The River and the Star

Book 2: The Warring Gods

by Gabriela Romero Lacruz

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Dark Fantasy; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

In the gripping conclusion to the Warring Gods duology, two women find themselves caught in an ancient feud between ruthless entities, and embark on an epic quest for power and liberation.
 
Reina is full of hope.
 
At long last, Reina has the peace she’s been searching for on the idyllic islands of Tierra’e Sol with the lover she's always wanted and in service to the god of the sun. But she can’t quite trust how long this will last. When monstrous creatures of the Void appear on the isle’s shores, she is certain she knows who is behind the attacks. Reina will stop at nothing to protect the woman she loves, but it could cost her everything she’s fought so hard for.
 
Eva is cherished.
 
Finally reunited with her father, the Liberator, Eva struggles to prove herself worthy of being his heir while keeping secret her alliance with the god of the Void. As destruction, both human and magical, tears across the lands, Eva is thrust into a power struggle she’s ill-prepared for. Confronted with the limits of her own ambition, Eva must fight to save herself from the powerful corruption of the Void before she loses the family she holds dear.
 
The warring gods are returning and the only thing between them and absolute power are two young women. But for the first time in their lives, Reina and Eva have something to fight for. And they won’t back down.
 

Release date: October 7, 2025

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 560

Sample

Moonlight showered Maior. She was radiant in a gossamer gown, like a beauty plucked out of an oil painting. Reina took her in so deeply, half listening to her chatter, too distracted as she considered her good luck. How she could take Maior’s hand in hers anytime she longed for the contact, unhesitant and unafraid. Oblivious, Maior tucked her raven hair behind her ear, revealing the dotted constellation of moles on her neck, the sign that had sent them on a colliding path.

Soft breezes enveloped them as they headed for the docks. Reina squeezed Maior’s hand and delighted in her blushing smile. Two soldiers trailed behind them, following Reina’s lead.

Together, they had spent the day scouring Isla Bendita, the smallest inhabited island of Tierra’e Sol’s cay formation. Reina had organized the expedition after rumors of demons had reached the Liberator’s manse in Isla Madre, of animals found with their chests carved open and emptied of hearts. The gossip sounded like the dangerous first sighting of a tiniebla or two. So she’d enlisted the soldiers to aid with their swords, and Maior to serve as their healer. But their search had come up empty. They’d failed to find any tinieblas. Reina was worn out and ready to return home, though a bit disappointed.

“So you had a bucket of moras,” Reina said absentmindedly, following Maior’s recounting of her past.

“Oh, yes, I was about eight years or so. I ate so many I think I looked like a deranged murderer to Sister Maria—she was a young nun,” Maior said, and Reina offered a soft laugh, imagining it. “I gave her a fright. My whole face was smeared with red goo—”

“A man-eater,” Reina noted.

“And it gave me the worst stomachache—” A sudden agonized scream cut through Maior’s words.

Reina turned in the direction of the sound: the jungle they had just emerged from to reach the docks. With a flick of her fingers and wrist, Reina quickly summoned the enhanced sight and strength of bismuto from her geomancia rings. The spell opened her eyes to the unseen, in case a tiniebla lurked about.

Maior blanched, her beauty interrupted. “Is that…”

“What we’ve been looking for,” Reina finished for her as apprehension tightened her chest. The scream could only mean the tiniebla had found a new victim. They needed to move fast.

Reina ordered one soldier to stay with Maior and the other to follow her into the jungle so they could cover twice as much area. Then they rushed after the screams, which shortly quieted. In the jungle, they split.

With Reina’s senses on high alert, every shadow took on an alarming shape. Vines looped over thick trunks, twisting, becoming vipers. Slick leaves the size of banners tugged her clothes like the faint grip of phantoms. Anthills gave under her boots. As the knotted greenery impeded her path, Reina hacked her way through with Ches’s Blade. Her golden blade.

A void emptied the sounds of the jungle. The amphibians and nocturnal critters hushed, as did Reina, pausing. For the first time in a month, since she had emerged from the rubble of Rahmagut’s tomb, Reina’s instincts prickled her skin with a warning. She felt a familiar yet uncomfortable constricting in her chest from the pumping of her iridio heart.

But warmth from Ches’s Blade flooded her with reassurance, even as she was still brittle from the last time she’d fought tinieblas. The thought of encountering the heart-ravenous demons again, how their bodies were amalgamated from parts of random animals, reminded Reina of her grandmother, who’d commanded tinieblas in Rahmagut’s tomb. Doña Ursulina had used them to sacrifice innocent women in the name of Rahmagut.

Reina would never be same after her grandmother’s betrayal. She was changed, fragmented, taking people’s words and turning them around and around in her head, evaluating the true intention beneath them. No longer was she desperate to achieve unimpeachable acceptance—now she knew such a thing was a fantasy. She was not a broken girl begging for love anymore. She was a woman rebuilding from nothing, without a family or home.

Her handle on the golden pommel of Ches’s Blade grew warmer. Despite her grandmother’s plots and lies, Reina had survived. She still had a future, and she was alight with strength and the drive to find atonement by serving her new community.

Maybe it was this actualization, or maybe something else. But since emerging from the tomb, her skin vibrated anytime she wielded Ches’s Blade. She had done the unimaginable for her grandmother, yet her heart blazed with her belief in Ches. If the tinieblas were Rahmagut’s creations seeding chaos into the world, then Reina would be Ches’s agent, vanquishing them. Tierra’e Sol and its people had welcomed her with open arms. In return, she would gladly keep them safe.

She shoved vines away from her face as she entered a swampy clearing. Twigs snapped ahead. Reina plunged forward, circling the pond and continuing down a path that could not have been carved by an animal. She slid down a steep incline and arrived on two shaky feet beside an outcrop where a hunter’s cabin stood.

She crossed a cloud of gnats and glanced around the cabin’s back door. Upon inspecting the hinges, Reina found it had been forced open. She announced her entry, but no one answered.

With her boots tracking in mud, Reina stepped into a small kitchen. As she passed a corridor, her nose wrinkled from the sharp smell of recently spilled blood, intensified by her bismuto spell.

She shoved open a door and found a middle-aged man lying on a bed soaked in an overflow of red. His eyes stared blankly at the ceiling, mouth agape. His fingernails were lifted and bloodstained from a struggle. His robe was torn open in the middle, the fabric mopping up the blood leaking from his chest. His ribs had been snapped, his chest carved empty.

Reina covered her mouth with her fist, swallowing the nausea. She didn’t bother inspecting him further. This was the work of a tiniebla.

Fuming, she whirled on her heels to search for it—to give the tiniebla an end befitting its actions.

The house was silent, save for the gentle twinkle of wind chimes coming from the porch. Reina tore into every room, finding each one empty. A door squeaked from the back patio, followed by the clatter of hooves on tiles. She rushed out and immediately met the bipedal fiend.

The moon lit a creature with the upper body of a man and the legs of a goat. The head was in the twisted amalgamation of a jaguar and a capuchin, with flared nostrils and a spotted forehead. The dead man’s blood was still smeared across the tiniebla’s sneering mouth, with tendrils of red sticking to the edges of its lips.

The tiniebla swung a pustulated arm at her, entering Reina’s reach. Time slowed to a crawl, as if her bismuto-dilated pupils and swollen muscles could react to movements far faster than these.

Reina’s blade severed the arm with ease. The monster let out a deserving howl. She swerved back for a finishing blow and nearly threw her body with a strength she didn’t know she had. Surprised, she found her balance and cut a life-rending gash through the tiniebla’s middle. The monster faded into nothing. As a creature of shadow, it left no physical remains.

The lack of challenge was… disappointing. If not for the need to see the tiniebla, the use of bismuto enhancement felt unnecessary.

After sheathing her blade, she slipped out of her leather gloves. She lifted a hand before her, inspecting her bismuto-ringed fingers under the moonlight. This strangeness in her body unnerved her. The strength—could this be the result of training with Don Samón’s soldiers? Had she truly not challenged herself completely since entering the Liberator’s service?

She scowled. Ever since the night at the tomb, Reina had wistfully nurtured the idea that its destruction would bring the end of tinieblas. She had worked under Ches’s guidance, smiting her grandmother and causing the sanctum to collapse. She’d hoped this had been enough to counter Rahmagut, the god of the Void whom Doña Ursulina had nearly sacrificed Celeste and Maior for. True, it was a naïve wish, but she’d reasoned that if Rahmagut had no altar to be worshipped, then surely his manipulations of the physical world from the Void would end. But a tiniebla in Isla Bendita turned this theory on its head.

Just as Reina was wondering how it had made it to the island, and if it was alone, another scream pierced through the night and right into her heart. Reina sprinted back into the house. She drew her blade and followed the cries, finding she had missed a door to an underground cellar, which was slightly ajar. She kicked it open and was assaulted by a metallic scent she knew all too well.

The cellar thundered from the toppling of furniture. Reina descended and found another feral tiniebla towering over an adolescent nozariel boy. The room was in disarray, as if from a mad chase ending with the boy using a small crate as the only barrier between him and the canine mandibles snapping for him. He used the crate as a shield, terrified and blind to the threat, for without bismuto he was unable to see the tiniebla that had already bitten a large chunk of his arm.

Reina tackled the tiniebla off him, shoving the boy away as the creature swiped at her. She swung, decapitating it in a single strike.

Afterward, she knelt by the boy, who heaved as he held his bleeding arm. “Something—I couldn’t see—something bit me,” he said.

Reina’s breath caught upon seeing the large bite. Her own healed arm itched with the memory of the tiniebla attack she had endured a lifetime ago. “Who else lives in this house?” she asked.

He was too horrified to answer, so she moved closer, shushing him while gently wiping tears away. His cheeks and pointed nozariel ears were splattered with blood. “It’s all right,” she said. “The tiniebla is gone. Another one will not get past me.” Which raised the question: How many had made it here? “Does anyone else live with you?” she asked.

He nodded and sobbed, “My father.”

Reina held her breath. “What is your name?”

“Juan Pablo.”

Gently, she inspected his wounded arm. The ring on her middle finger carried a solution of galio with enough potency to allow her to cast simple first aid spells. But Reina didn’t have the expertise to mend such a bite, with its concave emptiness revealing tendons and bone. Suddenly, Juan Pablo curled on the ground, as if struck by a pain more immense than just his injured arm.

Reina cursed. Her hands trembled as she moved him to get a better look. Moaning, he shut his eyes in agony. He gripped her wrist, seeking reassurance, but Reina’s chest fissured even more.

“And my father? Is he all right?” His big, teary eyes bore into Reina. “Please—he is all I have.”

Before Reina could answer, he screamed in anguish.

Reina knew exactly what that felt like. She had nearly died from a tiniebla bite when she crossed the Páramo Mountains in search of a better life. She knew the tiniebla’s corruption was going to take his heart.

The devilish whispers in her iridio heart rejoiced, awakened after a monthlong slumber, mocking her.

Reina hauled Juan Pablo over her shoulders and sprinted back through the jungle, enraged. Despite her search, the tinieblas had still taken a life. What if there were more? How were they supposed to scour every cay of Tierra’e Sol? And where were the wards guarding against them? Had Reina’s arrival or the events in Rahmagut’s tomb triggered attacks never seen in these parts before?

She returned to Maior’s and the soldier’s shocked faces.

“I found tinieblas,” Reina said, gently lowering Juan Pablo so he could sit on the docks’ briny steps.

He watched her with big, confused eyes. She understood his bewilderment better than anyone. She tried calming him with whispers of hope that sounded like lies to her, for she knew no words would be enough.

Maior grabbed her bag of supplies from the canoe. She brought bandages and several vials sloshing with different galio solutions. The soldier lit a torch while Maior’s galio healing made quick work of stitching whatever she could of the wound. Then she yanked Juan Pablo’s shirt off to inspect the source of his pain. Stunned, they stared at the varicose black stains crawling from his arm to his heart, as darkness claimed the healthy tissue and replaced it with necrosis.

“Reina?” Maior looked to her for reassurance.

“One of the tinieblas got to him,” Reina said with gritted teeth. She hated admitting it aloud, while the poor boy was still conscious and desperate for some reprieve. “I was too late. Maior… the darkness—it’s going to corrupt his heart. It’s what tinieblas do. It’s what they did to me.”

Scowling, as if refusing this fate, Maior summoned a different galio spell to her hands. Reina’s bismuto high lingered, allowing her to view the manifestation of Maior’s geomancia—a soft lavender hue—as it twirled around her fingers like satin laces and curled within her palms before she pressed them against Juan Pablo’s chest. There, the galio spell tried to take root, digging. But as Juan Pablo groaned, it was rejected. The darkness only spread farther.

“We should go back to Isla Madre,” Reina said as the second soldier returned from the jungle. She felt a panic rising in her throat. She’d lived because Doña Ursulina had acted quickly after her tiniebla attack.

Maior ignored her. She tried a different vial of galio. And another. Splotches of red spread about her neck. She switched through several pairs of rings from her bag to fight the rot. And Reina watched with a hollow growing in her belly as she realized Maior’s geomancia couldn’t hold a candle to the roaring firestorm of Doña Ursulina’s dark magic. Her beating iridio heart was a miracle bestowed from darkness.

They were wasting time.

“We have to go to Dr. Baltasar! This is not enough,” Reina snapped, wrenching Maior’s hands away from the boy.

Immediately Reina realized she’d overreacted from the reflection in Maior’s wounded eyes.

Juan Pablo howled in pain, and there was no time to apologize. They ushered him into the canoe and rowed back to Isla Madre at full speed. Maior faced away on the ride, her wavy hair surfing the air. When Reina placed a tentative hand on Maior’s lower back, aching for her attention, Maior flinched and didn’t meet her eyes.

Dawn arrived in Isla Madre. Reina paced the halls as Juan Pablo’s screams echoed through the infirmary. There was no escaping them. She could be a coward and leave. She could pretend she wasn’t affected, but her very bones understood the pain ravaging him. And his likely fate.

Dr. Baltasar, Maior’s employer, had sequestered her and a few other nurses to aid him with Juan Pablo. The boy’s cries seemingly went on for hours. Until they suddenly stopped.

When a hush quieted the infirmary, Reina stormed out, the need to retaliate blazing through her veins. But how would she? How could she stop these creatures that seemed innumerable and unstoppable? The moment she slayed one, or a dozen, another came back. She’d thought the blood she spilled in Rahmagut’s tomb would be the end of her violent path, yet the bodies kept piling up.

She walked without thinking and took a detour behind the infirmary. She stopped beside a window, drawn by the familiar voices coming out of its halfway-open shutters. Dr. Baltasar said, “You must learn to let go, Maior. The mercy was to stop his heart.”

Reina gripped the handle of her blade as the adrenaline from her earlier fight resurged.

Around her, Isla Madre’s bustle came alive with the arriving morning, unaware of the lost life. Music flowed from one of the houses sitting on cobbled roads. The wind lifted wayward sand around Reina’s legs and brought the smell of baked bread. A trader passed by her, guiding a donkey and his cart of freshly harvested mangoes. When he offered good mornings and waved, Reina had no choice but to let go of her anger. She offered him a meek wave back.

This was her community now. In the short, first month of her stay, the people of Tierra’e Sol had welcomed her with the same openness Don Samón afforded her. Reina wore a pained smile as she considered how innocent they seemed, isolated from the mainland’s conflicts. If Reina, Maior, and Eva were going to make this town their new home, they needed to shield it from the darkness they brought due to their involvement with the god of the Void.

Desperate for answers, she took the all-too-familiar canopied path to the tomb. Sweat clung to her back, her lips were chapped, and a headache hammered her. She ignored the discomfort as she rushed toward the caved-in opening of the tomb. Until now, she’d avoided returning out of cowardice. But this was where she needed to be to better understand the aftermath and why tinieblas were drawn to the islands. She knew she needed to swallow her own anxiety, if she truly believed herself a protector of this community.

Dense greenery encroached on the dirt path. The air smelled sweet and bitter from the rotting sea grapes hanging off surrounding bushes. Reina hacked an opening through the leaves. She met the lagoon facing the tomb’s mouth, with its crystalline waters reflecting prisms over her skin and clothes. A man sat on the largest boulder flanking the lagoon. He rose, as if awaiting her. He had dark brown skin and long, straight white hair crowned by two magnificent antlers, thick, like those of a pure-blooded valco.

Reina froze. The clearing quieted. Her heartbeats thrummed in her ears.

Then a name rolled out of her mouth, and Reina wasn’t sure if she’d been the one to put it there.

“Ches?”

As soon as she said it, it felt right. But it was a shock to see that her god of the sun was a valco—entirely unlike the way she’d imagined him.

He was dressed simply, in a white cotton shirt and ankle-length fishing pants. His unmoving smile confirmed it all. “Reina,” he said.

His voice sent chills through her.

She did the first thing that crossed her mind. She collapsed to her knees for a deep bow, her forehead grazing the packed dirt beneath. How else was she supposed to revere he who gave light to this world?

A soft hand on her chin lifted her head. She hadn’t even heard his approach, as if his steps were made of sunlight. But it made sense that he had the power to be everywhere all at once.

“There is no need for that. And it is much too late for reverence. I have been with you for some time now.” His words filled the clearing, coming from all angles.

Reina rose, meeting his red eyes, which were curiously devoid of pupils. It unnerved her for a moment.

His smile widened. She shuddered from being perceived by him, rocked by a surge of emotion she didn’t know she’d been bottling up.

He looked at her the way her father, Juan Vicente, did—filled with love and empty of the judgment everyone else held for her half-breed nozariel existence. It was like a homecoming. Reina shrunk to the size of a child and pressed her grimy palms against her eyes as tears rushed out of her. The ache for her grandmother, whose life she had brutally ended, crawled out of her heart. Guilt constricted her throat, preventing her from breathing. Reina shook as she recognized how vulnerable she was once again, starting from scratch, without the family and home she’d once thought guaranteed with Doña Ursulina and the Águilas. How could she, the fragmented creature she was, be worthy to face a god?

Ches squeezed her shoulder until she had no more tears to give. When her breath returned, it was clean, free of the weight she’d carried all month. Reina wiped her face. She couldn’t even muster embarrassment for breaking down before him. Perhaps he had planned this.

“It takes courage to pick yourself up,” Ches said. He motioned her to join him on the same slippery boulder where he’d sat.

“Thank you,” she said, and he nodded. “I am confused—surprised,” she said, quickly correcting herself, “that you are valco.” Though she wondered if she was being shallow, for being disappointed that he wasn’t of her kind.

His upper lip twitched. “Everywhere, mortals depict me in their likeness. With antlers and without antlers. With tails and without. Those who built the tomb where you saw my statue were fallible. Do not take their portrayal as the ultimate truth. How I appear is not what is important, but rather that I am able to appear at all.”

Reina frowned, not understanding.

“I hope by now you are comfortable with me,” he said.

“I’ve always been.”

He raised his bushy brows. He wielded otherworldly beauty, with his high cheekbones and smooth, thick lips. “No. You renounced me. You claimed Rahmagut as your patron.”

Reina’s cheeks warmed. Indeed, soon after Doña Laurel’s death and darkness had descended over Águila Manor, Reina had convinced herself that Rahmagut would be the god to solve her suffering. But like any cheap remedy, it was never true.

She shook her head. “I was wrong.” She almost bowed again, but Ches’s gaze arrested her in place. “You were always my patron.”

“I am more than that now. I am inside you.”

Reina squeezed her shirt, breathless. She froze and searched his eyes, finding nothing but unwavering truth.

“I am presenting myself so there is no doubt. I was gone, but I have returned. All the power my banishment denied this world is here, in your body.”

Reina cleared her throat, remembering to breathe. “You were gone, and now you’ve returned, through me?”

“I can take over your mind, bring you here or anywhere, whenever I wish. I am back, Reina, imprisoned in you, as you are chained to me.”

Her chest faltered. The elation she’d felt after crying crumbled into confusion. “I’m your vessel?”

He nodded. “This is not an invasion. But that is a capability I wield.”

Reina’s stomach turned as she remembered how Doña Ursulina had controlled her. The moments that weren’t her own. The terror of being trapped in her own body, performing someone else’s actions. She hated what Ches was implying. But what was she to do against a god?

He leaned in closer. “Now listen to me. You are my host for as long as you live. I chose you. But you are not unique. There have been others before you. Do not squander your life. I command it.”

“I won’t,” she replied. “I’m ready to fight.” She’d lost everything, except her strength, which was as sharp as the golden blade hanging from her hip. She knew she had to protect the people of Tierra’e Sol, and Maior. She’d promised, after all.

Ches nodded, satisfied. “The events resulting in my sealing destroyed my physical body. Thus, I am forced to exist in the bodies of mortals, like yours. But it is important that you never doubt or forget: Your death does not mean the end of me. I will simply find a different host, and our bond will have been a waste of my time. This holds true even for the person that charlatan chose.”

“Rahmagut returned, just like you?”

A strong gust lifted the leaves strewn about the clearing. Ches’s anger was answer enough.

“And he took someone else?” Reina guessed. By mere process of elimination, she supposed it had to be someone who was in the tomb with her. Reina’s stomach clenched, hoping Maior’s possession by Doña Laurel had barred her from also hosting the god of the Void.

“He chose the person best suited to wield the power of iridio.”

Reina sucked in a deep breath as she immediately knew the answer.

“Eva?” She grimaced. “But how could this happen? I thought my grandmother meant only to commune with Rahmagut. She couldn’t have known she would be unsealing him.” She didn’t add or you at the end, but as scorn flashed through his eyes, it was clear he knew her thoughts.

“After our sealing, I slumbered in the Void.” Ches’s voice echoed in the clearing. Gusts whipped at Reina’s braid. “But that man—that viper—instead of admitting defeat and slumbering with me, continued to intrude into the physical world.” Ches rose, giving Reina his back, as if he wanted to avoid showing the ugly hatred on his face. “He continued making tinieblas, knowing their devastation undermines the faith mortals place in gods. He planted dreams in people, fabricating stories of our strife, pretending his power matched mine. From the Void, he behaved as a patron to practitioners of Void geomancia and seeded tales of his Claw. Soon enough his legend gained validity, and it served as a motivation to offer him sacrifices every forty-two years.”

Ches faced her, and she knew he was challenging her to see if she understood the ties that fundamentally brought him and mortals closer together. “Gods gain power from sacrifices,” she said.

“The damas your grandmother butchered in the tomb, both during your time and when she assisted her lover forty-two years prior. The babes you abandoned in the mountains.”

Reina’s cheeks blazed with shame. She would never be able to erase the dark stain of what she had done. Even to this day, she carried those deaths with her.

“Eventually, I grew strong enough to break free from the seal.”

Reina knew she would be blasphemous for pushing back, but she couldn’t stop herself. “How did you gain power from those sacrifices?”

Ches’s lip curled in dissatisfaction, and a chill of fear stirred through Reina. “Rahmagut survived the Void because he bound himself to me. Every sacrifice made to him also fed me. Now listen, I am not here to bring you fame, riches, or conquest. I am not your tool. I may not share the ambitions of a mortal, nor the desire to reign over your life, but I will not be undermined.”

Reina shook her head. “I wouldn’t—”

“You couldn’t,” he barked, and the words were a tremor that shook the clearing. Moist leaves collapsed from the canopy. The lagoon shuddered. “Let this moment be an introduction. Remember my likeness. You will need to grow strong with me. Rahmagut cannot be left unchecked. He threatened this world once, and I fear he may do so again.”

Reina’s pulse quickened as she stared at her hands. More questions threatened to bubble out of her. But to a god, every question could be a challenge. “But why now? If you came into my body after I destroyed this tomb, why are you appearing to me now?”

Her heartbeats were loud in his silence. Had she angered him again, in daring to demand answers?

She stared down at her boots, and he replied, “Because it is now that you chose to return to the tomb. It took you all this time to muster your courage to face me. You were not ready, so I gave you time.”

In that moment, Reina’s heart filled with love for him. Ches was a god. He didn’t owe her anything. He behaved in ways she couldn’t comprehend, and it was nonsensical to assume she could. But he understood her. This was enough.

She glanced up, offering a smile of gratitude, but he was gone.

The lagoon was once again silent without him. Feeble rays of sunlight filtered through the canopy. She extended her arms to feel the sun on her brown skin and realized that since emerging from the tomb, she indeed had been experiencing the world differently. She wielded heightened senses. It was why she ran twice as fast, even without bismuto. Why she’d nearly cut herself from the fierce swings of her own sword. Breezes rustled around her, tickling trees that appeared brighter and more saturated to her eyes. The lagoon’s surface shone, more crystalline than ever. The jungle smelled wetter.

She was bound to Ches forever.

Reina searched within herself, prodding for him, wondering if she would feel it. She only sensed his company, like an unseen presence in a room where she wasn’t alone, and it was how she knew she hadn’t made this up. She knew Ches would be silent unless he chose to show himself, which was fine with her.

Bound, until death.

She wished she could ask him how he felt about this. How would he feel about going through her life by her side? Living as she lived?

Perhaps he had chosen her out of convenience, but that didn’t diminish how special he made her feel. Hosting him was an honor, and now, her greatest challenge. She was not going to disappoint him.

Every afternoon, the sun left Tierra’e Sol in a salty haze. Eva reveled in the idleness as she approached Isla Madre’s plaza with her hair salt-wild and her espadrilles muddy from the day’s gathering of geomancia reagents. The townsfolk were silent, retreating to their homes to prepare supper. Babies cried distantly, as did seagulls. Even on the cobbled path from the plaza to Don Samón’s manse, one could hear the waves. They carried a healing rhythm. A coming and going, its predictability bringing the comfort Eva so desperately needed after the chaos she had encountered when she left Galeno.

The path to the manse hugged Isla Madre’s burial grounds, a resting place for the island’s inhabitants long before Don Samón moved in. Every time Eva passed the grounds after sunset, curiosity and apprehension would fill her, raising the hairs on her arm. The grounds weren’t empty.

Sometimes, from the corner of her eye, Eva thought she could see the ghosts. They clung to the land, hiding behind the mango trees planted by the island’s first settlers. She saw them in the gardens surrounding the Pentimiento chapel as well, shooting furtive glances before disappearing around a corner. Men with mustaches, espadrilles, and j