I marvel at how this place—wherever it is—is the near opposite of the ogof y ddraig: Instead of standing on an ancient boulder in the center of a pond in the middle of a stone cave, I am standing on a moss-covered mound in the center of a growing forest. Where the ogof feels sacred and preserved, this place feels both ancient and alive. Where Excalibur slept, I stand. In this place, I am the blade.

I turn back to face Arthur’s stream. All that remains is a stretch of damp soil.

A voice behind me—crystal clear, proud—splits the silence open. “Daughter of daughters.”

Relief floods my chest. “Vera.” It doesn’t take long to find her. She stands in a stream on the other side of the mossy stone. She is as I last saw her in my room in the Lodge. Bathed in blood and flame, hair a crown of its own.

“Where am I?”

“Where you have been before.” She extends a hand for aid, and I lean forward to help her up onto the stone beside me. Her skin is warm, her palm and fingers firm. My lower body is chilled from the water, but she looks perfectly dry. Behind her, the small waterway she’d stood in babbles quietly. “The plane between life and death.”

“It doesn’t look the same.” I wrap my arms around myself.

“The plane can appear as many things,” Vera says with a smirk. “Before you visited me in my vision. Now, I am visiting you in yours.”

“But it’s not mine, not really. It was the Rite’s.”

She presses her lips into a line in the barest hint of displeasure. “Tell me about this Rite.”

“It’s a ritual for the Legendborn. It brought me to a room and a table and Arthur’s knights.”

“The king’s men may claim the ritual, but they cannot claim the plane as their own.” Her Southern accent wraps around the words like a blanket, pulling them close together in a soft drawl. “No one owns the space between bloodlines, between ancestors and descendants. Not even the dead.” She huffs and trails a hand through the billowing mist at our knees. “The spellcraft the king’s men use to create the plane in their image is but a poor sorcerer’s fabrication of what a natural-born Medium can achieve in this place. What you can do as your power grows.”

I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”

She hums and glances over my shoulder to the empty soil behind me then gestures to the stream from which she emerged, still running. “The streams are passageways. Your bloodlines made manifest.”