Aglaope didn’t remember moving.

One moment she stood rooted to the sand, torn between awe and disbelief, and the next—

Her arms were around her.

Around her.

Around the mother she had dreamed of, the mother she had mourned. Her cheek pressed against the golden fabric of Euterpe’s robes, and the scent—warm parchment, salt air, and something faintly floral—wrapped around her like a lullaby half-remembered.

She didn’t sob. Not yet. The grief was too deep for tears. It was the kind that lived in marrow, quiet and hollow and wide.

Thelxiepe hesitated. Her body trembled with tension, every muscle braced for the illusion to vanish—for the lie to show its teeth.

But it didn’t.

Euterpe looked at her with that same soft smile. She said nothing. She didn’t need to.

And that was what undid her.

Thelxiepe stepped forward, rigid at first—like a soldier approaching the pyre of a fallen comrade—but her pace quickened until she was pulled in too, arms slipping around the figure that had haunted her dreams, her questions, her anger.

For a breathless moment, they stood together on the shore—daughter and daughter and mother, caught in the stillness of reunion. The waves whispered their rhythm behind them. The sun kissed their faces.

And the world, for the first time in many lives, felt whole.

Euterpe closed her eyes.

Her arms encircled them both, her hands cradling the back of their heads as though afraid to let go, as though her own body had never stopped aching for this embrace.

“My brave girls,” she murmured, her voice a tremor of reverence and regret. “You’ve grown into forces I could never have imagined.”

Aglaope’s voice broke against her shoulder. “Why did you leave us?”

“I didn’t want to,” Euterpe whispered, pressing a kiss into her hair. “I was taken from you… and I have been trying to return ever since.”

Thelxiepe’s grip tightened. “Why now?”

Euterpe pulled back just enough to meet both their eyes, her own brimming with a sorrow that glowed like starlight.

“Because the world is shifting,” she said.

She stepped back from the embrace, fingers lingering for just a moment on each of their cheeks. Then, with a soft breath and a glance toward the horizon, she turned and began walking down the shoreline. The sea pulled at the edges of her golden robes, but she didn’t seem to notice. Or perhaps she belonged to it, just as much as it belonged to her.

Aglaope and Thelxiepe exchanged a look—full of questions, full of something like awe—and fell into step behind her.

“You have questions,” Euterpe said gently, without turning. “And I owe you truths.”

“Start with her,” Thelxiepe said, her voice steadier now. “Harahel. Who is she… really?”

Euterpe slowed, then stopped, and the breeze caught her hair, lifting it like strands of sunlight. She turned to face them again, her eyes bright and unreadable.

“She is me,” she said simply. “And she is not.”

Aglaope blinked. “That’s… not helpful.”

Euterpe smiled, small and knowing. “Harahel is my echo—my incarnation in the mortal world. She is Euterpe, yes… but she is also Thalia, and Polyhymnia.”

Thelxiepe’s brow furrowed. “Three of you… in one?”

“Yes,” Euterpe said, her voice low and thick with sorrow. “When the Muses were scattered—when we were forbidden to walk the world as we once did—unbeknownst to your father, the goddess Rhea allowed us to leave impressions behind. Embers, not flames. Harahel was born of those embers.”

Aglaope stopped walking. “So she is you. And not you.”

“She carries my song,” Euterpe said, her eyes distant now, as if peering into a memory. “Thalia’s joy. She carries my reverence, Polyhymnia’s depth. And yes, she carries my sorrow.”

“How much of this does she know?” Thelxiepe asked quietly.

“She knows only what Rhea revealed to her,” Euterpe said. “Rhea will reveal the rest when the time is right.”

“And how much does Father know?” Aglaope asked.

“The usual,” Euterpe said, a wry smile tugging at her lips. “Just enough to be dangerous.”

Gadriel's fingers twitched, aching to be free of the binds that held her—not out of fear, but out of a desperate longing to do something. Himerope’s grip was iron around her wrists, and Rhaemisia flanked her like a stone sentinel, but Gadriel barely registered the ache anymore. Her eyes were fixed ahead—on the three women now standing in a trance-like stillness, their hands still joined.

Harahel. Aglaope. Thelxiepe.

But they weren’t just standing. They were elsewhere. Gone into some unseen current, pulled beneath the surface of time and memory.

And Gadriel—bound and breathless—could only watch.

She hated it.

Hated the helplessness, the waiting. The fact that this moment—the moment she had tried to prepare for in a hundred possible variations—was now unfolding without her influence, without her voice, without her touch on the scale.

She narrowed her eyes.

Their faces were too still. The air too heavy. It was not merely magic—it was truth.

A mother revealing herself.

Children remembering.

A bond rethreading itself across lifetimes.

And yet, Gadriel felt no jealousy.

Only relief.

Because—thank the gods—none of her daughters were here.

If they had been—if her blood had reached out and felt that same pulse, that same divine current—Gadriel wasn’t sure what she would’ve done.

Would she have broken?

Would she have wept?

Would she have lashed out, not in defiance, but in sheer vulnerability?

She clenched her jaw and inhaled slowly through her nose, locking her emotions behind glass.

No. It was better this way.

Let Harahel falter. Let her eyes glisten with fragile hope and tremble with ancient grief.

Gadriel’s mind remained clear. That, at least, was something she could control.

But then—she heard it.

Not a footstep. Not the rustle of leaves.  A song.

Soft at first. So faint it could’ve been the wind threading through the branches. But no—there was rhythm to it. Cadence. A harmony too deliberate to be natural, too haunting to be welcome.

Her head snapped to the side.

Himerope and Rhaemisia didn’t react. Their gazes remained fixed on the trance-bound trio, their stances rigid and unflinching. As if they hadn’t heard it at all.

But Gadriel had always trusted her instincts. She cocked her head, straining to catch the sound more clearly.

There it was again—just beneath the heartbeat of the jungle. Notes floating on air, silver and low. Wordless, yet woven with intent. It slid through the underbrush like silk, coiling in the shadows, brushing against her skin like memory.

And then the harmony shifted.

No longer one voice.

Two.

Maybe three.

Close now.

And not kind.

Some time had passed, though neither Aglaope nor Thelxiepe could say how long. The tide had crept higher, soft waves tugging at the hems of their robes as they sat on the sand in silence, watching the sea breathe.

The sky had shifted, too—brushed with deeper shades of violet and indigo, stars beginning to blink awake in the vast dome above them. And still, neither spoke.

They were trying—truly trying—to wrap their minds around all that their mother had told them.

Thelxiepe sat with her knees drawn to her chest, arms wrapped tightly around them. Her gaze was fixed on the horizon, but her thoughts churned like the tide. Echoes of Euterpe’s voice ran laps through her mind. Impressions, not flames. Embers. Three muses in one girl. A world shifting beneath their feet.

“So, Gadriel is our aunts—but she’s not our aunt?” she asked. “And Harahel is our mother and our aunts, but she’s not our mother or our aunts?”
Aglaope, lying on her back with one arm flung across her forehead, let out a long breath. “Thelxiepe, please—my head is spinning as it is.”

Despite her best efforts, Euterpe couldn’t help it.

A soft giggle slipped from her lips—a light, airy sound that rose above the hush of the waves and settled gently between her daughters. It was the kind of laugh they hadn’t heard in what felt like lifetimes: unburdened, warm, maternal. Thelxiepe looked up, startled, and Aglaope lowered her arm just enough to peer at their mother.

Euterpe stood not far from them, her silhouette bathed in the indigo twilight, golden robes catching the starlight as though stitched with threads of dawn. One hand covered her mouth, but the mirth in her eyes was unmistakable.

“Forgive me,” she said, still smiling, “It’s just… you sound exactly like your father when he’s trying to understand something layered in metaphor.”

Aglaope groaned and let her head fall back into the sand. “Of course we do.”

Thelxiepe frowned. “That’s not comforting.”

“No,” Euterpe agreed gently, walking toward them and lowering herself to the sand with a grace that made her seem more breeze than flesh. “But it is familiar. And sometimes, that’s enough.”

She reached out, brushing a strand of sea-tangled hair from Thelxiepe’s cheek. “You don’t need to make sense of it all at once. The truth, like the tide, doesn’t come all at once. It rises. Slowly. And eventually, it covers everything.”

Thelxiepe leaned into her mother’s touch, her brows still knit with unease. “But we’ve lost so much time.”

Euterpe’s expression softened. “And yet, you found your way back to me.”

Aglaope sat up then, blinking against the salt breeze. “What happens now?”

Euterpe looked out to sea, her smile fading into something quieter. “Now… we begin again.”

She turned to face them both. “There are still many songs left to sing. And not all of them are mine.”

A hush fell over the shore, the kind that stretched beyond silence—something ancient, something waiting.

Aglaope felt it first. A subtle lurch beneath her skin, like the earth had shifted its weight, like something inside her had tilted off-balance.

Thelxiepe’s breath caught. She reached out, fingers brushing Aglaope’s arm.

The moment shattered like glass beneath a boot.

A tremor ran through the air, and then the light shifted—just slightly. The sea breeze vanished. The gold of the horizon drained from the sky. The scent of salt gave way to the thick, damp perfume of the jungle once more.

Thelxiepe blinked.

Aglaope sucked in a sharp breath.

The vision had ended.

They were back.

Thelxiepe’s heart pounded in her chest, her skin clammy despite the humid heat.

Euterpe was gone.

But her voice still echoed in their ears.

Her truths still clung like vines around their ribs.

Aglaope’s eyes flicked to Harahel—not Euterpe anymore. Not exactly.

She was breathing hard, visibly shaken. Her eyes shimmered, not with divine light but with human emotion. Fear. Hope. Longing.

Thelxiepe looked too, and for one heartbeat, all three stood suspended in that unbearable silence.

Aglaope’s fingers flexed at her side.

Thelxiepe took a half-step back.

Neither moved toward Harahel.

Neither moved away.

Because the woman standing before them was both mother and stranger. Euterpe... and not. She had held them once in golden light, whispered lullabies into their souls. But now she stood before them in mortal form—trembling, fallible, and fragile.

Aglaope’s lips parted, but no words came.

Thelxiepe's expression was unreadable. Her mind, usually a fortress of strategy and certainty, now whirled with fragments of memory and emotion she didn’t know how to place.

Do we hug her?

Before either of them could decide—

Thelxiepe turned. Her body went rigid.

“Where are Himerope and Rhaemisia?” she asked

Aglaope turned sharply, scanning the clearing. Her gaze landed on the spot where the sister Sirens had been—empty. Her heart lurched. "And where's Gadriel?"