chapter Text

Her legs trembled beneath her weight, her magic stretched thin from the fight and the bloodletting. Silas's power, enhanced by the blood Finn had just given her, laced through her like old threadwork—reinforcing the weakest places, keeping her upright—but it wasn't enough to make her whole. Not yet.

She turned to Hayley, "What did you do?"

"You kept talking about Kol," she said, her breath hitched. "And I knew you wouldn't have mentioned needing him if you thought he was on Mikael's side."

Brunhilda sent a pointed look to Finn. "And?"

"And," she continued, "I didn't know which one was him, so I thought—fuck it, might as well wake them all."

Hayley reached into her hoodie pocket and pulled out three gleaming daggers. Her hands were still shaking, but her eyes held steady.

Brunhilda let out a startled laugh.

"Fuck," she said, breathless, "I fucking love you, Hayley."

The girl sent her a smug smirk.

"So, will one of the daggers work on him?" Hayley asked eagerly.

"There wouldn't be any ash left on them," she said. "They won't hold him."

She turned toward his body and took a step forward.

Finn shifted at once—his rested on Mikael's head with almost too much ease, and the wet crunch of a third neck snap echoed through the room.

Brunhilda's regard for him was only growing.

She crouched beside the body and began digging through his coat. Every pocket. Every fold. She even tore open one of the inner linings, sending threads flying.

The white oak stake wasn't there.

A snarl curled at the edge of her lips. She hissed low and stood again, looking to Hayley.

"Where is it?"

"The stake?" At Brunhilda's nod, Hayley's lips thinned. "Freya took it. She didn't trust him to keep his word about Klaus. She made him give it up during one of your... unwilling naps. I think she hid it at one of our stops. Somewhere he wouldn't find it, but she could, if we needed it."

Brunhilda closed her eyes. Rage pounded behind her teeth, but she forced it down.

She didn't blame Freya for that part—for not trusting Mikael with the stake. Not exactly. But it meant that now, with Mikael unconscious and weakened and right there, she couldn't finish it.

Even with Silas's magic—singing through her with the sizable donation of blood that Finn gave her—it wasn't enough. Silas was having to prioritize keeping her upright, healing the immediate head and neck trauma. And if she pushed herself to the edge again... if she died again...

She wouldn't risk it. Not with Kol and Rebekah newly awake and Hayley within their reach—they'd chew first and ask questions after.

Finn she could trust not to immediately take a bite out of either of them, but he was still trying to understand the century he'd woken into. He wouldn't be able to protect himself, let alone Hayley.

She looked at Mikael's body and made her choice.

"I can't kill him... but I'm not leaving him like this," she said.

"What now?" Hayley asked, low. "We can't kill him without the stake."

Brunhilda didn't look up. She crouched beside Mikael and began tracing sigils in the blood pooling beneath him.

"I'm not killing him," she said.

Hayley frowned. "You're not?"

Brunhilda met her gaze, eyes hard.

"No," she said. "I'm going to do something much worse."

Hayley blinked once. Then—slowly, like a flame catching wind—her mouth curved into a grin.

Brunhilda reached into her well of power—grabbing hold of Silas's power. The magic rose in her and slid up her spin, settling into her fingertips. She crafted the spell not with words, but with feeling.

She wove his guilt into a cage. His cruelty into a mirror.

Mikael's body began to twitch. His fingers spasmed. And then—his eyes moved beneath the lids.

The illusion was holding.

He wasn't seeing her anymore. Was not seeing anything real. Not anymore.

He was seeing himself.

Not from the outside—but from beneath.

From the floor, the fist, the cradle of every child he had called weak. The illusion didn't just mimic—it inverted. Mikael was trapped in the bodies of those he had broken, made to wear their fear like skin.

He was Klaus now—small and trembling, mouth smeared with blood he hadn't asked to taste. His own hand was raised, cruel and righteous, and he couldn't move. Couldn't look away. Couldn't make it stop.

Then he was Rebekah—barefoot on dirt floor, begging him to stand back, to leave her brother alone. His lips moved, mouthing prayers he had sneered at for centuries.

Then he was Kol, was Elijah, was Esther, was every girl his people had hurt, was every vampire he had drained dry, was Marcel hanging in that opera house, was every person he had burned through on his quest to murder his son.

He felt every wound he had ever dealt.

The illusion folded the moments together: child, monster, victim, judge. The magic didn't just replay his cruelty—it rewrote it, locked him in it, kept him cycling through the same helpless terror he had delighted in giving others.

And in every form—every mask—it was his voice that rang out in rage.

His fists that struck. His blade that pierced. His shame.

The magic burned as she shaped it—hot and unforgiving, dragging through her bones like molten iron through old pipes. It scalded her throat when she whispered the last tether into place.

Silas cursed her from somewhere deep inside for using so much, but Brunhilda's rage would not cool.

If she could not kill him, she would make him wish she had.

"Give me one of the daggers," Brunhilda said quietly, already moving.

Hayley didn't question it—just handed one over, grip reversed.

Brunhilda took it and, without hesitation, began to slice through the muscle of his wrist. After a long moment of sawing through it, the hand fell with a wet smack against the concrete. Blood fanned out from the wound like ink spilled across stone.

She grabbed it and cradled it in her own.

She thought of Hope, for a moment. Hayley's daughter. A child who didn't yet exist—and maybe wouldn't, in this version of the world. But if she did, Brunhilda swore Dahlia would never touch her. This was for that.

She stood back from the body and looked at Finn.

"Let him go," she said.

He didn't move.

She blinked and a realization settled in her. 

"Of course you don't speak English," she muttered.

She gestured with a flick of her fingers—come here.

Finn hesitated before reappearing at her side.

Only then did she raise her hand again—summoning a flicker of flame from her palm. It danced at her fingertips, unruly, flickering, but powerful. The spell took what was left of her focus—but she held it steady.

She dropped the fire onto his chest and let it spread.

His blood ignited like oil. His skin blackened, curled. The room filled with the thick, choking scent of burning flesh.

The illusion still held.

Mikael did not scream. But he twitched. His mouth contorted in silent agony. His face convulsed like something inside him was breaking—something important.

He would die by inches—burned to ash over the course of next twenty minutes.

Brunhilda did not watch.

She turned to Hayley.

"We'll have a few hours, at most, before he reforms," she said. "But this place still belongs to Klaus, so we have even less before his witches come sniffing."

Hayley opened her mouth, but Brunhilda was shoving Finn and the severed hand towards her. She gestured again, this time toward the outer door. "Get Finn in the car—I'll get the others and then we're out of here."

And with that, she vanished into the dark, cloak trailing smoke, hands still blood-warmed, magic coiled tight beneath her ribs.

Chapter Text

Brunhilda drove with both hands on the wheel and both eyes locked on the road. Her jaw ached from how tightly she was clenching it, like if she ground her molars hard enough, she could chew through the silence. She hadn't picked a direction so much as escaped in one.

West felt wrong, east too predictable. So, she pointed the car north and didn't look back.

A thin cloaking spell layered itself over the car like mist, not visible to the passengers but humming beneath her skin. It wouldn't hold up against a real scry, not if Klaus's witches were particularly clever, but it might confuse them long enough for her to set up something better. It would give her a few hours at least.

Freya was curled into Finn's lap, inert. They had found her unconsciousness in the front seat of the car, just like Mikael had told Brunhilda she would be in the warehouse. When Finn lifted her into the front seat, Brunhilda had pointed and said "Freya," and his whole face softened, cracked open by the smallest flicker of hope.

His smile made her feel... weird, like she was too aware of her own body.

Behind them, the backseat was a disaster of limbs and exhaustion. Kol was draped across Hayley and Rebekah like a discarded blanket—head in Rebekah's lap, feet in Hayley's. He was too tall to fit comfortably, not without contortion or complaint, but he didn't move, and neither did they. Rebekah kept absently carding her fingers through his hair—her face was soft at the corners. She had obviously missed him fiercely.

Hayley had been talking for the past twenty minutes.

Not in a nervous way, not even in a particularly social way—more like someone determined to fill the silence with something less soul-sucking than dread. She had opinions about road conditions. She had opinions about buildings they passed. She had opinions about the correct ratio of chocolate to peanut butter in candy bars and the narrative integrity of certain long-running television shows.

Kol had been out cold the whole drive, which was probably the only reason no one had snapped yet.

Brunhilda didn't say much. Just hummed occasionally to show she was listening, or at least pretending to be. Rebekah, on the other hand, looked like she was preparing a murder defense in her head.

"Wait, wait—back up," Hayley said suddenly, eyes flicking to Rebekah. "You've never read a romance novel?"

"I've read novels with romance in them," Rebekah replied coolly.

"Not the same thing, Bex."

A beat. Brunhilda glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Rebekah's nose wrinkle slightly.

Hayley leaned in like a predator scenting blood. "Oh my god—you don't even know what 'forced proximity' means, do you?"

"I know what words are," Rebekah snapped, clearly affronted.

Hayley ignored her and launched into a vivid description of the trope—strangers, one bed, a snowstorm, a broken-down car, lingering stares across candlelight while pretending to hate each other.

"That sounds like kidnapping," Rebekah said flatly.

"It's romantic," Hayley shot back, clearly egging her on. "But I guess you wouldn't understand—you're, like, a million years old and you don't even have a boyfriend. So unromantic. It's sad, really."

"I am very romantic," Rebekah defended herself. "I've had plenty of boyfriends—and it sounds exactly like kidnapping! What's romantic about that?"

Brunhilda, still staring at the road, deadpanned, "The character development."

Hayley cackled. "See? Even she agrees."

The werewolf was relentless.

After wringing a reluctant promise out of Rebekah to read "at least five, no, six, because the first one's always the weakest" of her favorite novels, she pivoted seamlessly into a monologue about tropes she liked, tropes she hated, and how if someone didn't appreciate mutual pining, they were morally bankrupt.

Eventually, the topic drifted. Hayley started addressing Finn more directly, asking slow, careful questions—mostly through Rebekah, who acted as translator. "Though I warn you," Rebekah muttered, flipping her hair over one shoulder, "I haven't spoken the language in at least eight centuries."

Finn responded quietly, but steadily. He spoke like he was thinking through every word before he let it escape his lips.

It wasn't until a lull in Hayley's yapping that he turned to Rebekah and said something that made her brows furrow. She glanced back at him, asked for clarification. He repeated himself—gently, patiently—in their mother tongue.

Brunhilda couldn't understand a word of it. But the emotion in Finn's tone was clear. And Rebekah's face—her whole face—shifted with surprise, confusion, something like sorrow. Her hands twitched in her lap.

She turned slowly toward Brunhilda, eyes searching. "Finn wants me... is she... is this girl our sister?"

The car was silent.

Brunhilda didn't answer at first. Her hands tightened slightly on the wheel. She opened her mouth—

—and Hayley, of course, interrupted.

"Well," she said, drawing out the word like a verdict, "you do share a dad... so."

Rebekah's eyes snapped to her. Hayley just shrugged.

Brunhilda sighed, bone-deep. "Any real explanation," she said, "needs to wait until Kol's awake. But yes." She flicked her eyes toward the unconscious blonde in Finn's lap. "That's Freya Mikaelson."

Rebekah translated, voice a little uneven now.

Finn didn't speak. He only looked down, gaze softening. After a moment, his hand lifted—tentative, reverent—and brushed a lock of hair from Freya's face, tucking the pale strand behind her ear with a care that made something in Brunhilda's throat tighten.

Hayley muttered, "Don't get too excited. She's kind of a bitch."

Rebekah wisely didn't translate that part.

...

They drove a little longer, the car dipping into silence again, heavier this time. Not awkward, just full of things left unsaid.

Eventually, Brunhilda pulled into the parking lot of a rundown motel with a flickering vacancy sign and the sad, slouching look of a place that probably saw at least one serious roach infestation per calendar year.

Rebekah stared at it and shook her head vehemently. "Absolutely not."

Hayley burst out laughing. "I agree with Bex. I want a kitchen—a real one. I'm sick of eating out of vending machines." She looked at Brunhilda hopefully. "What about another state park? Like last time. You remember that cabin? It had actual privacy."

Brunhilda exhaled like someone aging in real time. "Fine."

Hayley whooped. "Yes! I'll run in and get directions to the nearest one."

"Wait—Hayley—" Brunhilda started, one hand half-raising, "you're—"

Hayley was already out the door, jogging toward the front office like a woman on a mission.

"—covered in blood and look like hell."

A few minutes later, the bell above the office door jingled again. Hayley reappeared, victorious, clutching a folded map, a laminated brochure, and handful of plastic-wrapped peppermints from the front desk.

"Success," she announced, flinging the passenger door open and sliding back into the backseat like she hadn't just paraded herself—bloodstained and sweat-slick—through a public building.

Brunhilda raised an eyebrow without looking away from the wheel. "And how'd you explain the blood?"

Hayley waved her off like the question bored her. "Said I was in town for a zombie LARPing thing, told them the blood was fake and the outfit was part of my character."

Brunhilda snorted.

Rebekah blinked, clearly confused. "What is... LARPing?"

...

They pulled into Illinois Beach State Park ranger station late in the afternoon.

The air heavy with humidity and midwestern mosquitoes. The trees here stood tall and close together, their trunks dark with age and their leaves whispering secrets overhead. Sand-colored paths veined through tall prairie grasses, leading toward the lake—still invisible, but close enough to smell—brine, algae, and the distant memory of bonfires.

Everything felt sun-bleached and slightly abandoned, like a summer town clinging to the edges of this place.

The cabins were tucked back behind the ranger station, partially hidden by a stand of pines and marked by small, battered signs. They looked less like vacation rentals and more like forgotten waystations—just walls and roofs and places to be alone.

Brunhilda slumped her head, cradling it atop the wheel. Her eyes were shadowed. Her posture screamed bone-deep exhaustion layered over body-aching dread. She looked like she hadn't known relaxation or peace in years.

Hayley stretched her arms above her head. "I'll go talk to them. You stay here."

Brunhilda raised her head, just a little. "Again?"

Hayley arched a brow. "I may look rough, but you look dead. Zombie LARPer or not, you step into that ranger station and he's calling the cops."

Brunhilda exhaled through her nose and muttered, "Fine. Same lie. If it seems like they're doubting you for a second, come get me."

"Yes, ma'am," she promised, then turned and jogged off toward the office, already smoothing her shirt, as if that would make her look at all presentable.

The others remained quiet while she was gone. Finn had closed his eyes again, one hand resting on Freya's shoulder like a lifeline. Kol hadn't stirred. Rebekah was flipping absently through one of Hayley's novels, making faces at the content like it personally insulted her.

A few minutes later, Hayley returned.

"No cabins," she said, slamming the door behind her. "Apparently it's a holiday weekend and they're all booked."

Brunhilda blinked. "Holiday?"

Hayley made a face. "Right. You've been out of it for days—it's July second."

Brunhilda muttered a curse under her breath.

"That's absurd," Rebekah said, already pushing open her door. "I'll be back."

Brunhilda didn't bother protesting.

Two minutes later, Rebekah returned—cool as ever, holding a crisp slip of paper and a pair of keys.

Hayley gawked at her. "What the hell? He told me there was nothing available!"

Rebekah gave her a serene smile. "He's going to call and cancel someone's reservation."

Hayley's jaw dropped. "This is discrimination!"

Rebekah sniffed. "It's pronounced compulsion."

Brunhilda didn't even pretend to be surprised. "Let's just get inside before someone asks questions."

...

Her eyes caught on a crooked signpost that read Cabin Four in peeling white paint, and beyond it, a small wooden structure hunched beneath a stand of pines like it had been trying to hide from the world.

She turned off the engine.

Rebekah was the first to move. She opened the door with a practiced grace, stepped out into the sunlight, and—without a word—lifted Kol from the seat like he weighed nothing. Finn followed, cradling Freya with the same aching reverence he'd had since Brunhilda had told him her name. The siblings disappeared up the steps, their movements quiet, purposeful.

When the car doors closed behind them, Hayley stayed put.

She twisted in her seat to face Brunhilda, one leg tucked under the other. "Okay," she said, voice lower now, more cautious. "What's the plan?"

Brunhilda didn't answer right away. Her eyes were on the tree line, scanning shadows like she expected them to spit something back. Then she said simply, "I have something I need to do."

Hayley's shoulders tensed. "You're not about to leave me here, are you?"

"No," she said quickly. "Of course not. I wouldn't leave you with three starving, ancient vampires. I may have made some bad decisions recently, Hayley—but I'm not that stupid."

Hayley went quiet. Then—slowly—she smiled. It was small, lopsided, a little crooked.

"Thanks. I appreciate that." The werewolf's tone softened, but the worry didn't leave her eyes. "Still... I'll admit that I'm not thrilled about leaving them alone."

Brunhilda twitched, she was worried for the same reason.

"Can't whatever you need to do wait?" Hayley continued. "Just until morning? We feed them, calm them down, figure out where we stand—then you go off and do whatever errand this is."

Brunhilda's jaw tightened. "I've already waited too long."

Hayley stared at her for a moment longer, unreadable. Then she leaned back in her seat with a soft exhale and said, "Well, that's not ominous at all... but okay. Whatever you need to do—we'll do it together."

Brunhilda blinked, the words catching somewhere in her throat. She hadn't realized how much she needed to hear that. Or maybe she had—and just hadn't dared to want it. There was a flicker of something warm in her chest, something grateful and aching, too heavy to hold in her hands.

She glanced over at Hayley, and for a second, all she could think was: thank the gods I found you again.

But underneath it was guilt—quiet, bitter, constant. For dragging Hayley into this mess. For caring for someone she had no right to love. For being so stupid, so weak. For not protecting her the way she wished she had.

Hayley didn't seem to notice the spiral.

"We should probably tell them we'll be back," she said, tapping her fingers idly against her thigh. "And that they should eat—subtly. Preferably someone who isn't your psycho girlfriend."

Brunhilda glanced over, one brow lifting. "I think it's safe to say Freya's not my girlfriend."

"Sure," Hayley said, grinning wickedly. "That's what they all say. Right before the murder-suicide pact."

Brunhilda groaned. "You're insufferable."

"And you love me," Hayley said, popping the door open and stepping into the humid air with all the confidence of someone who knew she was, unfortunately, correct.

Brunhilda hesitated before following.

...

Brunhilda drove with the windows down, the wind slapping against her face like it knew what she was planning to do.

The air still smelled like pine sap and fish, but there was something else beneath it—smoke, charcoal, the faint tang of grease. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear laughter. She followed the sound.

Eventually she found them—a cluster of humans gathered beneath a rusted metal awning near a picnic area just off the road. Someone had dragged a grill into the center of the space, and hot dogs sizzled over the open flame. Beer cans littered the table, coolers gaped open, music crackled from a half-dead phone speaker. Half of them were shirtless. All of them were drunk.

They did not know how much danger they were in.

Brunhilda parked the car.

She didn't move. Just sat there, eyes forward, hands curled loosely around the steering wheel. The hunger was still there—quiet, coiled. It didn't claw like it did before Finn fed her, but it hadn't left her either. It waited, pressed low in her gut, whispering.

She hated how used to it she was.

The sun poured down like judgment. Too bright. Too honest. It made everything look sharp and faded all at once. Brunhilda squinted toward the group.

She didn't feel like she belonged to the sunlight... not anymore.

Back at the cabin, Rebekah had clearly thought the same. She had been... hesitant to let them go. That was the polite word for it. More accurately—she had seemed deeply suspicious, as if she didn't trust them if they left her sight.

"Are you sure you don't need me to come with you?" she'd asked, voice laced with something between concern and accusation.

Hayley had scoffed. "Do you really trust Finn and the weird one"—she pointed bluntly at Kol, still unconscious, laid out on the couch next to Freya—"not to do something incredibly stupid without you here?"

That had earned her a long stare.

"We've got an errand," Brunhilda explained before the bickering could escalate. "We'll be back soon. Just make sure they eat."

Eventually, Rebekah had relented. Begrudgingly. Probably because she didn't want to leave Kol alone either.

Now, miles away, surrounded by pine and laughter and sunlight that burned too clean, Brunhilda felt the distance in her bones.

She hated it.

Hayley shifted beside her, legs kicked up on the dash like she didn't have a care in the world. "So," she said casually, "as fun as it is to sit around and people-watch... what's this actually about?"

Brunhilda didn't answer immediately.

Only after she'd scraped together enough courage—enough distance from the doubt and self-loathing still coiled in her gut—did Brunhilda finally murmur, "You remember when I mentioned I completed a ritual to jump into a new timeline?""

Hayley turned her head, slow and suspicious. "Yeah."

"Well," Brunhilda said, voice flat, "there's more to the story."

Brunhilda started to talk.

Where before she'd skimmed the surface—spoken vaguely of a world that died in pieces, of time slipping and things unraveling—now she bled freely. Not literally, for once. Just words. They spilled out of her. She told Hayley about the visions that came in waves, sometimes in sleep, sometimes in pain. About the feeling of being flayed open by memory—memories that weren't hers but had stitched themselves into her bones anyway. She told her that everyone she had ever loved died, slowly or suddenly or both. She spoke of witches burned alive by their own spells, of forests that rotted from the inside out—she told her about Bonnie, about Davina, about Hope.

She didn't tell her about the commune, not yet.

The guilt that came with that was still too loud, still too raw. That part of the story stayed buried, for now.

Hayley listened in silence.

Then, after a long pause, she asked quietly, "I guess I died too then? In that other world?"

Brunhilda flinched. Hayley didn't move.

"You lost me?"

The words cracked something open in her. Brunhilda burst into tears—hot, shuddering sobs that ripped out of her like they'd been waiting for an excuse.

The past few days—dying, fighting, bleeding, clawing her way through old trauma and new horror—finally came crashing down as she stumbled through the rest of the story.

She told Hayley the ghosts who whispered through her veins. About the mindscape that never let her rest. About merging with Silas—because she thought it might help, because she thought she could handle it, because she'd been so fucking desperate.

(Hayley blinked and stopped her at that point. "Wait—hang on. Let me get this straight. You mind-melded with the guy who destroyed your world?"

Brunhilda hiccupped mid-sob. "I know! It was dumb! I'm a very dumb person, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.")

She continued, explaining Tessa and Emily. Inadu. Tells her about the original plan—how she was supposed to use them to power a spell to body snatch a younger version of herself, only to realize that that younger version didn't exist.

("Jesus," Hayley breathed. "You're like... the haunted house of witches.")

And finally at the end, she explained the bloodlust.

How it had started as a hum in her chest, an ache in her teeth. How it grew louder each time she reached for Silas's magic, until it was no longer just hunger—it was something pulsing in her bones. A pressure behind her ribs, an itch under her skin. It came with every spell, every surge of borrowed power like interest owed on a terrible debt.

She told Hayley how she'd died in that mausoleum. How she'd fallen out of her body like slipping through ice, and into a place stitched together with two thousand years worth of failures and memory. She explained how Inadu had chased her, how she had seen Amara (at that part, she felt Silas stir in her, surprised). She explained Henrik, who was impossibly young and old simultaneously—explained the white oak, the desperate wishes that Henrik had made her promise to upkeep.

How she had woken up in the car, dazed and cold and cracked open—she had a concussion, a magical parasite, and a hunger that felt less like thirst and more like grief with teeth. She hadn't fed in days. And Silas—Silas had been mean, even as he burned through her reserves to keep her upright.

("You could have just asked me for some blood, Hilda. I would have given it to you.")

She told Hayley what she had done to Mikael. How she couldn't kill him—not then, not with the white oak gone—but she could hurt him.

How she had woven a spell into his being, something brutal and unrelenting. How it dragged him into the bodies of everyone he had hurt—made him become them. Made him feel every wound he'd ever dealt, every moment of fear he'd ever caused. She told her how he watched himself deliver the blows, how he screamed with his own voice from mouths that weren't his. How the illusion looped and how it would not end until the magic did, how the experience would linger in him for weeks even after he reformed.

She said it quietly, her voice a little hoarse, like the words had to scrape their way up her throat—if she couldn't end him, she wasn't going to let him walk away unmarked. Not after what he did to them.

(Hayley exhaled, just a little. "Holy shit. Remind me never to piss you off.")

By the time she finished, she was trembling.

Hayley didn't say anything at first. Then she reached over and placed a hand on Brunhilda's shoulder—warm, steady, grounding.

"You're not going to lose me again," she said simply. "I won't die."

The words ripped through what still remained of Brunhilda's defenses, and she cried harder. "Don't promise me that! You can't know that—and if you're lying, if you're wrong, I think it'll break me into a million pieces."

Hayley rubbed at her ears, wincing at the volume. "Dramatic. Maybe I am rubbing off on you."

Brunhilda sniffled like a kicked dog.

"Come on," Hayley said in a soft, comforting voice, gesturing toward the picnic shelter and the oblivious mortals under it. "Use some of that world-ending magic and get yourself a snack."

Brunhilda hesitated, then asked in a small, cracked voice, "Doesn't the whole... eating people thing scare you?"

"I killed someone when I was thirteen." Hayley gave her a flat look. "And apparently I was a hybrid werewolf-vampire thing in that other world of yours—why in the fuck would you think drinking blood would bother me?"

There was a pause, a tearful breath. Then—

Brunhilda laughed.

It came out half-sob, half-wheeze, sharp around the edges but real. "Yeah," she said, dragging her sleeve across her wet cheeks, "that was a stupid thing to ask."

"A stupid thing to worry about," Hayley corrected, leveling her with another look. "I swear to God, you might be the stupidest person I've ever met."

Brunhilda snorted, more laughter breaking through. "You keep saying that."

"Well, you keep earning it."

That got another laugh—warmer this time, not so jagged. For a moment, the pressure in the car eased, and the air felt a little less like it might collapse around her.

Hayley leaned back in her seat, exhaling hard through her nose. "Alright. After you eat—when you're less of a blood-starved lunatic—we're making a plan. A real one."

Brunhilda blinked, surprised. "A real plan?"

"Yeah." Hayley gave her a sidelong glance. "We'll call it... the Deadman's Ledger. Everything you're worried about, everything you need to account for. Everything coming for us. It'll be a list of our priorities."

Brunhilda arched an eyebrow. "That's a very apt name."

"It's appropriately apocalyptic, I think." Hayley says proudly. "Now shut up. We need to pick a target."

Hayley glanced toward the group under the awning. Her smile faded a little. "They seem... nice. Like a family."

Brunhilda followed her gaze, throat tightening.

"Let's find a loner instead," Hayley offered. "I'll help."

...

They drove deeper into the park, past picnic areas and trailheads, past the families and couples, until the laughter thinned and the trees thickened. The road narrowed into gravel. The sun dipped a little lower. Shadows stretched long across the windshield.

And then they saw him.

An older man sat alone on a wooden bench tucked just off the walking path, shaded by a crooked tree. He was sketching in a large notebook—charcoal lines smudged across the page, half-formed shapes that looked like trees or maybe ribs. His bike was leaned against a tree behind him, a water bottle dangling loosely from the handlebars.

He looked peaceful, content.

She slowed the car to a crawl and pulled off the road.

Hayley was the first to move. She stepped out and let the door swing shut behind her with a soft click. Her sweatshirt was still stained with blood. Her boots scraped the gravel. She didn't say anything.

The man looked up, blinking at the sight of her. His brow furrowed with gentle concern. "Miss? Are you—"

Brunhilda got out of the car.

His expression shifted. The concern deepened. He stood up, slow and careful, eyes darting between them. "Are you both okay?"

Hayley grimaced. "Oh, don't do that."

He blinked. "Do what?"

"Be nice. It's just going to make this worse for her."

For a moment, there was nothing but birdsong and wind in the leaves as Hayley's words hit home in the man.

Then, finally—after being absent since the warehouse—Silas spoke. "Do you want me to take over, Sweetness?"

No, she thought back, refusing to flinch. I have to do this.

She stepped closer, slowly, deliberately. Her boots left small dents in the dirt.

She needed this. Needed to kill this final piece of herself—the part that still hesitated, still cringed from what had to be done. She thought of Mikael's hand closing around her Hayley's throat, of the sound of her own ribs cracking, of blood filling her mouth and her magic fizzling uselessly in her chest. She had been worthless then. Helpless.

She would never be that again.

She let the power rise. It rolled up her spine, coiled around her ribs, curled behind her eyes. It wasn't just Silas's power now. It was hers too—if she just learned to accept it.

The man's mouth moved again, more frightened than he was when he first caught sight of them. "If you need help—"

The magic wrapped around him like a breath turning to fog.

Her voice was soft. Almost kind.

"You're not afraid," she crooned.

The man blinked. His shoulders relaxed.

"You want to help me," she whispered. "Helping me makes you happy."

He nodded, eyes going glassy.

"You feel no pain."

The words sank into him like a needle through cloth.

Hayley stood back and watched. She didn't speak.

Brunhilda stepped closer.

...

It was going terribly.

Brunhilda crouched over the man like a miserable blood smeared thing, hands shaking, mouth messy with blood, and eyes already glassy with tears. Her teeth barely managed to break skin. Mostly, she just gnawed like an overwhelmed animal, sobbing intermittently between shallow, panicked sips.

Hayley hovered a few feet away, arms crossed, expression unreadable. "You've got to be kidding me."

"I'm trying," Brunhilda wailed.

"You're crying."

"I know! I'm aware!"

Hayley stepped forward, crouched beside her, and held the guy's shoulder steady so Hilda could reposition her grip. "Okay, just—bite harder. You're going to bruise him like a peach at this rate."

Brunhilda sniffled. "I don't have vampire teeth. I have blunt, human teeth. Like a sad herbivore."

Hayley crouched beside her, brow furrowing. "Okay, but—why are you freaking out like this? You're starving. You need blood. This guy doesn't even know what's happening. So, what is it? Isn't blood tasty to you?"

"Yes!" she sobbed. "It's so good!"

"Then what's the problem?"

"Biting people feels weird!"

Hayley stared at her. "You are a terrible vampire."

"I'm not a vampire!"

Brunhilda tried again. More sobbing. The man made a soft noise—somewhere between a sigh and a twitch—but remained under the compulsion.

The scene was grotesque. Inelegant. A far cry from the poetic blood-drinking of legend. This was just two women in the woods, one crying into the jugular of a stranger like she was mourning a sandwich.

She hated herself for how much better she already felt.

"Wait." Hayley's voice snapped out, sharp. "Wait, Hilda—holy shit. Stop!"

Brunhilda jerked back, startled, blood still dripping from the corner of her mouth. The man slumped sideways like a puppet with his strings cut.

"What? What is it? Is someone coming—?"

Hayley was staring at her like she'd just solved a riddle. "No. I just—" She laughed, breathless. "Finn."

Brunhilda wiped at her face with the collar of her stained t-shirt, dazed. "What about him?"

Hayley grabbed her shoulders, grinning now. "His blood worked on you, didn't it? That's when your magic came back. That's when you stopped falling apart."

Brunhilda stared. Her eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot, her whole face a mess of snot and red. "Yes...?"

"So why," Hayley said slowly, "are we hunting down sketchy loners in public parks when you have an immortal blood bag sitting around in a cabin less than a mile away?"

Brunhilda sat there for a moment longer, processing. Then she blinked, opened her mouth. Closed it. Tilted her head.

"...I didn't think of that."

Hayley looked down at the guy, who was still twitching softly in the dirt, his pulse shallow.

"Well," she said, shrugging, "I don't think we're saving this one. So maybe just finish the job? One less witness. Plus, it'll hold you over until we can convince tall, dark, and handsome to be your permanent Capri Sun."

Brunhilda nodded miserably.

Chapter Text

They reached the cabin late in the afternoon.

Gravel crunched beneath their boots as Brunhilda stepped onto the patio, suitcase in her left hand and her canvas backpack slung across her right shoulder. Hayley followed behind her, grumbling about the weight of their gear (despite her super strength) and how the next time Brunhilda decided to drag them on a hellish road trip with an ancient evil, she ought to choose a more convenient location—preferably one with a valet.

Brunhilda snorted and swung the door open.

The cabin opened into a small foyer that bled into a narrow hallway, which in turn opened into a softly lit living room and kitchenette. Three doors branched off the hall—two bedrooms and a bathroom tucked neatly between them. Each bedroom had two king sized beds, the pale green linens perfectly made up.

The living room was bathed in warm light—partly due to the wall lamps and partly due to the afternoon sun. The kitchenette was compact, tucked into the back corner. A large TV hung across from an L-shaped couch that, even from here, Brunhilda could tell probably pulled out into an extra bed.

Brunhilda hadn't stayed anywhere this clean since before the world ended. Which was probably saying something.

There were throw pillows. Matching ones.

She stood there a moment longer than she meant to, then Rebekah appeared in the foyer.

She flashed down the hallway like she'd been waiting for them—arms crossed, posture stiff, expression unreadable in the way that only centuries of practice could perfect. Her eyes flicked over Hayley in passing before landing on Brunhilda and staying there.

It was the blood. Brunhilda could see it the moment Rebekah's nostrils flared, catching the scent clinging to her skin. Old blood and new, layered and acrid and not entirely human.

"Are you alright?" Rebekah asked. Her voice was sharp—too sharp—but edged with something else, like the question had been waiting in her throat for hours.

"I'll be better after a shower," Hayley interjected, shouldering past them both toward the hallway. "I smell like blood and emotional repression."

Well, that felt pointed, Brunhilda thought.

Rebekah didn't acknowledge the werewolf. Her eyes didn't leave Brunhilda.

Hayley snorted. "Oh, I see how it is—none of that concern is for me, huh, Bex? And here I thought we had bonded—"

"We're fine," Brunhilda said. It came out too flat, too even. A reflex more than a reassurance.

Hayley rolled her eyes and kept moving, stepping toward the closed bathroom door at the end of the hall. She reached for the handle without hesitation.

Rebekah's expression twitched. "Wait—"

Too late.

The door swung open to reveal a man standing inside the bathroom. Middle-aged, balding, dressed in the uncomfortable way of someone who hadn't planned to be kidnapped. His face was blank. His stance was slack. He didn't react to the door, or to Hayley frozen in the doorway, or to anything at all.

Hayley blinked. Then looked over her shoulder to Rebekah. "Um."

Rebekah let out a sigh like this was all perfectly normal. "He's for Kol."

"Right," Hayley said, still standing in the doorway, sounding a bit baffled. "Of course he is."

Brunhilda didn't even look.

"Does that mean you've already fed?" she asked, her voice calm, practical.

Brunhilda was almost startled by how level she sounded. The ache in her bones had quieted—not vanished, just hushed beneath the cotton—thick stillness that had settled over her like a shawl. She hadn't felt this calm in days. Weeks. Maybe years.

There was something about this place. The low hum of electricity, the scent of bleach and softened cotton, the ridiculous coordination of the throw pillows. But more than that—the way her chest felt a little too full, like something inside her was trying to root itself. Like something in her had finally decided to stop running, stop hiding. She didn't know what it was, only that it kept tugging at her chest and made her feel, for one impossible moment, like she might actually be safe.

Not safe from Klaus tracking them down with a new set of daggers. Not from Mikael or Esther, or Inadu, or this world's version of Silas... Not in any way that truly mattered. But safe in the smallest, softest way. Like a wounded animal collapsing into dry grass, too tired to keep fleeing, and for once, not being chased.

She had come close to this once before—with Freya.

She might've grown into that feeling even more if things had gone differently. But now, when she thought of Freya, all she felt was tired. Not angry, not wounded—just weary, exhausted. It was the kind of bitterness that curdled inward. Less rage at Freya, more disappointment in herself. Not quite grief. Not quite fury. Just regret, dull and leaden.

What would she have done, really, in Freya's place?

If someone had looked her in the eye, a blade poised over the chest of someone she loved... if they had told her that it was the only way. Not to save the world. Not even to save a thousand others. Just to save herself.

Could she have stood aside?

And if Bonnie came to her tomorrow, her voice low and certain, saying that Hayley needed to die for the world to keep spinning—could she do it?

Brunhilda liked to believe she could.

But for all her talk of sacrifice, of choosing the greater good—she was still that girl. The one who had woken up at fifteen with someone else's grief stitched behind her eyes. Still the girl from a bloodline of women who had amounted to nothing by prophecy and lit pyres. Still the girl whose bones remembered drowning in a stranger's sorrow, a heart that thrashed against its own ribs screaming: Unloved! Unloved! Unloved!

The truth of her lived beneath everything—beneath the illusion of control that had taken a single betrayal (and was it ever that simple?) to completely unravel. No matter what she did, it was always there—that wild, sobbing child at the center of her. That savage girl curled inside her ribcage, screaming that same truth she'd never been able to unlearn.

That woman who had bled her fellow witches for a single chance to remake her song.

Perhaps... another version of her, a version of her that had never died in that mausoleum, that had never seen herself in the truth of her world ender, had never seen the shape of what she was becoming, had never...

Maybe then, her answer would have been different.

But now—

"I took Finn," Rebekah said. "We handled it."

Brunhilda blinked once. Nodded. Let the thought fall from her shoulders like a cloak she could no longer bear the weight of.

She would think about it later.

For a moment, no one spoke.

Then Hayley sighed, loud and theatrical, breaking the spell. She cast a longing glance at the occupied bathroom, then turned toward the rest of the room with a scowl and a shrug.

"Well," she said, "we've got a lot to do. Still need to figure out how long we're staying, what we're eating, who's draining what. I'd rather not play errand girl for three ancient vampires with murder habits."

Brunhilda snorted and ran a hand through her hair. She was already moving toward the couch, limbs heavy but determined.

"I need to set up the wards before anything else," she said. "And the translation spell too—for Finn."

Hayley lingered near the hallway, arms folded. Her nose wrinkled. "I'm not exactly keen on dragging in a whole busload of humans to keep these three fed. Figured I'd take Bekah out tomorrow—see if we can snag some blood bags from the hospital. Maybe grab some food for the rest of us while we're at it."

Rebekah raised a brow. "What's a blood bag?"

Hayley gave her a look. "It's exactly what it sounds like. A bag. Full of blood."

The vampire sent her an unimpressed look.

Brunhilda dropped her bags beside the couch and rolled her shoulders, ignoring the slow sting that bloomed across her back. "I'll be working through the evening. I want this place locked down before nightfall."

Hayley nodded once, then tilted her head. "Just try to get the translation spell done tonight. We need Finn in working order if we're gonna ask him about—" She glanced toward Rebekah. "—the y'know."

Rebekah's eyes narrowed. "I assure you that I am quite capable of asking him anything you'd like."

Hayley didn't blink. "It's a personal issue."

The silence that followed wasn't tense—but it was pointed.

Brunhilda said nothing. She was already mapping sigils in her mind, calculating what kind of magic she'd need to make this place less exposed.

...

Soft light filtered through thin white curtains, golden with the haze of late afternoon.

The sofa took up most of the living room, upholstered in a pale fabric that looked like it had never known blood or ash. Freya was curled in on herself at one end, limbs drawn tight. Kol lay unnervingly still at the other, his body slack— the delicate rise and fall of their chests the only sign that they were alive. Or undead in Kol's case.

Finn sat at the kitchenette table, back impossibly straight, hands folded like he was waiting for judgment.

He spoke, softly, and Brunhilda saw Rebekah glance over her shoulder to answer. Her voice was low, careful. Whatever they were saying, it was about her. Brunhilda could tell by the way Rebekah tilted her chin toward her mid—sentence, then made a small gesture with her hand in her direction.

Finn's brow furrowed. His gaze softened. Then he gave a slow, solemn nod and tilted his head toward her—just slightly. A thank you, maybe.

Brunhilda returned it, barely more than a flicker of movement.

Hayley grunted beside her as she dragged Brunhilda's suitcase next to the coffee table. "This one's definitely yours," she said. "It smells like mildew and grass."

Brunhilda didn't respond.

She slipped her canvas backpack—despite everything, she was grateful that Freya had made sure that was packed into their new vehicle after Mikael had made her crash the first one—off her shoulder and crouched beside the suitcase. She unzipped it and pulled out her grimoire, setting it gently on the table.

"Is there anything else in the car?" Rebekah asked.

Brunhilda nodded. "Two more."

Before she could elaborate, Rebekah vanished in a gust of air and displaced dust.

Hayley sighed, brushing her hands off on her jeans. "I'll help her."

She gave Brunhilda a look that said you owe me for this—then turned and followed without waiting for a reply.

Brunhilda sat cross—legged in front of the coffee table, tugging open her suitcase—the one packed with witchcraft components and layered with an anti-tampering charm. The wards unraveled at her touch, loosening like threads unwinding from a loom.

She began unpacking with quiet precision. Glass jars went to the kitchenette table—each filled with oil, powdered roots, crushed minerals, resin—drenched wood chips, or some other strange liquid. The rest—hex bags, tokens, bundles of herbs—she laid out neatly in rows beside her grimoire.

Finn watched her with silent interest. He didn't speak, but his gaze tracked every motion with the reverence of a scholar watching someone translate a lost language.

Brunhilda kept her hands steady and her movements efficient. She sorted the ingredients by function—protection, cloaking, channeling, reinforcement—and began sketching out groundwork for the first layer of the cabin's warding in her small notebook.

The cloaking spell she'd cast earlier was still holding up admirably, but she didn't trust it to hold up against a determined enemy.

By the time the girls returned, she was already elbows—deep in selection—choosing the first pass of her protections. She didn't look up. She didn't need to. The work had her now.

"There should be something in Freya's suitcase you can wear," she said, voice neutral, directed at Rebekah. "If you want to change into something less... morbid. I can't imagine the clothes Klaus killed you in are particularly comfortable."

She spoke from experience. She was still wearing the outfit she'd died in. The blood had dried days ago, stiff at the seams. She thought—absently, distantly—that she might burn them after this.

Rebekah didn't answer right away. But when Brunhilda did glance up, she found the blonde watching her with an unreadable expression—skepticism, maybe. Or curiosity. Or something softer beneath both.

Whatever it was, it vanished fast.

Brunhilda turned back to her tools. She reached for her mortar and pestle and dropped in a handful of dried Osage Orange peels. The rind cracked sharply under pressure, releasing a bitter citrus tang into the air. She ground it slowly, deliberately.

"Rebekah," she said without looking up, "can you let Finn know I'm sorry about the clothes situation? We don't have anything for men. He'll have to stay in what he's wearing until you and Hayley go into town tomorrow."

Rebekah, mid-rummage through Freya's suitcase, glanced toward her brother and gave a noncommittal hum. "He's worn it for nine hundred years," she said dryly. "One more day won't kill him."

The line was flippant, but it stuck. Brunhilda's hand paused in its grinding.

Nine hundred years.

The number sat heavy. Not just for Finn—but for Freya, too. Freya, who had wanted so badly to free him. Who had asked, pleaded, to be the one to wake him.

Brunhilda was still aching. But she was also—quietly, undeniably—grateful that wish had been granted. That Hayley had pulled the dagger from him, from them all.

She shoved the thought aside like a splinter working deeper. It was too raw, too unfinished.

Brunhilda turned her attention back to the spell.

"Did you tell him about the translation charm yet?" Brunhilda asked. "I want to cast it after I finish the wards—get the protections in place first. Hayley can shower in the meantime. I'll clean up after she's done."

Rebekah turned to look at her more closely this time. Her eyes swept over the blood-caked fabric, the dried streaks across Brunhilda's arms, the red still clinging to her neck. Her expression shifted—still tinged with judgment and concern. Sympathy, maybe, if one was feeling generous.

"Are you sure you don't want to clean up before the werewolf?" she asked, arching a brow.

Hayley reentered just in time to hear it and snorted. "Wow. Thanks."

Brunhilda shrugged, unfazed. "The spell's more important. So are the wards. If I don't get them started soon, Klaus'll be on us before we can blink and who got to shower first will be pointless. My cloaking charm is excellent—but it's not perfect."

Hayley jerked a thumb toward the hallway. "Speaking of showers—Bekah, you need to get your guy out of there. Like, now."

Rebekah sighed like someone responsible for a group project she never asked to join. She stood with exaggerated patience, then vanished down the hallway—probably to scavenge change into whatever she found in Freya's suitcase before evicting their silent blood donation from the bathroom.

Brunhilda turned back to the mortar and pressed the pestle down harder this time. The Osage Orange cracked again—sharp, fragrant, bitter.

She felt better with something to grind.

...

Brunhilda poured the mixture into a wide silver bowl, the powder a mixture of white and color against the gleam of the metal.

The salt was the foundation—protection, always.

The Osage Orange—bois d'arc—and the honey locust came from trees armored with thorns. Use metaphor like a blade, her great-aunt had said once. Representational magic, when wielded properly, could make a symbol strike like a sword.

The salt would cloak them. The thorns would strike back. Anyone who tried to scry through it would feel it—feel the magic fold in on itself and bite.

The elecampane was a trap dressed in sweetness. Witches used it to sharpen their sight—but here, it would sharpen the recoil instead. If someone strong enough forced their vision past her veils, the spell would turn on them. Drag them into its teeth, into the thorns.

She moved room by room, the silver bowl tucked in one arm, her free hand pinching the mixture and letting it fall in clean lines. Each doorway was circled in a full, unbroken ring. Each windowsill was dusted edge to edge. She dragged her palm along the ledges afterward, pressing the spell deeper into place.

The bedrooms took longer. She lingered there, reinforcing every vulnerable seam—beneath the beds, along the baseboards, around closet doors and shallow vents. Any place a spell might crawl through, she sealed.

By the time she returned to the living room, only a thin ring of powder clung to the bottom of the bowl—just enough for what she needed.

Brunhilda laid out six small burlap bags, each dyed a mottled blend of black and deep indigo. The colors weren't for show—they too represented something. Black for protection. Indigo for hidden things.

Into each bag, she spooned equal parts of the mixture. The names came to her in order as she moved: Hayley first, then the three vampires she had freed, followed by Freya, and finally herself.

She had picked up the sisal twine in New Orleans. The plant fiber was durable, stubborn, built to withstand wear. That strength would carry into the spell.

To each bag, she added a small handful of dried juniper berries for added protection. Vervain would have been stronger, but it was not an option for obvious reasons. She centered the spell with a sprig of dried rosemary to bind the memory of the spell into a closed, unyielding shape.

These bags were an extension of the protections she had already worked into the cabin—portable now, meant to cling to skin and bone. A ward they could carry with them.

Rebekah had returned by the time Brunhilda knotted the final string. She hovered near the kitchenette, answering Finn's stream of quiet questions the best she could. He seemed less interested in the world that had changed around him than in the magic laid down to protect it.

That, at least, Brunhilda thought, he could understand.

She moved to the kitchenette table and sat beside Finn, her shoulders stiff with the effort of everything she had already done—and everything still left to do. Rebekah followed and slid into the seat across from them, silent, watchful.

Brunhilda rolled up her sleeves and reached for her vials—small amber bottles, their stoppers stained with old resin. They held various drying oils, but walnut was the best suited for this project of all of them.

She uncorked it and let the scent rise—rich, earthy, with the faintest bite of bitterness.

Her great-aunt had once told her that if a witch gave someone a bag of walnuts, their wishes would come true.

Wish magic was fickle, but it made walnut a good vessel. It absorbed intention easily, steeped in meaning the way roots steeped in water. She poured the oil into two small dishes and stirred it gently, preparing it to take pigment.

The salt ring around the cabin might hold against an above average threat, but Klaus Mikaelson liked to surround himself with witches who belonged to a completely different level of existence.

By now, he would've been notified of what had happened at the warehouse.

He'd start hunting soon—if he hadn't already.

She would not make it easy for him.

She would've preferred linseed—properly steeped in bloodroot and red bark—but all she had left from New Orleans was oil from a blue flax plant. It was useful for concentration spells, but not for something like this. What she truly needed was red or pink linseed—scarlet flax, specifically.

But she made do.

Into the first dish, she folded arbutus bark. It turned the oil a deep red—brown—the same color as Mars, the planet it drew most of its power from. It was a slow—burning, resilient type of protection component. A solid base for what she would be doing.

Then came the muted green, made from dried nettle leaves she'd crushed by hand. Nettle wasn't just strong—it bit back. It was retaliatory magic. A ward with teeth.

If anyone managed to scry past her defenses—through the salt, the thornwood, the fruit—this would be the final answer. The nettle would latch onto their magic and hurl it back like a curse, straight into Brunhilda. Not to harm her, but to warn her. The moment it hit, she'd know.

And she'd run—grab the others and burn everything behind her.

Once both mixtures had thickened, Brunhilda unrolled her brushes.

They were expensive—but she'd traded them for a set of spells stolen from one of the LaRue grimoires she'd come across in her last world. Knowledge she'd gathered two years ago or maybe several years from now, depending on which direction you measured time in.

Her fingers traced each handle with something close to reverence: deer hair set in acacia wood, boar bristle fixed into iron—stained bone, horse hair, and birch. Precision tools, each one meant for a different kind of spellwork.

She reached for a wide stencil brush—deer hair—and paused.

Then, wordless, changed her mind.

Instead, she selected the fox—hair brush. Built for cloaking, for false paths, for misdirection. The handle was carved from yew: a death-wood, old and potent. It felt right. She was hiding some of the oldest creatures still walking the earth.

It would work nicely.

Moving from wall to wall, she worked with quiet precision. The fox—hair tip dipped into the red—brown mixture, then the green, then swept in clean lines across plaster and wood. Sigils bloomed beneath her hand—fractured spirals, barbed loops, sharp-angled runes like broken stars. She wove protection into obfuscation, veiling into misdirection.

Layer upon layer. Cloak upon cloak. Maze upon maze.

Now and then, she paused to consider logistics.

The cabin staff would need to be dealt with. Compelled to forget, or at least ignore the symbols seared into the walls. Perhaps Rebekah could handle it. Brunhilda didn't love relying on her tricks after Henrik's warning, but the alternative—burning the cabin to the ground on their way out—was hardly better.

As she added a final sigil to the kitchen archway, her gaze drifted to the couch.

Kol still lay sprawled across it, limp-limbed and silent. His face was slack, unreadable. The slow rise and fall of his chest was the only proof he hadn't crumbled into ash sometime in the last hundred years, but even unconscious, he felt... watchful.

Brunhilda tilted her head.

He'd recognize the sigils. She was sure of it.

She hadn't invented this array. The foundation came from a grimoire she'd salvaged in Oregon—half-buried under collapsed shelves and wards meant to kill the uninvited. Kol had helped write it, after all.

The tighter loops—the nested spirals and recursive wards—those were something she has written with Bonnie. They'd spent months perfecting them in the ruins of Vegas. Trading components. Scribbling notes on the backs of torn playing cards. Bonnie had laughed once when a sigil caught fire mid—spell. Brunhilda remembered the sound.

The magic pulsed once beneath her fingertips, then sank into the walls and floor.

Done.

From the table behind her, Finn said something as she walked back to the kitchenette and began to wash her brush and vessels—low and formal, his voice still rasping at the edges.

Rebekah translated over her shoulder with a touch of dry amusement. "He says it's impressive. And thanks you."

She paused, blinking at that. Not the compliment itself, but the fact that he meant it.

Rebekah added, "Kol's going to talk your ear off when he wakes and sees this, you know. He's going to be unbearable."

Brunhilda hummed.

She let herself breathe for a moment, then began to prepare for the next display of magic.

Her translation spell would require five components—though it was less about using what an enchantment called for and more about finding things to stand in for conceps.

First was cloth-of-gold—a pale, radiant flower typically used to commune with animals and the dead. Here, it would act as a conduit between thought and language. It had to be harvested barefoot, on ritually cleansed soil, clothed only in white, with an offering of bread and wine buried beneath its roots. Brunhilda could only hope the witch she'd bartered it from hadn't lied.

Echinacea came next, to anchor the spell and keep it from unraveling under pressure. Bay leaf for clarity and wisdom—to help Finn absorb the language as if it had always been his. Not foreign. Not forced. Just... remembered.

Mint, sharp and sweet, would ease the transfer—soothe the fraying edges of memory and dull the ache of a mind reawakening after centuries of silence.

The final component was her voice.

The spell had to be sung—not like music, but like a chant woven from breath and cadence. It would root through the sound of her voice, shaped by intention and will. Her voice would carry it, would bind it.

She measured the herbs into her ceramic bowl with the slow precision of ritual.

And just as she reached for the cloth-of-gold, Kol began to stir.

...

The ceiling was unfamiliar.

Kol lay still, the weight of his own limbs startling in its density. He catalogued the ache deep in his bones—the stretch of muscles left unused for decades. His mouth was dry. His spine felt too solid, and his stomach rolled with aching hunger. But beneath all of it, humming low and steady like a second heartbeat, was magic.

It laced through the walls, curled under the floorboards, pressed velvet—soft against his tongue. He hadn't felt magic like that in a millennium.

It felt like his magic.

Like the version of himself that had existed before his parents had conspired to murder him.

He blinked, slow and deliberate. The world came into focus by degrees.

The room was strange. Too clean. Too modern.

Light filtered in through slatted blinds instead of heavy drapes. A large black rectangle hung on the wall—he had no frame of reference for what it might be. If it was an attempt at some new form of art, it was dreadful.

The furniture looked wrong, too—like it hadn't been made by a human's hand. A wide L-shaped thing dominated the space, and a low coffee table was cluttered with what could only be described as witchy clutter.

Kol tilted his head. His cheek brushed the couch's upholstery.

He wasn't alone.

A blonde girl lay further down the couch—sharp-featured, sleeping. She looked unnervingly like the girl he'd taken to the Christmas party the night Niklaus had daggered him. That had been... what? A hundred years ago? Perhaps more. Perhaps less. Time was slippery when spent in a box.

Rebekah and Finn (they had undaggered Finn?) sat at a small table just across the room—strangely partitioned, one side tiled and gleaming, the other lined with hardwood. The space made no architectural sense.

But none of that mattered.

Because at the table—hands moving through spell weaving, head bowed in concentration—was the girl who pulled all gravity toward her.

His soulmate.

And she was covered in blood.

Not in the poetic, artful way some witches wore it—ritual dots at the brow, a neat smear at the throat.

No.

This was blood like she'd been dragged through death backwards.

It clung to her in dried rivulets down her collarbone, in stiffened splotches across her sleeves. A healed vampire bite—barely visible, just peeking above the neckline of her shirt—caught his eye. Her hands, though, were clean. Deliberately so. Carefully washed, likely for spellwork.

Kol catalogued her.

She'd stiffened, just slightly, like she could feel his gaze on her. Like it unnerved her. That made something in his chest hum.

The blood intrigued him. She wasn't a vampire—that much was obvious. The magic radiating off her in waves was too thick, too potent. But she didn't feel quite like a witch either. Not in any way he could name. It was like staring at an eclipse: beautiful, overwhelming, and entirely unnatural.

He caught sight of the bite again and narrowed his eyes.

He hoped it hadn't come from one of his siblings. He'd hate to have to kill them over it.

(Well—he wouldn't hate it, exactly. But it would make things awkward.)

Magic shimmered off her like heat rising from scorched stone.

She was working—focused, meticulous, laying out spell components with the kind of precision he'd once seen in himself. His eyes flicked across the table. Cloth-of-gold. Echinacea. Mint. Bay leaf. A language comprehension spell. For Finn, no doubt. Nine hundred years of silence would do that to a man.

Kol let his gaze drift, lazy and practiced, until it landed on the walls.

The sigils emerged slowly—first one, then another, until the entire array revealed itself like a constellation just barely visible in the dusk. Some were sharp-edged and violent, meant to bite. Others curled soft and delicate, all misleading grace. Together, they formed a full spell wheel.

A proper one.

Not the slapdash chains hedge witches liked to scrawl in goat's blood when they were feeling ambitious. No—this was real work. Thoughtful. Well-constructed.

And familiar.

Kol's mouth curved into a slow smile.

He recognized most of the array immediately—it was the same one he'd helped a French coven refine back in the 14th century. They'd offered him sanctuary, good wine, and an enthusiastic lover in exchange for some old-fashioned spell crafting. Kol, being Kol, had graciously obliged. Back then, the spell had been solid. Rudimentary, but decent.

But here—here it had evolved.

He leaned forward, eyes scanning the far corner—where the runes curved into a fifth seal he was fairly certain hadn't existed in the original design.

Ah.

She'd fixed it.

She'd fixed the bloody orientation.

Kol let out a soft breath, equal parts amusement and awe. That particular seal had always been slightly misaligned—subtle enough that most witches never noticed why the spell never reached full potency. It hadn't even occurred to him until two centuries later, somewhere in Venice, over absinthe and boredom.

Bloody brilliant, really.

He looked at her again—she had stiffened, just slightly, under the weight of his regard.

So, he cataloged her anew. There was a layer of dried blood clinging to her skin, but there was new blood as well.

And still—despite everything—she wasn't a vampire. That much he knew.

But she wasn't just a witch either.

Her magic called to him.

It curled around his spine like a silk cord—tightening, pulling, humming just beneath his skin. He could feel it pooling low in his stomach, thrumming at the base of his skull. She was soaked in it, completely saturated by it.

And he...

He wanted it.

He wanted to peel her open and see how far the magic went. Wanted to feel it rush through him, to know what it would be like when that kind of power curled into his bones and sang there.

Even if she hadn't been his soulmate, Kol thought, he would have been helpless against her. The headache blooming behind his eyes wasn't hunger or confusion—it was her. It was the way her spells folded into the room and made it hers, how the magic rearranged the very shape of the space around her.

He blinked once, slow and reverent.

Was that... an infused salt ring? He inhaled and caught the sharpness of citrus and thorn in his nostrils. He recognized that immediately as well.

Gods, he thought. I'm already halfway in love.

He didn't reach for her magic through their tether—not yet. He didn't know how it would affect her. And judging by the precision of the wards layered through the cabin, she was the sort who might break his nose if he didn't ask first. Or set him on fire.

Honestly, he wasn't entirely opposed to either.

As he watched, she glanced up—her face turning slightly, like she'd just heard someone whisper in her ear. Her eyes rolled skyward, full of theatrical annoyance.

At no one.

Kol grinned.

Ah, he thought affectionately. She's a complete nutter.

He stood—fluid, unhurried—and her gaze snapped to him.

Her eyes were sharp, but they didn't flare with fear. Just focus. Like she was clocking his every movement, cataloging him as a threat. Kol found he rather liked that.

He crossed the room with no warning, no explanation. Rebekah and Finn both tensed in an instant—two pairs of eyes narrowing, subtle but unmistakable. He filed the reaction away for later. Interesting, that. Strangely protective.

He stopped just before her.

She didn't move.

Kol reached for her hand—slowly, almost gently. And she let him take it.

He lifted it to his lips and pressed a kiss to the back of it—deliberate, lingering just a fraction too long. Her skin was warm. Her pulse fluttered once beneath his mouth.

Her hands, he noted, were the only part of her that wasn't bloodied.

Clean. Intentional. She'd washed them before her spellwork, unwilling to let blood—a chaotic component—taint the representation. Sensible and pwerful.

Kol smiled against her skin.

He really liked that.

"Kol Mikaelson," he said, his voice like silk dragged over a knife's edge. "At your service, darling."

Rebekah glared at him like he was personally ruining her life.

Kol gave her a haughty look—though he didn't really know why she was so angry with him.

He was sure he must have done something, but he'd only been awake for a few minutes, and he wasn't in the business of figuring out Bekah's moods. For they were as fickle as a summer storm.

He looked back at his sweet witch and gave her a dazzling smile, all white teeth and sinful charm, and followed it with a wink.

Did... did Rebekah just growl at him?

Definitely another thing to file away.

The girl—his girl—tilted her head. "Brunhilda Voss."

"Voss," he repeated. "I don't know any witches with that name."

"My mother gave me my father's surname."

Kol clicked his tongue. "Unusual. Witches tend to keep things maternal. Matrilineal heritage, passed power, bloodlines, so on and so forth. All terribly rigid and predictable."

She shrugged. "My family's been through a lot of surnames."

Kol tilted his head. "Any names I might recognize?"

She didn't offer one, but the question made her smile. Barely. The corner of her mouth curved, just enough to count. "I doubt it."

"Oh, don't be so sure, darling." His voice dipped. "I've picked up all sorts of names over the years. Curses, bloodlines, dirty limericks in lost tongues. I'm a collector of dangerous things—and pretty things too."

He stepped a fraction closer, just enough to brush the edge of her magic again.

"And if there's ever something you want—a spell, a bauble, something shiny to hang around your neck—just say the word. I've always had a soft spot for giving clever girls exactly what they want."

Brunhilda blinked once, and to his absolute delight, he could feel a spike of oh god embarrassment tickle at where he was tangling with her magic.

She immediately turned back to her spellwork without saying a word—Kol was positive that her face had gone pink under all the layers of gore.

Kol's grin grew.

Before he could press the advantage, Rebekah's voice cut in, dry as bone. "There's a man in one of the bedrooms for you."

Kol didn't move.

She arched a brow. "Try not to make a mess. If you get blood on the floorboards, you're scrubbing it out yourself."

He let out a wounded sigh. "You're no fun, sister mine."

Still, he turned—slowly, reluctantly. He cast one last lingering look at Brunhilda. He didn't want to leave her, not with her spell still thrumming in the air. Not with her blood-stained presence, making the whole room hum like a tuning fork freshly struck.

But he knew better than to risk hurting her. Or the two other non-vampires she clearly cared about: the werewolf he could smell or the familiar blonde question mark curled up on the couch.

He stepped out of the room, into the hallway—and nearly collided with the werewolf.

She was fresh from the shower, hair wrapped in a towel, robe blindingly white and far too plush for someone so bristling with attitude.

"Lovely robe," he quipped.

She didn't even break pace. "Fuck off, Nosferatu."

Kol grinned—he didn't understand the reference, not even a little, but he understood the tone—and kept walking.

...

Kol returned quietly, shutting the bedroom door behind him with a soft click.

His meal had been disappointing—forgettable, really. Middle-aged. Bland. The man had barely made a sound. Kol had snapped his neck just before the final pulse of his heart, careful not to spill a single drop on Rebekah's immaculate hardwood floors. Then he let the body fall, already bored.

Now he was back in the living room.

And she was still working.

His soulmate sat at the table, head bowed over the remnants of a spell. Her hands moved with practiced grace. She didn't look up.

"Well," Kol cleared his throat—loud and theatrical. "Someone want to explain what the hell is going on? Last I knew, I was having a rather splendid evening, and now I'm... here. Wherever here is."

No response.

He frowned slightly, glancing around the room. "Also, if someone could be a dear and tell me the date, that'd be grand."

The cheeky werewolf didn't miss a beat. "July second. 2008."

Kol went still.

He did the math.

"Right. So I've been daggered for—what is that? Ninety-three and a half years?" He whistled, low and unimpressed. "That's practically rude."

Rebekah rolled her eyes, arms crossed. "Could've been longer."

Kol rolled his eyes right back—mostly because he knew it drove Bekah mad.

His sister didn't wait for him to prompt her again.

She launched into the summary with the briskness of someone who had given this speech before and didn't particularly enjoy repeating herself. She told him how he'd been daggered on Christmas Eve, 1914—how Niklaus had immediately thrown him into his box after. She detailed how she'd spent the following decade—the flight from New Orleans, Chicago, and then the dagger.

Kol noted that she was vague about Chicago in a way that told him that she had met someone there, probably some poor bastard who had tricked her into thinking he was the love of her life.

Kol listened with half an ear, tuning in only for the more scandalous parts and mentally logged them so he could use them later for maximum emotional damage.

"Right, right, Bex," he said when she finished. "I appreciate the loving recounting of your past decade of life, but it isn't exactly what I was asking for. How, exactly, did we end up here?"

The werewolf—Hayley, he learned from Rebekah's stream of consciousness—cut in then, arms crossed, voice dry and no-nonsense as she launched into what Kol immediately clocked as the long version.

She talked fast—quick, sharp, the cadence of someone who hadn't slept enough and had absolutely no patience left for explaining things to a centuries-old vampire.

Kol leaned against the wall, arms folded, eyes drifting toward the unconscious blonde on the couch.

Freya.

A new sister. Because of course they had a new sister. All they were missing now was holier-than-thou Elijah and dickier-than-thou Klaus, and they'd have the full dysfunctional set.

Hayley, to her credit, didn't skimp on the details. She told him about Little Rock, finding Mikael's body, and how Freya had knocked Brunhilda out to keep her from killing him. (Kol glanced at Freya again, brow twitching. Rude.) Then came the road trip from hell, Esther's ghost showing up to ruin things, Mikael's neck getting snapped, his girl getting knocked out again and Freya pocketing the white oak stake like a thief in a family of liars.

She got to the part about Finn saving Brunhilda, and Kol perked up slightly. Now that was unexpected. And oddly touching. He glanced over at his older brother, translating slowly with Rebekah's help. His face turning going a shade paler with every sentence.

Kol snorted quietly to himself.

He supposed Finn had to be his favorite sibling now. Though if he told Bekah that she had dropped down a level in his regard, she'd likely try to drown him in a bathtub. Still, the man had broken Mikael's neck thrice and saved his sweet girl's life. That counted for something.

He looked down at Freya again. She still hadn't moved, but the shallow rise of her chest confirmed she was breathing. Pity. Would've been far more convenient if she'd simply died. That way, he wouldn't have to invent some creative form of revenge that wouldn't upset his siblings—or his soulmate.

Kol turned his attention back to the spell.

Brunhilda still hadn't acknowledged him.

She was nearly finished now—and Kol drifted closer, just to feel the hum of the spell against his skin. His fingers twitched.

She was still working, still tracing spell lines with slow, deliberate care. Her fingers moved with ritual precision, etching sigils into the air like she was writing scripture instead of spellwork. Kol thought about offering to force the language into Finn's brain himself, but when he saw the mint and bay leaves in her setup, he understood why she hadn't asked. She wasn't just translating. She was softening the blow. Making the knowledge settle, rather than invade.

He wondered if she'd let him touch her while she cast it. Just enough to feel the magic thread through him, anchor in his bones.

...

The spell was simple—mechanically, at least.

The hard part was Kol Mikaelson.

He wandered over halfway through the casting—slow, silent, magnetic in that way only a Mikaelson ever could be. He stood just off to her side, close enough that the air between them felt charged. His gaze didn't waver. Not once.

Finn was watching her too, though his expression held none of Kol's razor interest. He looked at her like she was a marvel, or a question he hadn't quite learned how to ask. There was gratitude and thankfulness in him.

That she understood—she was helping him after all... but she didn't understand Kol's hovering, or why her heartrate kept jumping or why she could feel every movement he made through her magic.

Somewhere behind her, Hayley's voice rose in theatrical frustration—she had apparently roped Rebekah into reading one of her smuggled paperbacks aloud. Brunhilda heard the rustle of pages, Rebekah's flatline narration, and Hayley's occasional gasps or groans. They were either pretending not to care about the spell—or genuinely didn't. Either way, she appreciated the distance.

She began to chant.

Softly at first, then louder—singing the syllables into shape, her breath weaving them into thread. One hand rested gently at the center of Finn's chest. Her voice shifted. The magic coiled tighter.

And Kol's hand slid over hers.

She flinched, but her magic didn't—it shuddered.

His palm, warm and steady, engulfed her own—anchoring both of them to Finn's still form. Kol's chest hovered just behind her back, a weight and a warmth and a dare. The spell hitched, adjusted.

Caught.

Just as her breath did.

She could feel it—a closed loop.

Her power twined with Finn's—older, steadier—and then Kol's—brighter, louder. His magic didn't blend so much as flirt with hers, curling around the edges of her will, pushing into her breath.

She closed her eyes.

Let herself savor it.

Finn's energy was like stone smoothed by water—shaped by time and pressure, careful in its strength. Kol's was wildfire. Quick. Unapologetic. Both threaded into hers and she felt... light, breathless.

Kol's other hand rose to her shoulder. His fingers rested there lightly, as if he wasn't sure she'd let him stay.

She didn't move.

When the spell broke, it did so gently—like an exhale. Brunhilda lowered her hand first. Kol's fingers slipped away a moment later, as if the magic had left behind a residue he wasn't sure he wanted to keep.

Finn blinked.

Then sat up straighter, gaze sharpened and lucid in a way it hadn't been since she first laid eyes on him. He turned toward her with a slow nod.

"Thank you," he said. "For the spell. And for... everything else." His voice was low but strong, its cadence was pleasant to her ear. "It is a gift, to speak again. Properly."

Kol snickered. "Ha! Bekah, did you hear that? Finn was sick of speaking to only you!"

Rebekah threw a couch pillow at him. Kol caught it without looking.

Brunhilda stifled a smile, turning her focus back to Finn.

He was still watching her—not with the sharp appraisal his siblings seemed favored, but with something softer. Something curious but obvious in its kindness.

"How did you come to know Freya?" he asked. "Rebekah didn't translate that part."

She hesitated—not because she didn't know what to say, but because she wasn't sure how much to say.

"That's because there was nothing to translate," she said carefully. "We met before I found Hayley. It's... complicated. But we helped each other. For a time."

Finn nodded, quiet and thoughtful. He asked a few more questions—soft, deliberate—and she answered in kind. Nothing too specific. Just enough to give shape to the story without exposing the fragile threads still knotted between her and Freya.

Behind her, she could hear Kol moving again. The soft creak of floorboards. The faint scuff of his boots. She didn't turn. She figured he'd gotten bored and wandered back to the couch—likely stretched himself across it in some melodramatic pose.

But then—

"Right. Quick question, darling."

His voice sliced through the quiet like a knife wrapped in velvet.

"Any particular reason my name is on that strange little board over there next to the word 'died'?"

Brunhilda froze.

Kol was standing across the room, next to Freya's suitcases, holding up what could only be described as her personal apocalypse map. The conspiracy board that should have still been inside the car—or so she'd thought. Now it hung crooked in his hands, red string swaying faintly, damning in every possible way.

He tilted it toward the group. "Also, related: who the hell is Jeremy Gilbert?"

The board was chaos. Scribbled names, looping arrows, overlapping symbols. Photos pinned alongside sketches. Newspaper clippings. At least three different kinds of handwriting layered in different colored ink. Every thread curved inevitably toward a single word circled in black marker:

SILAS.

Kol turned slowly to face her. The echo of whatever magic existed in him gave away the wave of absolute terror that was rising in him.

Brunhilda didn't even try to hide her glare as she looked at Hayley: Why did you bring that in here?

Hayley met her gaze, unimpressed: I brought in everything.

Brunhilda's scowl deepened: You shouldn't have brought in this particular thing.

Hayley rolled her eyes: Well, you should have clarified that before it became an issue.

The whole exchange passed between them in a series of sharp looks and minute expressions.

Kol loudly cleared his throat.

"So," he said, waving the board slightly. "Again. Why is my name listed among the recently—or future—deceased? And more pressingly: who in God's name is Jeremy Gilbert?"

Without a moment of hesitation, Hayley threw out an accusing finger towards the witch. "Hilda's a time traveler."

Brunhilda turned to her friend, face slack with abject horror at her betrayal.

The werewolf didn't look particularly sorry about it.

Chapter Text

It occurred to Brunhilda that she had run out of corners to press herself into.

Her skin felt stretched thin, her bones brittle. Her fingers were shaking—not from fear exactly, but from the splintering strain of holding herself together for too long. There was too much inside her and nowhere left to store it.

Even her silence had gone taut with the tension.

She considered the simplest solution: knock them all out. Kol first—he'd make the most fuss. Then Rebekah, if only because she'd throw herself between the others. Finn last—not because she trusted him, but because he was least likely to snap her neck on reflex.

She imagined it. Grabbing Hayley and driving until the road thinned and the past got small in the mirror. She could drop her off with a friendly pack or take her back to New Orleans—could break the Crescent Curse and tear through anyone who stood in Hayley's way to becoming alpha. She'd make Marcel an offer he couldn't refuse—ensuring Hayley could be protected even after Brunhilda was gone. And after that, she'd find Damon Salvatore and Annabelle. Perhaps removing them from the board before the comet, before they could force anyone's hand, would be enough to satisfy her promise to Emily...

But Brunhilda was tired—so goddamned tired of being alone.

She'd been running so long that the habit had rewired her, had reshaped her gait—her spine now curved like a question, her shoulders hunched by reflex, always expecting the next blow. And beneath it all, quieter than rage and crueler than fear, was the ache.

That hungry, bottomless wish: to love something she would never lose.

Something that wouldn't slip through her fingers or shatter beneath her devotion. Something that would outlast her. A truly immortal thing, not just in name but in reality. Something that would not fall, not leave, not fade.

Not die.

But even that was a lie. She had seen immortal things crumble. Had watched some rot slowly and others vanish cleanly. Watched Hayley turn to nothing in her arms. Watched every last Mikaelson burn. Watched the world buckle under their absence.

The answer came from Emily, though Brunhilda had thought of no specific question.

"Living is always a risk," she whispered. "Loving things that can die is a kind of magic in itself. You must never allow the fear to hollow you out—let it follow, if it must, but never let it lead."

Brunhilda wanted to believe her, but all she could think of was the scarred silhouette of a world cracked open. Burned into her corneas were rivers of ash, scorched tree-lines, the outline of Hayley's body cooling in her arms, the image of Bonnie's back turned to her, the curve of Davina's smile the last time she beheld it.

The End had left fingerprints on everything. It ghosted behind every flickering light. It howled in every silence.

It had made her, just as surely as it had marred her in turn.

And then, somewhere, deeper Silas stirred.

"This is a choice, Sweetness," he murmured. "One of those rare moments when you get to pick the end of your story. Tell them the truth, use them, and if they betray you—run. Or choose to leave them in the dark. Stay quiet, flinch, and spend the rest of your time struggling, wondering what might have been. But either way—choose."

She let the silence stretch out, let her breath settle.

The truth was she didn't know if she deserved anything. That word—deserved—felt foreign now. But she believed in her hunger. In that brittle, relentless wish that someone might stay. That someone might see her—truly see her—and not leave.

That someone might know everything and still choose her.

Hayley had done it. She'd looked at some of Brunhilda's worst parts and hadn't flinched. Maybe that was reason enough to try again. To roll the dice. To believe that what happened once wasn't just a fluke of timing or something fleeting—but a beginning.

Her eyes opened.

Her hands were still.

And in that quiet, tired, ruined moment—clinging to nothing but the echo of hope—Brunhilda made her choice.

She chose to try.

...

She came clean.

Not all at once. Not in a rush. But in the low, even voice of someone trying not to bleed too much at once. The words came steady, controlled, like a wound she'd pressed her thumb against to stop the oozing.

She didn't give them everything—some truths were too vast to name while others were too cruel to relive.

But she gave them the bones—what she'd already trusted Hayley with. The shape of the ending, if not its full weight. She left out only what was too sharp to speak aloud: her coven's last breath, the memory of her most important people lost to time, and the quiet, stolen moments of joy that had belonged to her alone. The pieces no one else could hold. The ones she would never give away.

She told them how the world didn't die all at once—it unraveled. Peeled apart like a thing that had lived too long and no longer knew how to stop dying.

It began with a death. Two, really—Kol and Finn. They died too close together. Too suddenly.

Finn's brought wildfires, floods, natural disasters. Hundreds of thousands drowned or burned in their homes within weeks. Kol's shattered its magical core. Spells began to misfire—then detonate. Water magic drowned cities. Earth spells split the ground down the middle. Half the world's leylines went dark.

And then the deeper collapse began. Magic turned inherently volatile. Wild. Cruel. It surged up from the Earth's core, ripped through spell lines, and burned covens from the inside out. Tremors rolled through the lands like nerves twitching after death. Soil soured. Rivers vanished overnight. Crops withered. Forests rotted. Sacred groves bloomed with black rot. Deer wandered in circles until they dropped and whales flung themselves ashore.

And Silas rose and Amara fell—and with them, the boundary between life and death was sundered. The dead clawed back into the world. Esther. Mikael. Kol. Finn. Thousands of the world's most bloody, most cruel, least deserving of breath. All returned—but not for long.

What Brunhilda remembered with eerie clarity was this: Halloween 2012, the losses blurred together.

Rebekah was murdered that night—and Bonnie tried to use the resulting nexus vorti to repair the fracture but destroyed it entirely instead. Kol and Finn were taken again—disappeared with the rest of the escaped dead things. All of the world's ghosts, gone.

All but one.

Inadu left a piece of herself in Hope Mikaelson. A sliver of hunger in the shape of a child. She sank into Hope like a blade into soft flesh.

And then—it all came apart. Klaus and his sireline died. Freya was gone. Davina and Elijah vanished. Bonnie was nearly powerless. Most of the North American covens were ash.

By then, the world had already forgotten how to hold itself together.

It collapsed not in fire but in disintegration. A quiet undoing. Systems failed. Nature turned on itself. People vanished. The silence that followed wasn't peace—it was vacancy.

And when it settled, the questions came.

Kol asked the most. Of course he did. Pulled at the seams, tested for fault lines. Who killed him? What happened to his body? Did it hurt?

Brunhilda answered what she could. When she couldn't, she didn't lie. He asked if they'd ever met.

"No," she said softly. "We tried to bring you back once, but there was nothing left to bring back."

Rebekah's questions were fewer, but they cut deeper.

"Was I alone?" she asked. "Did anyone try to save me? Was Hope—?"

She didn't finish the last question.

Brunhilda could only offer fragments. Whispers. The sense of something missing—an absence she hadn't noticed until it became too large to name. She'd been searching for Qetsiyah, trying to rebuild the Other Side, while Rebekah was falling. She hadn't seen it happen. Hadn't even known, not truly.

She suspected Esther had something to do with it or maybe the Travelers. Both had begun to stir in those final, fraying weeks. And though she never said it aloud, a small part of her still wondered if Bonnie had a hand in it. The timing was too perfect. Too close. And Bonnie had been too desperate, too willing to do anything.

And by the time Brunhilda looked back, Rebekah was already gone.

Finn, meanwhile, said almost nothing. He sat still, hands folded neatly, gaze cast somewhere distant. When he did speak, it was only to confirm a name, a year, a place.

Brunhilda pressed on, voice hoarse, each word scraping its way out. She told them about Silas—how he had watched the veil collapse and with it the last of his hopes for reuniting with Amara, and how he had begun to burn the world in his rage. How Cade rose from the ruins and laid waste to most of the eastern United States with hellfire. How the last witches—what few remained—were either broken or slaughtered. And how, in the end, she had killed a not-insignificant number of them to make her escape.

"So," Kol said lightly, fingers tapping against his leg, "what happened to Silas, then? Did he get bored and bugger off, or did you kill him too?"

Brunhilda stopped. Her mouth opened—then closed again.

She didn't look away from Kol—she looked at him. Really looked. And something flickered.

There was a strangeness in how she sensed him. Like tuning into a frequency just beneath human hearing. She could feel him in the room—feel him in a way that wasn't magic, exactly, but memory. Something ancient curled in the back of her mind, the way a scar curled into the shape of an old wound.

And she realized—suddenly, sharply—that she wanted them to know. Even if it cost her.

"I think..." she began, her voice thin, barely more than a breath. "I think I'm scared to tell you."

Kol's brow arched, but the movement was too tight to be amused. "Darling, you're looking at me like I'm going to bite," he said, voice low. "What—am I the one you're afraid of now?"

"No," she said. "Not you. Just..."

She looked at him, full in the face. Her throat worked around the words. They stuck, sharp and splintered. But eventually, she forced them out.

"I'm afraid of how you'll react," she said, softer now. "I didn't escape on my own. There's... something I carry with me. Not a ghost, not really—though I have those too. Not a memory either."

The room shifted, quieted. Her next breath came too slow. She felt Silas stir—wrapping around her like a fog, like a funeral shroud.

This is it, Brunhilda thought. This is the part where he tries to kill you too.

"There's nothing to fear," Silas murmured from somewhere inside her. His voice was old stone. "They cannot unmake you."

She ignored him.

"I found him in the End," she said. "I didn't set out to do it—I didn't even know it was possible. But the world was already gone. Everyone was dead. And I was still breathing."

Kol's body had gone still, already starting to realize what she hadn't quite brought herself to say.

"I need you to understand," she said, watching him. "What do you know about the Gemini?"

Kol's mouth twitched. His voice, when it came, was dry. "Their leaders always come in twos. Bit of a tradition—they raise their kids like pigs for slaughter, and the twins battle it out in a merge. One lives. One dies. Winner takes all."

"Yes." She paused, just long enough for the weight to settle. "But he didn't die like he was supposed to."

Something snapped sharp in the air—nothing magical, just Kol's energy shifting. Like his breath caught behind his teeth.

She didn't move. Didn't breathe. Just let the silence stretch, like something flayed open.

Now he knows, she thought. Now he decides. Now they all get to decide.

"You—" Kol made a half-aborted movement forward, then stopped himself. His voice, when it returned, was lower. "You merged with him?"

"There was no one left to stop me."

Kol's jaw worked. His expression was unreadable—not shock, not quite fury. But something frayed at the edges.

"Oh," he murmured, just a shade bitter.

The word echoed in her skull like a cracked bell. Brittle at the edges. She felt scraped raw, exhausted from everything that had happened.

"Okay," Hayley cut in, flinging up both hands. "Let's circle back to the whole soul-bonded-to-harbinger-of-the-apocalypse situation later, yeah?"

Brunhilda blinked, caught off guard, but—gratefully—nodded. She inhaled like she was pulling herself back from a ledge.

"She's right. We have bigger problems," she said. Her voice was steadier now, iron threaded through fatigue. "The white oak—there's a whole damn bridge full of it. And when I cursed Mikael, his stake wasn't on him. Which means it's still out there. Either we destroy it, or we use it. But we can't leave it lying around."

That got their attention.

Hayley crossed her arms. "Freya took the damn stake in Mystic Falls," she said. "Don't ask me what she did with it. I was a bit busy keeping you from dying again."

The last word hung in the air.

"Dying—"

"—Again?"

Rebekah and Kol both spoke at the same time.

"Yes," Hayley said flatly.

Then, bizarrely, she looked straight at Finn. Not Rebekah, not Kol, not Brunhilda—Finn. Like he was her chosen audience, her co-conspirator.

Brunhilda blinked. When had that happened?

"Freya killed her waking up your dad," Hayley said, raising an eyebrow, as if challenging the eldest Mikaelson to do something about it.

Kol froze.

Rebekah's jaw clenched.

Finn's brow furrowed, a flicker of something tugging at the calm mask of his face.

"But... she came back," Rebekah said quietly. Her voice had changed—softer, careful. Like she was circling something she wasn't sure she wanted to name.

Hayley nodded. "Eventually."

Kol's eyes cut to Brunhilda, sharp now. "Because of Silas?"

She exhaled through her nose. "Yes. I've... inherited a lot from him."

The room pulled taut, expectation gathered like static—quiet, pressing in around the edges.

"His immortality," she said first. That part was simple. "And..." Her mouth flattened, "his hunger too."

That got a reaction. Not quite judgment. But something hung in the air—curiosity, maybe. Wariness.

She straightened, jaw set.

Brunhilda shouldn't care. It was ridiculous to care. They were vampires—Originals at that. Rebekah had killed people she claimed were close friends. Finn had eaten hundreds of people. Kol had certainly drained a monastery or two just for fun.

And still—some absurd, buried part of her was braced for the hit.

"The connection I have to him—it's not always stable," she said. "To keep the magic functioning, I have to feed on blood. Regularly."

She let that land. Felt the weight of it press against her ribs.

"It's not exactly a craving. It's more structural than that. If I don't feed, the power starts to corrode, and I unravel."

For a moment, the room felt thick, and then—

Kol shrugged.

"Well," he said breezily, "that's an easy enough problem to solve."

Brunhilda blinked at him.

"You need blood to stay upright. We have plenty," Kol said, like it was a math problem. "We feed you. Done. Next crisis."

Hayley leaned against the arm of the couch, arms crossed, nodding. "That was the plan," she said. "We were gonna ask Finn to donate. Mikael's blood didn't do much, but his actually helped."

Finn, calmly: "I would not mind."

At the same time, Kol drawled, "I'll happily offer my neck right now, darling—just say the word and I'll let you drain me dry."

"Oh, so, we've got options then," Hayley snorted, then turned to Rebekah. "What about you, blondie? Want in on blood bag duty?"

Rebekah looked at Brunhilda—really looked. Not sharp. Not soft. Not assessing or piercing. Just... seeing her.

"I don't usually make it a habit to feed witches," she said carefully. "But if it keeps you from falling apart in front of me—fine."

Brunhilda let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding.

Hayley clapped her hands together. "Great. That solves one problem. We'll draft a feeding schedule for our feral baby vamp."

"I'm not a vampire," Brunhilda muttered.

Hayley rolled her eyes. "You bite, you brood, and you have the look of someone who would rock leather. You know what they say, if it quacks like a duck..."

"You're not helping."

"Oh, bite me," Hayley snarks. "I'm doing my part to build team morale."

Before Brunhilda could fire back, Kol leaned in, his tone all curiosity.

"I wonder why Mikael's blood didn't help," he mused.

"Silas told me I can't be turned. Not while we're still... enmeshed."

Kol frowned. "That still doesn't make sense. Finn's blood worked, didn't it?"

She nodded. "It did."

"And Mikael gave you how much, exactly?"

"Maybe a teaspoon," Hayley cut in.

Kol's eyes flicked to Finn, then back. "And he gave you...?"

"A lot," Brunhilda admitted.

Kol sat back with a flourish, smug as anything. "There you have it. Simple volume issue. You've got yourself a prescription then—one Original, twice daily, with snacks in between."

He paused, mock thoughtful. "For science's sake, we really ought to run a few trials. I propose a taste test. I volunteer, if you'll have me, little witch."

"You're the worst," Rebekah muttered.

Hayley snorted. "And you're offering out of strictly academic interest, huh?"

"Naturally," Kol said. "I'm nothing if not rigorous in my research."

Finn let out a quiet breath that might've passed for amusement in another life.

Something shifted in Brunhilda then.

Not dramatically. No great sigh of relief. Just a sliver of quiet between barbs. A flicker of something unspoken passing between them all—light, absurd, almost tender.

And that—of course—was when it hit her.

Not like a blow, but like water breaching a dam—a small fracture from which the tide was held back until it eventually crumbled. A breath caught wrong in her throat. A flicker of warmth she wasn't ready for nestled too hard against something raw.

Somewhere behind her ribs, something finally cracked open.

It felt like a trick, almost. Some cruel magic. A joke.

It was... so silly to Brunhilda that the universe had decided this—not fire or fury or some final betrayal—but this ridiculous, gentle kindness would be the thing to undo her. As if the resolution to years of blood and failure and loneliness was... this. Kol cracking jokes. Finn offering silence like a shelter. Rebekah meeting her gaze without looking away. Hayley, alive and snickering at her expense.

Tears prickled behind her eyes before she even realized what was happening.

It was still too much.

Not grief. Not even relief, exactly. Just the sharp, aching pressure of something finally giving way inside her. Like a wall she hadn't meant to build, bowing under the weight of too many almosts and not-quites.

It was as if something soft had slipped past her guard, wrapped itself around the thinnest parts of her, and pulled.

Brunhilda sniffled—barely a sound, barely even a motion—but it cracked like thunder in the room.

The wave of aching anger and overwhelming disquiet that she had cried out to Hayley earlier returned, the feelings she'd buried beneath pragmatic spell crafting and strategy rose in her. It sat in her chest like something had gone brittle from too much heat.

She refused to let it break her open. Refused to let it show. But the sound was out now, small and betraying, and that was enough.

All three of the vampires noticed.

They twitched almost in unison, their bodies going still and watchful the way predators sometimes did around a wounded animal. But it wasn't menace. It wasn't hunger. It was something closer to concern, something taut and unspoken and almost—Gods help her—gentle.

Finn moved first.

He stepped toward her without a single word and reached into the inner pocket of his jerkin. The movement was calm, elegant even, purposeful.

When he withdrew his hand, he was holding out a folded white handkerchief, one edge stitched in faded thread. It was clearly old but carefully kept—like something that had been forgotten more than neglected.

He didn't press it into her palm, just held it out to her—offering but not insisting.

Brunhilda looked at it, then at him. Slowly, she reached out and took it from his fingers.

She raised the handkerchief to her face, prepared to dab at the corner of one eye, then paused. Her brow wrinkled, she pulled it back slightly and blinked down at the fabric.

"This is... really dusty," she said, with a note of disbelief.

A beat of silence.

Then Kol barked out a laugh.

"Unfortunate side effect of my brother being daggered for nine hundred years, darling," he said, snickering at Finn's expense. "Bit hard to launder your delicates when you've been boxed up like a family relic."

Finn looked, if not offended, then certainly sheepish. "It was clean when I last used it," he muttered, though the wince on his face undercut his dignity.

Brunhilda stared down at the handkerchief again, her mouth twitching at the corners despite herself. There were still tears in her eyes—threatened but left unshed—but now there was also the threat of a smile.

Rebekah spoke at last. Her gaze swept over Brunhilda, not invasive, but thorough. "Well," she said, "sounds like we've built the beginnings of a plan. I think you should take a moment—freshen up."

It wasn't a command, but it was not quite a suggestion either. Somewhere in the space between—a directive softened by the shape of care.

Hayley nodded, already stepping forward like the baton had been passed. "I'll fill them in on the rest," she said. "You go wash your face or scream into a pillow or whatever makes you feel better. I've got this."

Brunhilda hesitated.

Something inside her still bristled at the idea of turning her back—of leaving them alone with all that she'd just laid bare... leaving them with Hayley, especially after how it had turned out the last time. But Hayley's eyes were steady, Rebekah's were patient, Finn's hand still hovered at his side like he was ready to offer another dusty heirloom if she needed it, and Kol was—well. Kol was grinning at her as if he liked whatever he was seeing.

And so—for the first time in what felt like a very long time—Brunhilda considered letting someone else carry the weight.

Just for a minute.

...

The bathroom was warm, already fogging over. Steam curled in lazy swirls along the edges of the mirror, blurring her reflection into soft, unrecognizable shapes. The cabin's plumbing wasn't great, but the water ran hot—blessings, Brunhilda thought and reminded herself to count them.

Her shirt peeled away with effort, stiff from sweat and all the layers of blood. Her shorts were worse—crusted, cracking at the seams as she dragged them down.

When she finally stepped out of everything, she looked at the pile on the floor and grimaced. It deserved to be burned.

The first touch of water made her hiss. It was too hot, scorching along her spine, but she didn't flinch. She welcomed the sting. Needed it. She stepped fully into the stream, tilting her head back as it poured over her, washing through her tangled hair, over her shoulders, her back.

And then—slowly—she began to scrub.

She cleaned her body like she could erase everything. Like the past week could be lifted from her skin with enough pressure. Her fingers moved with a kind of desperation, digging into her shoulders, down her arms, over her ribs. She scrubbed until her skin bloomed red, until it stung and protested, until the blood and ash and sweat and dirt felt less like an extra layer of skin and more like something she could finally take off.

She found a bar of soap and worked it into a thick lather, running it over her collarbones, between her fingers, behind her knees. Every crevice. Every line of her form.

She shaved her legs slowly, methodically, the blade dull but usable. Her hair took longer—knots snarled like vines from sweat and old magic and days of neglect. She worked in conditioner, finger-combing until the strands surrendered.

By the time she stepped out of the shower, she was pink and raw and buzzing with the ache of being clean.

Brunhilda reached for one of the bathrobes that came with the cabin—soft, surprisingly heavy, still smelling faintly of her shampoo. She wrapped herself in it, cinching it at the waist, and then turned to her reflection in the mirror. Her face looked strange. Paler than usual. Eyes too dark. A little haunted. She leaned in.

She had a few red spots near her jaw and across her forehead. A stress breakout—or maybe it was from the blood and dirt that had clung to her for days. She touched a spot near her jaw—red and inflamed—and grimaced.

Can you fix breakouts, she thought at Silas, not truly expecting an answer.

"Yes," he murmured. "But I'm not wasting a single flicker of power on your blemishes until you prove that you won't skip any more meals—feed regularly or suffer your own ugliness."

"Wow, that was rude," she muttered under her breath, still examining a particularly angry looking pimple. She resisted the urge to pop it. That would only make it worse—and he'd probably mock her for that too. "What did I ever do to you?"

She could feel Silas's sarcastic scoff in her spine.

Brunhilda rolled her eyes, reaching into her toiletry bag and dabbing a bit of salve on the marks. "Okay, now you're just being petty."

She brushed her teeth—it took three rounds of rinsing before her mouth stopped tasting like iron.

When she finally unwrapped the towel from her hair, she felt... not healed, but newly assembled. Like someone had taken the same broken parts and rearranged them with care.

The buzzing in her head was still there, but it was quieter now—less clawing, more background hum.

She stepped into the hallway barefoot, steam trailing behind her.

...

Rebekah was curled up at the far end of the couch, legs folded beneath her, pen moving with clipped precision over the pages of what looked suspiciously like—

"That's my notebook," Brunhilda said, stopping mid-step.

Hayley looked up and grinned, mid-laugh, eyebrows raised. "Found it in your bag. You left it wide open like you wanted us to pilfer it."

"I did not."

"Did too."

"You can't just go through my stuff without asking."

"Oh no," Hayley said, utterly unbothered. "It appears I already did. Tragic. Whatever will you do?"

Brunhilda huffed.

Hayley waggled her eyebrows, "Speaking of tragedies—feel better after the shower?"

"Like a new woman."

"Perfect. Then park it," Hayley ordered, patting the spot between her and Rebekah. She jerked her chin in a commanding little come on then motion. "You're not getting out of helping just because you died a few days ago."

Brunhilda grumbled under her breath but obeyed, shuffling across the room.

The warmth of the couch and the quiet companionship waiting for her on either side was... disarming. It made her feel comforted—almost safe. Rebekah shifted slightly to make room, her pen still hovering over the battered notebook.

"Show her," Hayley said. "Let her see what we've come up with so far."

Brunhilda took the notebook from Rebekah's lap and flipped through it. The handwriting was mostly hers—scrawled, tight, precise, with a few angrier scribbles and frantic cross-outs—but there were additional notes (both throughout the content she had already written and on the previously empty pages towards the back) in Hayley's rougher block letters and, to her surprise, neat cursive—Kol or Rebekah, she guessed.

This wasn't her favorite notebook—the one where she'd compulsively scribbled half-formed ideas and strange rambles. This one she'd picked up in New Orleans, mostly filled with her thoughts on how to kill Dahlia. It was a crinkled black Mead spiral notebook with the words For School Use Only faded on the front in peeling white letters. A smudge of dried blood—unclear whose—was smeared across the corner.

Hayley had clearly remembered everything Brunhilda told her in the car. Mikael. The white oak. Dahlia. The Hollow. Silas. Sheila Bennett. The Harvest. It was all there—some annotated, others underlined or circled, a few so heavily marked they left pressure dents through the page. Someone (definitely Hayley) had doodled a burning tree next to the white oak entry with the words world's strongest murder tree. Someone else had crossed it out and replaced it with something more precise.

Hayley nodded at one of the bolder entries and murmured that she'd told them about the ghosts too—not just the Hollow, but everything else Brunhilda carried with her. Brunhilda gave a tight nod. It wasn't everything. But it was enough.

There was something near the bottom of the page—The Freya Question—bolded, boxed, and left entirely blank. No notes. No commentary. Just the weight of a silence too deliberate to be unintentional. It said more than any scribbled paragraph ever could.

Finn spoke then, voice even but firm. "I told them I would not—could not—leave Freya to that fate. No matter what's passed between the two of you, she is still our sister."

Brunhilda didn't answer. She didn't have to. It already existed in the ledger, and she didn't want to touch it either.

Brunhilda exhaled slowly. The notebook was still incomplete—but not a bad starting point.

"There's something else," she said. "We need to add an entry for Klaus's curse."

That got their attention.

"I haven't brought it up before," she continued. "She wasn't important to my part of the story. But there's a human doppelgänger."

"And let me guess," Kol scoffed, "she's also in Mystic Falls."

Brunhilda nodded.

Kol let out a humorless breath. "Of course she is."

"How hasn't he found her?" Rebekah asked, voice tight.

"He does," Brunhilda said. "Just not yet. Elijah gets there first—in two years' time."

Rebekah's brows drew together. "And he sends word to Nik, then?"

"No," Brunhilda shook her head. "He hatches a plan to kill him during the ritual."

Kol blinked. "What the hell did Nik do this time to convince Elijah he's finally past the point of saving?"

Brunhilda's mouth was a hard line. "He told Elijah that he dropped the three of you into the Atlantic, sealed in coffins."

Hayley exhaled. "Jesus."

Silence followed.

Hayley looked between them, then added, "Okay, I hate to derail everything, but—what the hell is a doppelgänger?"

Brunhilda explained that when Silas and Amara achieved true immortality—free from death, decay, or any natural end—it fractured the balance of the world. Nature, in response, created a countermeasure: mortal versions of their bodies, born again and again through the centuries. Doppelgängers. Vessels designed to die in their place and restore equilibrium, no matter how briefly.

Kol's voice cut in, sharper now. "Their blood's useful. That's the short of it. It's potent. Good for binding magic, dangerous rituals—our mother used it to create vampires, and again to tie Klaus's werewolf side down."

"The curse keeps him from turning. From accessing the werewolf part of himself. Break it, and he becomes what he was always meant to be—a hybrid. Vampire and wolf, together. Stronger. More dangerous. Practically unkillable."

Hayley's expression twisted. "And breaking the curse requires the doppelgänger?"

Kol grinned. "More or less."

Rebekah scoffed, sharp and bitter. "It would've been done centuries ago if Katerina hadn't betrayed Elijah and run."

Brunhilda turned to her, jaw tightening.

"It's not betrayal," she said coldly, "you were planning to murder her."

Hayley blinked. "What are you talking about?"

Brunhilda explained the story plainly to her friend—in 1492, Klaus had planned to use a doppelgänger named Katerina as the sacrifice to break his curse. Elijah had played both sides, but Katerina figured it out—just in time. She took her own life, turned herself into a vampire, and slipped through their fingers. Since then, she had been running with Klaus at her heels like a hellhound, burning her path through villages and cities alike. He razed her home. He slaughtered everyone she had ever known. All because she had refused to lie down and die for him.

"What the fuck," Hayley said after Brunhilda finished. "Your brother needs a therapist. And a cage."

No one argued.

Finn was the one who finally spoke, calm as ever. "What's the girl's name?"

"Elena Gilbert."

Kol's brow twitched. "Gilbert—as in Jeremy?"

Brunhilda nodded. "His sister."

Kol leaned back, not angry—just calculating. She saw it settle in him like fog across a field. A new grudge clicking into place behind his eyes. A new shape to the game. "The first doppelgänger in five centuries and the boy who staked me. Fascinating little family."

Brunhilda didn't answer. Her fingers tapped mindlessly on the page, mind already moving ahead.

"There's more," Brunhilda said, her voice quiet but firm. "Breaking the curse is only the beginning. Once Klaus becomes a hybrid, he'll need the blood of a human doppelgänger every time he wants to make more like him."

That pulled Kol forward again, the game face shifting to something more attentive.

"Elena is surrounded by people who love her," Brunhilda went on. "And they won't let her be used like that."

Kol gave a low, impressed whistle. "I bet Nik will take that well."

"It didn't go well," she said. "Klaus made enemies during the ritual—some very lucky, very persistent ones. They fought back. Then he retaliated. Then they did. It spiraled."

Then, mock-offended, he pressed a hand to his chest. "Enemies? My dear brother? Surely not. Niklaus is the gentlest soul I've ever known."

He glanced sideways at Brunhilda as he said it—grinning like a man who knew exactly how sharp his teeth were. That crooked little smirk—charming, sharp, maddening—landed like a blade drawn just for show.

Heat crept up her neck. She didn't meet his eyes.

From the kitchenette, Finn let out a noise that was not quite a laugh.

Brunhilda cleared her throat. "It didn't end there."

That pulled them back in.

"Elena was turned eventually," she went on, quieter now. "Not her choice. Circumstances forced it. But Klaus still needed her blood—so he pivoted. Started working with the same people who'd fought him to find the Cure."

Rebekah straightened. "There's a cure?"

Brunhilda nodded. "For immortality—not vampirism. At least not like you're thinking."

She hesitated—just a beat—then continued, her voice level. "Qetsiyah made it to punish Silas. It doesn't remake you, it strips you down. It makes you mortal, yes—but if someone bleeds you, or you lose enough blood on your own, it triggers the second half. You regain all the years you stole. Most wouldn't survive the week."

Something in Rebekah's face shifted. Small, but not lost on Brunhilda.

"Whatever you're chasing," she said, voice soft but steady, "whatever feeling you think mortality will give you... there are other ways. Other answers. Other ways to want something real. But the Cure won't give it to you. It's not hope. It's a weapon. And right now, it's the only one that works on Silas. It can't be wasted chasing something it was never meant to fix."

Rebekah didn't speak. But her jaw worked, tight. And then—reluctantly—she nodded.

Brunhilda exhaled, long and low, fingers steepled against her lips. The ledger sat open in her lap, a tangle of names that read like a graveyard—etched in ink, waiting.

They couldn't avoid Klaus forever. That much was clear.

And if he broke the curse—if the hybrid transformation worked—maybe, just maybe, it could be useful. Hybrids were strong. As close to true immortality as most could ever reach. If Klaus could be brought to their side, then the impossible might become survivable. But that was the problem: Klaus was a weapon with no safety. If he spiraled—and he would—it would be glorious and catastrophic, and he'd take them all down with him.

Unless she controlled the fallout.

Maybe, if she let the ritual happen—let Elena die, then fixed it after—she could soften the blow. Bring the girl back. Use time and magic and careful promises to make the wound survivable. Maybe Elena would understand. Maybe she'd give her blood willingly. A terrible deal, yes—but a fair one.

Her eyes flicked, almost unwillingly, to Hayley.

A werewolf. Mortal in the cruelest sense. Time would eat her. Magic couldn't hold her. Not truly. Vampires were built, in many ways, to outlast everything, and witches could trick the sands of time if they were powerful enough. Hayley would rot, eventually, no matter how careful they were. No aging spell would last. No anchor-binding would hold. Only Klaus—or Hope, if she ever existed again—could offer her anything like permanence. But even then, it would come with blood and pain and Klaus's mercy, which was no mercy at all.

Unless...

Qetsiyah's elixir.

She had the witch who made it trapped inside her body, after all. Perhaps...

"One thing at a time," Tessa murmured in her mind, voice like chipped obsidian. "You shall shatter if you continue to try too much too fast."

Brunhilda didn't argue.

Silas chuckled—low, smug, unhelpful. "You could always bring back one of the dead ones to break his curse," he said. "Tatia, maybe. Use her as your sacrifice and leave Elena to her brother-husbands."

She would make a decision later. When the list stopped reading like a prophecy of loss. When the world stopped threatening to end at every corner.

The quiet stretched—tired, tense, full of things unspoken.

Rebekah spoke first, still clearly thinking about the cure. She tapped the notebook's edge with her pen. "The white oak is still the priority," she said, her tone clipped. "Stake, tree—whatever we can find. That has to come first."

Finn nodded once. "I agree, but if we go to Mystic Falls so soon after being freed, we risk drawing Klaus straight to the doppelgänger."

"So?" Rebekah pressed. "According to that ridiculous murder board, the girl and her friends weren't exactly kind to us."

Finn turned, voice hardening. "You'd condemn her for something she hasn't yet done?"

"Yes," Rebekah snapped. "Because she will. That's the point of all this, isn't it?"

"No," Finn said, colder now. "The point is to be better than the monsters we've been up to this point. We have a chance to fix our mistakes before ever making them, sister."

"She's one girl," Rebekah shot back. "One mortal girl."

"She's a person."

Kol leaned back, arms crossed, watching them like it was a chess match—every word another piece moved across the board. He didn't interfere. Not yet.

Then his gaze slid sideways to Brunhilda. "Do you care about her?"

Brunhilda blinked. "I've never met her," she said slowly. "But she matters. Not for who she is—for who would love her. Sheila will never allow the ritual to happen as long as she's still alive. And her best friend—Bonnie—if Elena dies, Bonnie will eventually come for Klaus and, by extension, his family. She won't stop."

Hayley's head jerked up. "Bonnie?" she echoed. "As in your Bonnie?"

Brunhilda nodded once.

"Of course," Hayley muttered, dragging a hand down her face. "That's great. Just great."

Kol hummed, his fingers tapping a slow rhythm against the arm of the couch, already assembling possibilities in his mind. "Well, if the little doppelgänger's suddenly off limits, we could use someone else."

Finn straightened sharply. "Kol—"

But Kol kept going, his voice bright and pleasant. "It doesn't have to be the Gilbert girl. Magic doesn't care. Blood is blood."

Hayley raised an eyebrow. "And you've got a spare doppelgänger lying around?"

"We could just resurrect Tatia," Kol grinned, unknowingly parroting Silas's earlier suggestion. "She was a favorite of Nik's, wasn't she? Or we could use Amara. Immortal already. More durable. Built-in longevity. We wouldn't even have to worry about killing her for real."

Brunhilda felt Silas stir violently inside her, not in words but in the primal way an earthquake shifts beneath a city. Grief, ancient and cold, rippled through her bones like a tremor. Amara's name—his Amara—had a weight to it, a resonance that turned Silas's silence into thunder.

She didn't speak to him, but she could feel his protest, sharp and wounded. Amara had been through enough. Even Silas, with all his cruelty and selfishness, didn't want her used again.

Finn spoke then, low and cold. "You'd kill another girl just to make Niklaus happy?"

"I'm not advocating for murder," Kol said, unbothered. "Well, actually, I suppose I am. But we could resurrect them a second time after the ritual for a quick blood draw. It doesn't have to be a girl if that's the crux of your problem, brother. It could be a boy instead, if it makes you feel better. According to our witch, Silas had his share of copies."

Rebekah rolled her eyes. Finn didn't bother to hide his disdain.

Hayley held up both hands. "Okay, let's not turn this into a sibling knife fight."

Brunhilda had had enough.

"Elena doesn't matter," Brunhilda interrupted before anyone could pull Hayley into their bickering. "She's not important—the white oak is. That's what can end you. All of you. Klaus's curse, his hybrids—none of it matters if that wood falls into the wrong hands."

She looked at Kol, her voice steady. "And for the record—using Amara will never be an option."

"Of course, darling. Just thinking out loud," Kol immediately reassured. He inclined his head, his mischief tempered. "But I do agree. Let the girl live or die without our interference. If she becomes important, we can always work to bring her back."

Finn made a small noise—half protest, half resignation—but didn't argue.

Brunhilda nodded once. "We'll need to leave soon and head toward Mystic Falls. The trip takes eleven hours, give or take. We can be there in two days if we don't stop much."

"Another road trip," Hayley muttered. "Great."

Then she stretched, cracking her back. "Guess I'll take Rebekah into town tomorrow. Grab supplies. Clothes. Blood bags."

She threw Brunhilda a sly look. "You know—for your blood bags."

"Hilarious."

Hayley winked. "That's the spirit."

Brunhilda rolled her eyes. "I'll handle Freya tomorrow. Figure out what she did with the stake."

"I'll stay with you—in case anything goes wrong," Finn offered.

Hayley scoffed. "Meaning in case she tries to kill Hilda again?"

Finn's expression didn't shift, and he repeated himself. "In case anything goes wrong."

They drifted back into a loose circle of discussion. More names were added. More risks were named, dissected, and then shelved for later. It all started to blur after a while—possibilities folding into contingencies, a dozen loose threads knotted against a backdrop of rising dread.

Eventually, the weight of it all became too much.

The plans. The names. The stakes—both literal and metaphorical. A ledger filled with what-ifs and possible futures.

The air itself began to feel overburdened, the room overfull.

Rebekah sat rigid, clicking her pen with too much force. Again. And again. And again. She said nothing, but every so often the tip of the pen hovered over Silas's name—right above the word cure—before she caught herself and looked away.

Finn leaned back in his chair, eyes closed, not asleep but somewhere quieter

At some point, Kol had drifted away from the couch, and now stood near the window, uncharacteristically still. His gaze was distant now, mouth tight with thought.

The silence stretched—not tense, but tired.

Then, inevitably, Hayley broke it.

"I'm done thinking about the end of the world," she muttered and then she shouted, "Someone find me the damned remote."

...

Before anyone could drift too far into their corners—Kol muttering about snacks, Hayley rifling through cabinets—Brunhilda stood.

She cleared her throat, quiet but pointed, and handed out the small protection sachets she'd enchanted earlier that day. No speeches. Just a soft "Keep it on you. Always," as she pressed each one into an open palm. One for each of them—she would give Freya's to her tomorrow.

After that, the mood shifted. The sharp edges dulled. Urgency folded in on itself and retreated to the corners of the room.

Hayley found a stash of microwave popcorn left by a previous tenant and insisted on showing Kol how to use the ancient beige microwave. He insisted that she explain how it worked to him in agonizing detail. When she admitted she didn't know the difference between the 'potato' and 'popcorn' buttons (aside from cook time), Kol immediately implied she was thick for using a device she didn't understand.

Finn stayed at the kitchenette table trying his best to ignore them.

While Kol and Hayley bickered, Rebekah helped Brunhilda wrestle the hidden bedframe out from beneath the couch, metal legs squealing faintly as they extended. They made a loose sprawl of blankets and pillows for the group to lounge on.

Hayley turned on the TV.

The second fight was over what to watch.

Hayley wanted to finish the show about a school teacher cooking meth to pay for medical treatment—a concept completely lost of the vampires. Kol vetoed it when he glimpsed a disemboweled corpse while she flipped to the correct channel and immediately insisted on Criminal Minds. Hayley shot back the plot of Breaking Bad was clearly superior. When they both turned to Brunhilda—clearly hoping to sway her vote—she shrugged and said, "I want to watch cartoons."

Hayley groaned and immediately said that Brunhilda's vote didn't count.

Finn tried to side with Brunhilda, voice mild: "I think I'd like to watch these cartoons too." But Kol immediately snapped that Finn didn't even know what cartoons were. Hayley called Kol out for "faking outrage because he was losing" and pointed out he also didn't know what cartoons were.

"We had picture shows in 1914."

"Oh my god," Hayley muttered. "I know you did not just call it a picture show, you absolute ghoul."

Brunhilda, biting back a smile as their teasing began to devolve into an argument, glanced at Rebekah. "Do you have a preference?"

Rebekah lifted one shoulder in a shrug. "I wouldn't mind seeing what a modern-day cartoon entails."

Somehow, despite having three votes for cartoons, they ended up watching Kol's pick.

Brunhilda lay stretched out on Hayley's left side, both of them tangled in mismatched blankets. Their arms brushed occasionally—elbow to elbow, shoulder to arm, the accidental brush of knuckles. It was a quiet kind of contact, unspoken, grounding.

Kol had claimed the foot of the bed, draped across it like a cat in a sunbeam. Every so often, his hand drifted upward to trace the line of Brunhilda's ankle, light as a thought—barely there. A slow, lazy tease.

The first time, she twitched like he'd sparked her nerves on purpose.

The second time, she kicked his hand away.

By the third, she let it happen.

Kol interrupted the show periodically with questions about the show—after the sixth one, Hayley began to pelt him with popcorn any time he opened his mouth and warned him if he didn't shut up, she'd change the channel.

Rebekah sat upright on Brunhilda's other side, legs folded neatly beneath her, a blanket draped over one shoulder like it belonged there. She hadn't said much, but she didn't need to. She was still. Watchful. Her eyes lingered on Brunhilda longer than necessary—tracking the subtle shifts, the shallow breaths, the tension that never fully left her shoulders. She didn't smile. But she didn't look away either.

Across the room, Finn was still sitting at the table with one of Hayley's romance novels open in his hands. He was frowning—and every few pages, he'd glance up and ask, bewildered questions: "What does it mean that his eyes 'darkened with intent'? Is that literal? Is he a vampire?" Or, more warily, "Would a duke truly refer to himself as 'daddy'?"

Hayley, to her credit (and at Brunhilda's request), had found him a historical romance. She was easing him in slow—no billionaires, no werewolves in heat. Not yet.

The television flickered gently, casting washed-out light across the room. The color shifted every few seconds—blue, then gold, then green—painting tired faces and tousled hair in a moving tapestry of domestic peace.

And Brunhilda, for the first time in longer than she could remember, began to drift.

Not into sleep exactly. Not yet. But into something softer, sappier. Her mind was a blur of plans and everything left undone—but here, beneath the static hum of the television, the quiet rustling of blankets and shared laughter, she let her guard fall.

The last thing she saw was Kol's hand still resting near her ankle, Finn's book held close to his face, Rebekah's eyes still on her, and Hayley murmuring something half-laughed into the air beside her.

Brunhilda let herself drift away.