Ultimately, Ryleigh decided, there was little harm in unlocking her memories. If it turned out the pain was still too pungent, and the recollections of her past friends proved too much of a temptation, she could always lock them away again. Looking at it like that, there was little reason not to.
She left the mansion through the backdoor, or through what was once, in a different era long before her own, a backdoor, but that was now a gaping hole in the decaying wall, and walked a little way into the forest. She didn't want any prying eyes for what she was about to do. Manipulating memories was a delicate business and the last thing she needed was for someone to interrupt the process. If she lost focus even for a second, she could accidentally erase something important, and since she wouldn't remember what it was, she wouldn't be able to retrieve it either.
It was an unfamiliar, rocky territory, so it took Ryleigh a while to find a spot that suited her, but eventually she did. She happened across a large boulder on a small clearing, and sat down on the wet dirt, leaning her back against the rock and crossing her legs under her. There were no memories near, and she doubted anyone was going to find her. It was already late at night, and their work for the day was done, so no one had any business with her anyway.
The only one who might go looking for her was Parker, since he liked hanging out with her, but last she'd seen of him he'd been playing cards with Josie and Dawn, so she didn't expect him to bother her either.
She closed her eyes. Memories were a funny thing, and one's general memory – the entire collection of the past – was weirder still. There was something immensely fascinating about the way memories would float and flutter, resurfacing whenever they felt like it. Sometimes a memory that had been dormant for years would suddenly burst into the open, reminding a person of a past long lost. And memories had a certain feeling to them. There were always emotions tied to them, a remnant of whatever a person felt when the memory was made. Ryleigh saw the emotions as colours, as well as feeling them herself, as though she was not just an audience to someone's recollections but a participant. Anger was red, love pink, sadness was blue, and sometimes there were explosions of colour when there had been explosions of emotions. And sometimes, when memories faded, emotions would fade with them, to a dull, almost indiscernible grey.
When it came to magic, there was a whole new level to the memories. Memories erased with magic left a hole that was ever so slightly different from the holes left by time. It was a field of nuance, but Ryleigh had learned to navigate it well. That is how she knew what gaps to look for. Once she had found them, unlocking them was easy. All she did was wanting for them to reappear, and they did. She liked envisioning it as a picture with a chain drawn around it, a lock hanging from the front, and she would jab a key in the lock, snapping it open. And then the picture would start to move, replaying the memory as though it had never been gone at all. It was as easy as that. Well, when you've had nearly two decades of practice, then it's easy. When Ryleigh just started out, it had seemed an impossible thing.
She sifted through the gaps, restoring every single memory she had erased. There were dozens of them, some more significant than others. There were her interactions with Ridge, and she realised how much she missed the crazy man. From the moment she had met him, he had managed to put her at ease without even trying. Then there was Carry, who was a breath of fresh air and who always managed to make Ryleigh smile. Julie was next, and Ryleigh remembered how much she respected her. It took a strong woman to step aside for fate, and Julie had done it without growing to hate Ryleigh in the process.
Ellis was more complicated. She liked him, respected him, but also blamed him for selling her out to Alder and for being so incredibly hard-headed when it came to fate and morals.
Of course there was Sky, who had been her unlikeliest of friends, direct and grounded in reality as she was. And then there was Austin.
Remembering him and everything that they had shared was difficult. She had deeply enjoyed their verbal sparring, reading together in the library, that one time at the lake, the evening at the hall, and their one night together. More than that, she had cherished how he had made her feel. How his touch set her skin ablaze, how his smile made her heart race, how his scent made her head spin, and how the entirety of him would make her feel, just for a second, like the world wasn't so bad a place after all.
She remembered that there had been a moment, not so long after she had jumped into the river with that feral wolf to save his life, and after the full truth came out, that she had, for one fleeting second had had a sneaking thought, a treacherous desire, that perhaps, by some twist of fate, there would be a way for them to last. It had been a tiny twinkle of hope at best, but it'd been hope, and she hadn't thought she was capable of feeling it anymore.
That was, perhaps, what hurt her the most. He had pulled her from the shadows, and she had seen the sunrise for the first time since her childhood, and he had made her feel like vengeance wasn't everything. That there was a life beyond hate, a way beyond war, a future beyond death. Austin had represented that tiny flicker of hope, and now it had been extinguished along with their bond.
It was her own fault, of course. She realised that. Enough time had passed for her to admit it. She was the sole person responsible for the end of her relationship with Austin. Sure, Corbin had helped speed up the process, but ultimately it would have come down to the same thing: Austin and she wanted different things in life and neither one of them was willing to bend far enough to accommodate the other. They couldn't, because following the other on their path would be such a radical change that they would have to throw their old life away completely. They might have attempted it. She might have attempted to settle down at Midnight Moon, but she would have been miserable there. Austin had changed her – most people would agree for the better – but it wasn't right to expect her to change enough to ever enjoy being Austin's mate and nothing more. She didn't want to be anybody's anything. She was her own main character, nobody's side-kick. But that came with consequences, and she had to accept those. She did accept those, but Goddess, did it hurt.
It was a small consolation, however, to know that they had been destined for disaster from day one. It made it easier to shift the blame onto something beyond her control. She wished she could shift the blame onto Austin. She wanted to hate him. Moving on would be easier if she despised of him, and without the good memories, she had. She had loathed him. But now that her memory was restored, and now that she remembered how he'd touched her, how he'd loved her, how he'd looked at her as though she put the stars in the night sky, as though she was the night sky, a vast expanse covering his whole word – remembering all that, she could never hate him.
She shook her head, shutting down her pity-party. Were there any more gaps for her to fill? Memories were chronological, though people couldn't often put them in exact chronological order, and Ryleigh could see them as a sort of overview, flipping through them almost like leaves in a book. Every once in a while, a page was missing.
Eventually, she recovered all the pages, and she was ready to call it a day and return home, when she noticed something she had never noticed before.
Just like magically erased memories left a different kind of hole than naturally faded memories, altered memories felt differently than original memories. It was an almost unnoticeable difference, something about the lining, something about the light, or the brightness of the colours, or perhaps it was just the skill of an expert who instinctively knew what was authentic and what wasn't. Had she been more prone to altering her own memories, she might have noticed it years sooner, but she hadn't touched her memory in over a decade, and the last time that she had, she hadn't had the finesse to notice the difference.
But there was a difference. There was an altered memory.
And it wasn't just any memory either. It was her memory of the Shadow Walker battle, fourteen years ago. It was altered. She'd altered it. Why? When? What had she changed? She didn't remember – both what the original had been or why she had been moved to change it.
She shut down the overview of her memory and got up. Whatever it was, she wasn't ready to find out.
_____
A/N: The plot thickens.
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Destined for Greatness ✔️
Hombres Lobo*Book 3 of the Destined Series* Without her sister, her mate, and her friends, Ryleigh has nowhere to turn to but home. Whether she wants to join her father's cause again and wage a war against King Alder no longer matters. Vengeance is all she has...
