71. Tattered Remains
Chapter 71
IRIS
Someone was banging on the wards. The impact ricocheted inside my skull.
I was beginning to get a headache from all the incessant pounding against the barriers I’d woven. I’d never left many in place before, and I wondered if all Threaders could feel when their creations were threatened or tampered with—or if it was only because I was so close.
The racket started again, and Aspen groaned in his sleep. I’d meant to stay awake until he made it back, but my limbs had been too heavy to manage it. I’d barely gotten one of his tunics over my head before crashing onto the bed. Several weeks prior, I’d toyed with the wards so that either of us could enter and exit at will, much like the barrier outside the Tundra.
Although the cabin’s barrier wasn’t soundproof, unlike the apothecary, I still couldn’t make out the indiscernible shouting. The voice, however, was unmistakable.
“Deyanira?” I grumbled, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.
Moonlight streamed in from the open skylight, casting a sliver of light across the wooden floor. Untangling myself from Aspen’s hold, I pried his fingers from the plait I was sure I hadn’t managed to braid before falling asleep. Despite the peak of winter, the enchantments woven into the residence kept the floor comfortably warm beneath my feet as I padded to the front door.
Deyanira blew into the front room with a gust of snow, frantically searching the space.
“Now.” She swept past me without a second glance. “We have to go now.”
“Gavalon!” She threw a stray pillow at Aspen’s sleeping form.
“Deyanira, what?—”
“Get up.” She shook Aspen’s shoulders with an impressive amount of force. He startled awake, terror flashing across his features before recognition set in.
“Fucking Divine, Deya. Why the?—”
“They have Theon.”
The words reverberated in my skull.
They have Theon. They have Theon. They have Theon.
Aspen was out of bed in an instant, grabbing clothes, weapons—anything—and stuffing them into my discarded bag.
“Who has Theon?” I demanded, head snapping between them.
What was happening? And why did I have no idea?
We had to leave. We had to reach him.
“Where are we going?” I yelled, but neither of them answered. They were moving in a daze, crashing into furniture, tearing through shelves. I stepped in front of Aspen, trying to stop his frantic pace. Deyanira was already in our closet, pulling things down—my books, journals, spare supplies—throwing them onto the bed and shoving them into satchels.
“Where is Theon?” I shouted. Aspen jerked at the sound of my voice, as if yanked from a trance. “Somebody tell me what in the fucking Divine is going on!”
He grabbed my wrists, his whole body lined with terror. “You can’t be here.”
I reached up to push the strands of hair from his eyes. “Tell me what?—”
My words died out as he recoiled. A sickening feeling twisted in my gut.
I knew fear like this. Recognized the terror that sent you spiraling so deep you could think of nothing else. But I’d never seen it from him.
It was Deyanira, though, who answered. Glancing between us, something akin to pity flashing in her amber gaze.
“Threader, believe me when I say we don’t have time right now. I gave them six other locations to look for you, but they’re probably halfway through them already. They will figure out you’re here. We have to leave.”
“Who?” I cried, pulling on the first set of clothes I found.
“We don’t entirely know,” she admitted. “Whoever Calum has gotten himself involved with. It’s not going to end well. My father is connected, and…” Her gaze flicked to Aspen before she finished. “They want you.”
Aspen murmured incoherently to himself as he sheathed his weapons. One slipped from his grasp, clattering to the floor. He slammed his hand against the bedside table. “Fuck!”
Deyanira yanked at my arm, attempting to drag me from the room, but I tore away from her. Aspen fixed his sheath, storming into the next room. I followed.
“You have to leave, Iris.” His entire body shook. He muttered more incomprehensible words as he threw the bag over my head, turning me toward the door. “You have to go now.”
Someone had found out. It was the only explanation.
I’d been careless, and now they knew what I was.
They were coming to collect.
And they were using the people I loved to do it.
I ducked beneath his arm on the door handle, grabbing his face with both hands. “Stop it, right—” He tried to avert his gaze, but I held him firm. “Look at me, Aspen. We will get him, all right? Theon will be all right. Whatever is happening, we will get him out. Then we’ll find somewhere safe and?—”
I was trying to convince myself just as much as I was convincing him.
His hands curled around my wrists. Gently, he pulled them from his face. Stepped back.
I watched it happen—the slow, deliberate building of a wall. Watched bricks of ice fall between us. Watched his gaze go cold. Impenetrable.
“No,” he said dully.
The world tilted.
Ringing filled the air.
It reminded me of that brief, imperceptible moment before something fractured irrevocably. The half breath between watching a glass slip from your hand and its inevitable shatter.
The moment before breaking.
“Aspen,” I said, my voice laced with quiet apprehension. “What is going on?”
“Deyanira,” he said flatly. He didn’t turn to face her. Only stared through me, unseeing. “Get her out of here. Take her to Solyndra.”
A heartbeat.
Not him. Never him.
“Please,” he added, his tone hollow.
His words shook me into action again. “No!” I protested.
We had to go find Theon. What was this? Why Solyndra? Had this all been—? I refused to believe it.
“Stop it, Aspen. You can’t—” I cut myself off, remembering that we weren’t alone.
“I already know,” Deyanira said from where she stood in the kitchen.
My chest cracked. But Aspen seemed as shocked as I was.
“You didn’t…” I ran through the terms of our life debt. “You couldn’t…”
“I’ve known far longer than he has,” she said, not bothering to elaborate.
I glanced between them, my mind spinning. How many people had I put in danger?
What had I done?
“Fuck, Reilune, I don’t know. Just get her out of this realm,” Aspen ordered.
I grabbed his arm, desperation clawing up my throat.
“How dare you?” Anger and fear churned in my chest, a thrashing storm. “That is not your decision to make. We get him together.”
It was so easy to see what this was. His fatal need to take every blow alone. It didn’t stop the fury from climbing. He had no right to make that choice for me.
“We get Theon,” I reasoned, “and then we leave. Together.”
A flicker of something crossed his expression. A single crack in his resolve.
I latched onto it like a lifeline.
“We’ll get Theon, and then we’ll figure it out, all right?” The words tumbled out fast, desperate. “We’ll leave it all behind. We’ll be safe. Please, Aspen.”
“And what would we do, then?” He demanded, all of his walls crashing down around him. “Pretend we have more than a year?”
I faltered.
“You will die if you stay here, will you not?” His voice broke.
Leather journals clouded my vision. Golden suns and handwritten notes and words in another language.
A truth I had spent my whole life avoiding finally caught up to me.
I couldn’t outrun it anymore.
“Your healing has slowed since you arrived.” He continued when I didn’t answer, shaking his head. “It lessens each day. Do you truly think I don’t notice everything about you? At first, I thought you were sick, that I would lose you to this plague.” His voice cracked slightly. “I thought maybe if I worked harder to find the answers, everything would be all right. I begged them.”
He’s only left to go curse the Goddesses. Theon’s words from so long ago.
My lungs constricted, the weight of reality pressing in. Pain surged as the conversation blurred with memory, the pounding in my head growing louder.
I couldn’t think.
“Once the Trials pass, if you don’t compete… it’s not just your immortality you’ll lose, is it?” His voice dropped lower. “You will die.”
A sharp pain lanced through my skull. My body trembled with every unspoken word. I’d shared so many secrets with him, let him shoulder the weight I had carried alone for so long.
But not this one.
“Tell me I’m wrong,” he pleaded, and I hated the hope lacing his words. “I beg of you, tell me that.”
I saw them then—the translations, the scrolls upon scrolls of fate I had prayed were wrong. The words that drove me to speak to the Goddesses again. To beg them.
The words I knew by memory.
In my haste, I made a fatal mistake. I chose them myself. They are perfect, in every way. They will keep my new world safe; they will have the ability to rule without corruption. The Trials will complete the transformation, with another gift to tie them to their power and immortality. And yet, that will be their downfall. I cannot undo the web I have woven. It is past even my saving now. They must not be selfish in their desires.
“I can’t,” I admitted, the truth tearing its way out of me.
If it was possible to watch someone’s heart break, I was sure Deyanira had just seen it happen twice—had witnessed the splintering of two souls that perhaps should’ve always been one.
“It is the only way to ascend,” I confessed, the words clawing up my ravaged throat. “And… the blessings we are given, our essence… a mortal body cannot withstand it.”
Which was what I would become once the Trials passed and I did not compete.
The finality of it was haunting.
Deyanira paced, muttering to herself, her urgency thick in the air.
“Death is the only escape.”
The final words of Lux’s journal entry. The ones that never changed, no matter how desperately I wished they would.
“Why?” Aspen asked, though I wasn’t sure if he was speaking to me or to the universe itself. “Why not go? You have to compete, you have to?—”
“I will die if I return! We’re fooling ourselves if we don’t believe that killing me is the first thing they would do upon my arrival.”
“Go back, Iris,” he begged. “We will all protect you. You will live. I will make sure?—”
“I can’t! Zinnia will die if I don’t fulfill my end of the debt our mothers made!”
“You have been released from that debt,” he said, not meeting my gaze.
“I… what?”
“It has been arranged. Your assistance with the tonic was enough. My mother has released you from it.”
“I don’t understand…”
“It is done. There is no reason for you not to leave.”
“You are my reason!” I bellowed.
Aspen closed his eyes, taking several measured breaths. I grabbed at his wrists, recoiling at the iciness there. It burned through my body with a ferocity only matched by my raging heart.
“I am begging you,” his voice faltered.
I didn’t know how to answer him. Didn’t know what to say.
I was going to fix it. I could fix it. I had to fix it.
I shook my head, unable to meet his eyes.
“Then what?” Aspen roared, gesturing wildly between us. “What was it all for? What was the point of any of it if we don’t get an after?”
He paced, pulling at his hair. “Why didn’t you tell me? Was I supposed to do nothing? Be all right with you deciding to die? I can’t survive that, Iris!”
“We were supposed to have time.” A sob broke through my chest, tears spilling freely. “I was going to figure it out, I just needed time. I swear. I’ll fix it, I promise I can fix it…”
He stopped, one hand gripping the doorknob, the other cupping my cheek. Both were trembling.
I could barely see through the haze of tears and fury and heartache.
“You may be content with this being the end of your story, but I’m not.”
He opened the door. The blizzard outside howled, picking up speed. The emotion drained from him, the angles of his face hardening. The blue in his eyes faded into a cold, unyielding grey.
“I don’t get to keep you either way. I would rather give you a chance at life than sit by and watch you die.”
No.
Internally, I was screaming. Raging and clawing at the sky above.
It wasn’t supposed to end like this.
“Then don’t do either!” I demanded. “Come with me. Trust that I will figure it out. Let us have what we both dream of, Aspen… Let us finally have that happiness.”
I was going to figure it out. I could fix it.
We were supposed to have time.
That was all I had begged for. Bargained for.
Time.
“You are brilliant enough to know that there is only one way to fix this.”
What do you do when you finally find what you’ve been searching for, only to lose it anyway?
I reached for him. “Get Theon and come with me.” My voice cracked with desperation.
“Please, for one moment, stop saving everyone else! For the love of everything Iris, save yourself!”
Another truth barreled out. An irreversible, cataclysmic consequence born from my compulsion to flee.
“I think…” My breath came out in a shudder. “I think it’s too late anyway. I waited too long.”
He shook his head frantically. “The sunstone,” I whispered. “I didn’t complete the offering.”
My blood never fed the dial. Too young at the time of my escape to solidify my place to compete.
The Sunchosen had over two decades to complete the offering, the magic sealing in finality as the year of the Trials began.
A year that began in seven daybreaks.
Aspen’s face shattered. “No.” He shook his head frantically. “No, I refuse to believe there isn’t a way.”
“Then we both go,” I argued. “And figure it out after.”
Aspen exhaled sharply, something sparked in my chest at his tone. Maybe he understood.
“I can’t. I can’t leave.”
“We won’t leave without him.” My chest clenched, the urge to run directly to wherever Theon was without thinking threatening to take over. He had to be all right. “We will all get out, and then I’ll find a way to?—”
“I can’t leave.”
A sharp intake of breath reminded me of Deyanira’s presence. Something like recognition passed over her face as she stared at him, shaking her head. Her eyes closed, a single tear escaping down her high cheekbone.
“You didn’t,” she whispered.
That glimmer of understanding...
Aspen grasped my shoulders. “Iris, do you trust me?”
“With my life.” The answer came before I could think. It hadn’t changed.
His hands tightened. “Then let me do this.”
Let him…
The urgency. The insistence on going alone. On forcing me to leave.
I shoved against his chest, realization hitting like a blade to the gut.
This was never just about the Trials.
It was about time.
And he was going to buy it with himself. “Know that I would never ask you to do something I didn’t know you could do.”
I shoved against his chest, the truth crashing over me as each piece fell into place. Calum, the Incarnates, whoever the fuck was behind this… They hadn’t just wanted control. They’d wanted Aspen. A royal in their ranks, a bargaining chip to solidify their power. Or worse.
He’d despised it all, entertaining their games just enough to stay in their good graces, to glean information for the rest of us.
He was going to get Theon.
He was going to buy me time.
He was going to give them exactly what they wanted.
Himself.
For time .
“No! No, you don’t get to do this! You don’t get to decide your life is worth less!” I shoved him again, harder this time, but he didn’t budge. A statue in the storm. “You don’t get to offer yourself instead!”
That was the other reason.
Time to get away from whatever they wanted me for. Time to make the decision he was begging me to.
Time to figure it out.
Just… time.
“Did it matter to you? Any of this?” My voice cracked, raw and pathetic. I knew I didn’t have the answers. Knew I couldn’t change any of it. “Or will it only matter once I follow your plan? Your idea of the life I should live?”
I regretted the words as soon as they left my lips.
Icy hands snapped up, gripping my face so fast I jolted. They warmed the moment his palms made contact with my skin.
“It mattered more than anything. You matter more than my life. More than my sanity. More than any crown. I survive on you and you alone. And I will die before I let them have you. I wanted more than anything to give you a life you wanted. Freedom from all of it. But you and I both know there is no other option. This is all we have. So, for once, I need you to value your own life above anything else. Find a way. Know that you can survive this. Put yourself first, and live.”
We both took a shuddering, aching breath.
His voice broke as he brushed the back of his hand over my cheek. “I need you to choose to live.”
“Please, Aspen.” I whispered the plea, already bracing for the blow. The final brick in the wall he’d so carefully rebuilt between us.
After everything.
And as fury raced through my veins, I knew I’d helped him lay that foundation.
Complicit in the carnage.
This was it. The last thing I’d hidden.
The answer to which secret would finally break me.
If I’d told him about the journal before… if I’d ensured him I was trying...if I’d ever learned how to live without secrets…
Maybe it wouldn’t have come to this.
But I didn’t.
And it had.
I’d thought I could figure it out alone. So had he. Both of us so sure that our plans were the only way. Now, the choice was irrelevant. We’d laid down the pieces of a game we could no longer unplay, no matter how much we regretted it.
Even if I walked into Solyndra tomorrow and prayed they wouldn’t strike me down where I stood, it wouldn’t stop this.
It wouldn’t undo what had already been set in motion.
Because they had Theon. And we were out of time.
“None of it matters without you.” The words barely made it out.
“Listen to me.” His voice was raw as he grabbed my chin. “Run one more time. Survive tonight. Then show them, Iris Virlana. Show them everything. Bring them to their fucking knees.”
“Don’t do this.”
“And know—” His voice was almost lost to the storm. “That they will all burn. I will scatter their ashes in a path for you to climb towards everything you deserve. Even if it takes my very last breath, I will never stop clawing my way back to you.”
In the same moment, we lunged for each other. Our fingers dug into flesh, trying to leave imprints on one another. Tears and snot smeared against his bare chest.
Everything hurt. Every inch of me cracked. Fine lines splintering across my soul.
For what they would do to him. For how blind I had been.
It was all connected.
Calum’s wretched society, the Incarnates, the Malum, the curse—it was all the same.
And he was going to give himself to them.
“I won’t leave you with them.”
“I know.” He pulled back, leaning down and pressing a kiss to the top of my head. A eucalyptus breeze curled around my neck, diving through the splinters as he whispered, “I’m sorry.”
The space he left after stepping back rivaled the Chasm.
“Iris Virlana, as the payment for the life debt I made to you, you are henceforth released on the condition that you leave the realm of Kacidon at once.”
“Aspen—”
“And that you do not return for the remainder of your life.”
The moment of shattering arrived.
Magic bloomed in my chest, cold seeping through every new crack in my soul.
Deyanira was beside me again, pulling me into the night.
I didn’t know how she was holding the wreckage of me together.
I hated the way the wind whipped my face, carrying the last pieces of him with it.
I hated the way the emptiness ahead of me matched the one inside me.
I was hollow.
A shell.
Maybe I’d let the wind take me.
“Iris, I?—”
“Don’t.” I whirled on him, the shriek tearing from my throat. “Don’t you dare. Not now.”
There was a sick satisfaction in seeing it—the matching ruination of him. Knowing he’d been painted in the same destruction.
We were both empty now.
Tattered remains of hearts that had only ever beaten for each other.
Deyanira yanked me tight against her steady frame and stepped past the edge of the wards.
I watched him squeeze his eyes shut as we vanished.