Chapter
Thirty
h Teller, it was so lovely, Diem looked beautiful, she was so sparkly and queen-like, and everyone from school was“O there, and there was food and music, and we danced all night long, and then Elric got into the wine and made tiny light ponies that stampeded around the ballroom and kept burning everyone’s dresses, and then...”
My thoughts wandered as Lily gushed over the details of the ball to my brother, who was gazing at her in rapture like it was the most interesting thing he’d ever heard.
Though he smiled and nodded along in encouragement, I couldn’t miss his twinge of sadness at having not been invited.
Teller would never admit it, but he desperately wanted to be a part of this world.
Lily’s world. My world.
After my fight with our father this morning, I’d been wrestling with how my mortal family fit into this new life. I wanted them close by, but with that came consequences. For them, for me, and for the realm.
Sometimes I thought about cutting them off altogether. Though it would destroy me, it would liberate them—let them live out the rest of their days in anonymity without the burden of my Crown hanging over them, too.
But then I thought of my mother, and Luther’s promise to bring her home by year end. Her loss had fractured our family, put us each on our own separate paths, with distance both real and emotional pushing us apart. But maybe, once she was home again—if I could survive that long—we could find our way through this.
There was nothing the Bellators couldn’t take on, as long as the four of us were together.
“...you should have seen it, the Hanoverres were awful, making all of these horrible accusations, and Diem went all angry Queen on them and she was all, ‘Do you dare challenge me?’ and they were all, ‘No, Your Majesty, we would never’ and they got scared and ran away, and then...”
Teller arched an eyebrow at me, and I subtly shook my head. We both grinned at the silent understanding that Lily’s retelling had taken on some dramatic embellishment.
“...oh, and there were Descended from the other realms there, and they all gave her these fascinating gifts. There was an orb from Sophos that can answer any question, and—”
Teller perked up. “The Sophos Descended were there? Are they still in Lumnos?”
Lily nodded eagerly. “And they know about you! They even said you can come st—”
“Lily,” I snapped. She pursed her lips, cringing under my hard stare.
Teller looked between the two of us and frowned. “They knew about me?”
“It’s nothing.” I played with a loose thread to avoid meeting his eyes. “They just wanted to scare me by mentioning you. But
I’m not going to let them hurt you.”
Neither of them responded.
I let out a harsh sigh. “Can we talk about something other than the ball?”
Teller’s eyes darted around my face as he tried to work out what I wasn’t telling him. “How did the House Reception go?”
“Fine.” I continued to tug absently at my sleeve. “Father resigned as my advisor. He says I’m selfish.”
“That doesn’t sound like him,” Teller said, his frown curving deeper. “I know you two have had your problems lately, but Father would do anything for you.”
“Apparently not,” I muttered. The wound from my father’s disapproval was still too raw, too painful. I shot Teller a rueful smile. “I’ll be grateful for the day when you’re done with school and you can join my Council.”
He sat up straighter. “You would make me an advisor?”
Lily gasped and grabbed his arm. “Oh Teller, that would be perfect for you! You would be such a good advisor. You always know everything, and you never share secrets. Oh, and then you could come live here in the palace!” Her cheeks turned bright pink. “If... if you want to, that is.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t know. Our house in Mortal City... that’s my home.” Lily looked a little crestfallen, and Teller reached out to clasp her hand as a matching blush rose to his face. “It would be nice to not have to sneak in to see you, though.”
“How do you get him in here, anyway?” I asked Lily. “I should probably have my High General executed for his dreadful security.”
Lily grinned at my empty threat. “There’s an underground canal that runs to a boat dock under the palace. The door to it is just across the hall from the entrance to the dungeon.”
Memories of my failed Guardians mission sprang to mind. I had been attempting to sneak into that same secret dock when Luther had trapped me, effectively ending my tenure as palace healer.
“And there are no guards along this canal?” I asked.
“There’s two of them, but they’re easy to distract.”
“Too easy,” Teller agreed, shooting me a displeased look. “Half the time, they’re asleep.”
“But the door in the canal has a bloodlock,” Lily added. “It only opens for royal family blood.”
“Aren’t there hundreds of Corbois?” I asked. “If any of them can open it, that doesn’t seem very secure.”
“Not anymore. The Bellators are the real royal family now, so only you and Teller can unlock it.”
My gaze darted to Teller as a sudden realization punched the breath from my lungs.
“And that works?” I gasped. “You’re sure of it, Teller? Your blood opens that door?”
He nodded, and my heart felt as if it might claw its way right out of my chest. Ever since being revealed as a Descended, a tiny part of me had wondered if my mother was really my mother. We shared so many features and mannerisms, but her secrets had infected everything in my life with doubt, and my mind had succumbed to wild speculation about the real origin of my birth.
But if the bloodlocks opened for Teller, it could only mean one thing—my mother’s blood ran in both our veins.
And while I didn’t need that to consider Auralie my mother or Teller my brother—just like I didn’t need a blood tie to consider Andrei my father—the comfort of knowing that at least this one piece of my identity had not been a lie...
Gods, it meant everything to me.
I was moments away from tackling Teller to the floor in a weepy embrace when the door to the dungeon flew open with a heavy bang.
“Your Majesty?” a voice cried out from the top of the stairs. “Are you down there?”
“I’m here,” I answered.
Frenzied footsteps echoed through the cavernous space as Alixe rushed inside. Her eyes had grown too large, her face deathly pale.
“I need you to come with me, Your Majesty. There’s been a... an incident.”
I shot to my feet. “Where? What happened?”
“Come, I’ll take you there now.”
I glanced at my brother. “Teller, go home immediately.”
“No!” Alixe said.
Too quickly.
Too forcefully.
I stared at her as dread began to crystallize in my veins. My bones felt leaden and heavy, the heft of them holding me in place and begging me not to go with her. Not to learn anything more.
Muscles tightened on Alixe’s throat. “Your brother should stay at the palace. I can get him to your suite unseen.”
My mind and my body pulled at the rope that bound them sanely together, the cords unravelling and snapping under the strain. I watched numbly as Teller disappeared with the help of Alixe’s illusion magic, then felt my legs carry me up the stairs and through the palace to my chambers as if controlled by someone else.
“Where is Luther?” I choked out. “Is it... is he...?”
“He’s there now. He sent me to get you.”
For one singular heartbeat, the anvil on my chest lifted, and I could breathe again.
“What happened, Alixe?”
She looked across her shoulder at the empty air, where only the quiet breathing that followed us signaled Teller’s masked presence, then looked back at me.
The horrible pity in her eyes was the swing of an axe. It severed the last frayed thread that held me together. My last hope that my world had not just shifted in a way I could never put back.
Once we reached the royal chambers, Alixe gave orders for Lily and Teller to stay in my suite and for Perthe not to let anyone in or out until we returned. Lily nodded emphatically and clutched Teller’s hand to her chest, while Teller watched with a look of confusion.
“What’s going on?” he asked, his eyes jumping between Alixe and me. “Was there another attack?”
I knew if I opened my mouth, it wouldn’t be words that came out, so I only nodded.
I lied.
The truth would come soon enough.
Sorae was frantically pacing on her perch and letting out scratchy, pained sounds I had never heard from her before. She sounded as if she were being ripped apart from the inside out and holding herself together through sheer force of will.
Alixe put a gentle hand on my back and nudged me toward her. “We’ll get there faster if we take Sorae.”
I obeyed and mutely climbed onto my gryvern’s back. Alixe whispered something in Sorae’s ear, then mounted behind me and clutched me tight against her as we launched into the sky.
My heart was no longer racing. Instead, it had slowed to the pulse of Sorae’s flight, each wingbeat reverberating with an ominous thump in my chest. My blood was slowing, my thoughts were slowing, time was slowing.
I wanted it to stop.
I begged it to stop.
But when that beautiful, modest cottage on the marsh came into view—that home so full of laughter and memories, so rich with loyalty and unbreakable bonds, the one place in the world where I had always, always felt loved—something in me fissured wide open.
Sorae landed with a smooth gait on the front lawn, the same place where my father and I had spent hundreds of nights sparring.
Luther stood in the open front door. His dark hair had spilled free from its usual restraint, now shielding his face like a veil. His arms were quivering and soaked in blood to his elbows as he stared at a headless body that lay at his feet.
Scattered around the clearing, I spotted two more bodies, their heads resting too far from their necks.
“No,” I whimpered. “No, please, no...”
The word kept falling from my lips as I broke into a sprint toward the door, my eyes fixed on the body at Luther’s feet. But as I stumbled on the front steps and crashed to my knees, I saw that the corpse wore the uniform of the Royal Guard.
I scrambled to my feet and tried to force my way past Luther. He grabbed me by the shoulders.
“Don’t,” he said, his voice rough. “Don’t look.”
I shoved against him with all my force, straining to look over his shoulder. He held me tighter and forced me away from the door.
“Don’t go in there,” he pleaded with terrible softness. “I’m begging you not to look.”
I finally stared up at him. His eyes were so filled with shadows they were nearly black, and the skin under his scar was angry and red like a fresh welt. His dark brows were drawn painfully tight, deep lines creasing his face with visceral anguish.
This face had revealed so many guarded emotions these past weeks. Frustration, amusement, pride, worry, affection.
Maybe even something deeper.
It was the face I had come to look for in every crowd. Even when we were cross, it was his face that calmed me every time I spun out of control.
But today, his face spoke only of despair. Relentless, unfixable despair.
“Move,” I breathed.
Heartbreak slashed across his features. His shoulders sank, his hands dropped to his sides, and he stepped away.
At first, all I saw was blood.
Blood everywhere.
Pooled on the floor. Streaked across overturned furniture. Dripping from the drapery and the cabinets.
And then I saw the writing. Large, angry letters smeared in dark crimson on every wall.
Mortal lover.
Half-breed.
Rebel scum.
“Where is he?” I scanned the room, but everything was camouflaged under a blanket of wet, shimmering scarlet. “Where is my father?”
Luther set a hand on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Diem. It’s too late.”
No.
“Where. Is. He?” I ground out, my fists clenching tight. “Where is my f—”
Then I saw him.
In the kitchen.
The last place I’d stood with him in this home. Where I’d screamed at him, insulted him, broken his heart. Where I’d told him he wasn’t my father, then left and never came back.
There he lay, in a lake of red, his body so terribly, impossibly still.
Dead.
My father was dead.
My father, who had taken me in when I was no one to him but someone else’s bastard child, and who had cherished me as the most precious jewel in his life.
My father, who taught me everything he knew. Who never saw me as weak because I was a girl, who taught me to embrace
it as my strength.
My father, who had loved me unconditionally, even when I hadn’t deserved it.
Andrei Bellator, war hero, legendary Emarion Army Commander, Advisor to the Crown of Lumnos, beloved husband of Auralie, devoted father of Diem and Teller, was dead.
A broken sob tore from my chest, a scream that was inhuman in its agony. Outside, Sorae roared into the sky, my grief consuming me so fully that it spilled across our bond and exploded into her. The house rattled with the force of our combined cries.
I staggered forward and crumpled to my knees at his side. His beautiful caramel-brown eyes were open and glassy. His mouth gaped in a permanent scream, his face forever frozen in a mask of disbelief.
I had never wanted to turn my healer’s mind off more than in this moment, but my training seized control against my will, cataloguing each injury.
His face was bruised, his lip and eyebrow split open, tissue under his nails, all suggesting a struggle. His throat had been slit, likely the wound that killed him. Puncture wounds littered his body, many of them bloodless, suggesting the murderer had continued to stab him long after his heart stopped beating.
Not just a murder—a punishment.
A message.
For me.
The murder weapon was still lodged in his chest, its handle sticking straight up into the air. Between my trembling hands and the thick, syrupy blood coating my palms, I could barely pull it free.
It wobbled in my watery vision under the thunderstorm of tears I feared would never stop falling.
Even when they dried up, they would still be falling. Until my last breath, until I crossed into the afterworld and back into his open arms, they would forever be falling.
Luther knelt at my side. The sudden awareness of him broke through my fog. My eyes cleared for a moment, and I leaned in closer to examine the blade.
If the dark, smoky grey of Fortosian steel hadn’t marked it as a Descended weapon, the jewel-encrusted handle would have. The blackwood hilt was inlaid with copper scrollwork and pale pink gemstones that twinkled as the dagger quivered in my palms.
A violent, poisonous darkness infected my veins. I had once believed that, as a healer, I could never take a life. That seemed laughable now. Once I found the person responsible, I would do so much more than simply take their life.
I would make them suffer in cruel, unimaginable ways. Make them beg me for mercy, and then make them beg me for death.
I would make real every terror that haunted them, and when there was nothing left of them to wound, I would put them back together so I could do it all over again.
Devourer of Crowns. Ravager of Realms. Herald of Vengeance.
Fight.
“Yes,” I whispered in response to the voice’s savage cry. “I will.”
I clutched the blade to my chest in a vow of retribution. A promise to my father—and to the dead man walking who had
stolen this precious star from my sky.
Fight.
“You should go,” I murmured to Luther.
His hand gently stroked my back. “I’m not leaving you.”
Fight.
“Go, Luther,” I said, louder this time.
“No. I won’t let you be alone.”
My skin began to shimmer, then glow, then blaze a glittering white-hot. Dark shadows spilled from my palms and curled around me like a rolling fog, staining the blood on the ground until I knelt in a sea of ink. Deep in my soul, a churning ball of ice and heat doubled in size with every shuddering breath.
I was a bomb about to explode, ready to annihilate the world with the jagged shrapnel of my grief.
Fight.
“Go, Luther,” I gritted out. “I’m ordering you to leave.”
“I will not abandon you when you need me,” he growled.
“Sorae, take him.”
“No, Diem, wait—”
The doorway shattered into a cloud of dust and splintered wood. Sorae’s talons tore away at the walls until the front facade of the house was gone, exposed to the dusky glow of the twilight sky.
Luther yelled at her to stop, but my command was clear, and Sorae was loyal only to me. She snared Luther into her talons and shot into the sky.
“Protect them,” I said. Across the bond, I felt Sorae’s heart, bleeding for me, thump in answer: I will.
I took my father’s hand. The cold stiffness of death had already set in.
It was a gut-punch of awareness that I would never again feel the warmth of his hand on my arm or the scratch of his beard against my cheeks. I would never again experience the tender strength of his arms as he wrapped me into a hug.
He was gone.
My beloved, cherished father was gone.
Because of me.
Fight.
Kill.
Destroy.
So I surrendered to my grief, and to the voice.
And I detonated.
Raw, silvery power blasted around me in an expanding sphere that was at once hot and cold, dark and light, life and death.
It hissed with a deafening hum of energy that sounded and felt ancient.
It obliterated everything it touched. My father’s body—gone. The blood on the floor—simmered, then boiled, then evaporated. The Corbois medallion around my neck, the jeweled dagger in my hand, Brecke’s blade on my thigh—all of it melted away, dripping to the soil before charring into hunks of ash.
The house vaporized, taking with it every material possession that had ever mattered to me. Drawings, journals, art, books, weapons—all the treasured objects our family had collected over this brief, happy lifetime together.
Gone.
Just like him.
Even the clothes on my back burned away, leaving me naked in the center of an inferno of unearthly power.
With my mother’s disappearance, there had been grief, but also hope, however distant and unrealistic, that she might return.
But there was no returning from this.
No hope left at all.
I screamed until my throat was raw. I clawed at my chest, desperate to tear my own heart out to stop this unbearable pain.
My power flared brighter, and I burned, and I burned, and I burned.
My body felt weightless in the worst kind of way, like being shoved off a cliff. I was plunging to my doom, caught in the agonizing anticipation of that final, painful end.
Shouting penetrated the haze of my grief. A woman’s voice, then a man’s, then inhuman snarls.
A moment later, two hands wrapped around me. An immediate feeling of safety told me instantly who it was.
He knelt beside me and gathered me into his arms. His clothes had burned to ash, though somehow, his skin was unscathed.
I was too broken to question it. I laid my palm against the scar on his chest, then buried my face in his neck and wept as my magic consumed us both. With every tear that spilled from my cheek to his skin, he gripped me tighter, held me closer, laying tender kisses on my temple and hair.
He didn’t say a word, and I was grateful for it. I could not have born any false assurances, however well-intentioned, that everything would be fine.
Things would never be fine. Not ever again.
For hours, I sat in Luther’s arms, burning and sobbing, screaming as the excruciating pain of loss devoured me whole. I had the vague sensation of a well inside me slowly draining. My sorrow flooded out with my magic, leaving me hollow and certain I would never again feel whole.
Eventually, the sky turned dark, and my power faded to embers. Luther rocked me in silence, curled up at the center of a smoking crater. The heat faded from my skin, and the chilly night air set my body shivering. He rose, still cradling me in his arms.
“If you’re not ready to see Teller, I can take you to the lodge,” he offered softly, his voice coarse with emotion.
I shook my head as fresh tears pushed through my closed eyelids. “I have to tell him.”
He nodded and pressed a long kiss to the top of my head. I felt him climb onto Sorae’s back, then the breeze of the wind as she took flight.
I stared at the ground as we flew away. My beloved home was gone forever, replaced by a circle of black, a scar on the earth to mark the unhealable wound on my soul.
I had been crafted here. I was born a lump of molten metal, shaped by my mother, honed to a point by my father, engraved on the hilt by my brother. I had so foolishly believed the trials of the last few months had been the final firing that would harden me into a righteous sword of justice.
But that had only been the beginning. That had been the pounding of the blacksmith’s hammer, the grinding against the wheel until my edges were sharp and my aim was true.
This night—this was the fire that had forged me. And someday soon, when the burning glow of my grief cooled away, I
would show my father’s killer, and all of Emarion, just how deeply my blade could cut.
