Ballad of Whispers (The Sunchosen Chronicles #1)

74. Fear of Nightfall

Chapter 74

IRIS

The unused revitalizing tonic slipped from my grasp as my knees buckled beneath the force that struck them.

“You can never leave well enough alone, can you, dearest?” Zinnia snarled.

The skin on my wrists burned as a rope tightened around them.

“Just to keep you safe, Dove,” she huffed, finally coming into view as she dragged me toward a nearby stool. “That part of you can’t be trusted right now. You know how the Threads make you, and you’ve been through so much tonight. You’re out of your wits.”

One of my eyes was swelling shut, the distortion making her copper hair shift in and out of focus.

“What did you do to me?” I asked, my voice thick with tears and blood dripping down my chin. The pounding in my skull grew as my head was yanked back, my mother’s fingers undoing the braid.

“I taught you so well, can’t you see?” My neck ached as she twisted it from side to side, the comb she wielded snagging in every tangle. “I worried you’d have too weak a stomach to ever do what needed to be done. Had to play all those silly little games when you were young, convince you to go along with it. I never thought you’d do it yourself knowingly—planned to keep coddling you. But, dearest, look at you.” She grabbed my chin, yanking my head around. “Look at what you did to that brute.”

“You hired him to trap me,” I spat through clenched teeth.

How many families had there been like the Gavalons? Just how many assassinations? How many hadn’t survived?

“And it has been biting me in the ass ever since,” she barked. “He was a fanatic. Still is. Thought he had such a high standing, but he never even grasped the true purpose of the Incarnates when he devoted himself to their cause. Never wormed his way into knowing what was really happening, either. Back then, he was running his mouth about some small resistance forming—whispers of a rebellion, those who still believed in the old ways. He focused on reinstating their order, pushing those with singular goddess blessings beneath them, so they could reclaim power. Last time, they wanted Solyndra. Infiltrate the council with one of their own.” She shoved my cheek away, brushing out the last of the tangles.

It was as if each nerve ending had been flayed open, raw to every morsel of pain. A body would go into shock after a certain amount of time, its systems shutting down to reduce damage. I wondered how long it took. If emotional wounds left the same impact as the ones that painted the pool of blood beneath me.

“I didn’t care either way for their beliefs during the old war,” she continued, setting the comb on a shelf.

During the old war? That meant Zinnia had to be at least?—

“They were shortsighted. Not worth much more than brute force. But when they returned, I knew I could use them to get to you.”

“Why me?”

“You have what I need.” She stepped around to face me, trailing a finger down my cheek.

“And I knew you’d come with me. Don’t you see the resemblance, dove?”

I tried to process her words through the fog. My reserves were returning, but too slowly to risk using my Threads yet. Now that she was in front of me, I elongated my nails into claws, slowly shifting to dig one into the rough rope binding my wrists.

Her laugh was high-pitched, piercing through my eardrums. “My faultless sister never made any mistakes, forever looking down on me from her moral higher ground. But she couldn’t even keep her own daughter under reign, now could she? She let you run off to wherever you pleased. Made it oh so easy for me to lure you from that palace. They barely raised security after those idiots failed to follow orders the first night and you escaped. But the plans were already in place. We just needed you to run from them.” She smiled. “And now I’ve turned you, my caged little bird. I’ve turned you into everything she despises.”

Her voice dipped into a whisper, thumb and forefinger capturing my chin.

“I’ve turned you into me.”

“You took your own sister’s child for petty revenge?”

“Don’t be a fool,” she snapped. “I am not so shortsighted.”

“Then why?” I pleaded, searching for something—anything—that would change. That would make it easier to bear. The grief of a person you thought you knew, one who remained living but would never exist the way they had in your mind, was torment.

Looking at her, unable to crush the love that bled through my chest as her nail broke through skin, was torment.

“Because Solyndra took everything from me!” she shouted. “And I will watch them crumble for it. I needed your power to get there. You are the key to what I want.”

I let out a breathless, bitter laugh. “So you planned to take down the council? The Triad will just send new Sunchosen. You think you can stop the Divine?”

“I do not wish to stop the Divine,” she laughed. “I wish to aid them. No one despises the Triad more than the rest of the Divine.”

“You’re delusional.” The Divine were gone. We were toys to them, insignificant in every way. They hadn’t set foot on Altaerra since before...

Except she had been alive during the old war. Only I hadn’t known.

“The Divine won’t care about one Sunchosen,” I coughed. “The Triad don’t. What could you possibly think taking me from Solyndra would accomplish?”

“They should care, now that I have the resources the Incarnates give me. Now that I have the key that was foretold.” Her tone softened. “You may not approve of my methods, Dove, but I got you away from Solyndra’s corruption. I kept you safe all these years, didn’t I?”

“You call this safe? I was attacked because you planned it! Tortured because of you! You had me kill for you!”

“And look how well you’ve learned,” she murmured, eyes gleaming. “Look at that body rotting away downstairs.”

“I just wanted a family,” I croaked.

“And I made you one, dearest.”

“You made me your captive.”

“I made you perfect!”

The slap came before I registered it, her hand striking with brutal finality.

I wanted to rip my heart from my chest. Tear away every piece of me that still held a glimmer of hope for her. For us. Shove back every night spent listening to stories. Every morning painting in the garden.

“I taught you everything I know, you ungrateful little brat.”

“I didn’t want any of this!”

“Divine, it’s always about you, Iris. Your silly wants, your sad little days, your nightmares. I have had to make everything about you your entire life.”

“A life you stole from me!”

She laughed cruelly. “The life you had with them? It was so easy to embellish their treatment of you, get you to flee. They planted those seeds themselves. Their punishments, their rules—I barely had to exaggerate them. The extra punishments inside didn’t do the trick, but they made it easier to dip into your mind while you slept. Morph it into what I needed it to be. They were vicious people.” She eyed me up and down. “But honestly, you could’ve done with a bit more of their ambition.”

She ran her nails through my scalp, angling my head up. “Dreams are made of memories, you know? Collective filings of our consciousness, mixed in new ways. The mind is a gullible thing. Show it the same dream enough times, warp it to fit your narrative, and it can’t tell the difference. Use a nightmare instead? The effect is tenfold.”

Screams. Years of screams. Sweaty sheets. The fear of nightfall.

“You failed,” I rasped through a fresh mouthful of blood. “I still remember them. You couldn’t take them all.”

Her grip tightened. “That wasn’t my failure. You were too fragile. Any more meddling and you would’ve become a shell. Useless. And I still need you.”

Nightmare after nightmare after nightmare.

“I could never erase some of them completely. Your fucking sentimental attachment wouldn’t allow it,” she scoffed. “I left what didn’t matter to me. But the more fearful you were, the more I could blur the rest—make them decently unrecognizable. You believed them, believed what they did to you. You left of your own free will, remember?”

Crashing filled my ears. The sound—instantly recognizable from my nightmares—was the one I’d been running from that night. A cacophony of splintering wood, breaking stone, and maniacal laughter chased me as I sprinted across dirt paths, straight into the woods.

Straight to Zinnia.

“There was still so much work to do. But once there were no more walls between us, it became easier—especially if you were drained of your essence beforehand. Your mind fought far less without your magic there. I worked with the memories that remained as best I could. It was enough.” I continued to saw at the rope digging into my skin with miniscule movements.

“Gods, I was exhausted when you were younger,” she droned, as if the memory itself was tiresome. “Had to step in and mold you every time you became too sentimental, too attached. I had to keep you tethered to me alone—especially when you were young. Your mind resisted as you aged, but I could still twist what I needed, plant new memories while I had the chance. The nightmares helped keep them in place, though I had to use them sparingly. So damn fragile.”

Everything in my mind was a blur—a haze of images, smoke curling from the burning edges of pictures that could just as easily be fabrications. It all mixed together, real and false, nothing entirely in focus.

Persist.

“It started wearing on my own essence, so I had to limit it—to only what was necessary to keep you with me. So that you would understand.”

“Was any of it real?” I asked, the question escaping before I could stop it. Still, I needed to know. Still that child who desperately sought her mother’s—no, Zinnia’s—approval.

“Of course.” She tucked a strand of hair behind my ear with a softness that made my stomach twist. “I love you, dove. You are my prized possession. I had to help you. Your mind couldn’t handle all that… confusion.”

Those words cut deeper than anything else she’d said.

“That isn’t love.”

“I have given you everything!” she bellowed.

“And what now?” I bit out through clenched teeth. “Now that I am no longer your little puppet. Are you going to kill me, Mother?”

“Of course not,” she said, her entire demeanor shifting in an instant. “You are my beautiful, caged bird. My perfect weapon.” She wiped fresh blood from my cheek with an almost tender touch. “We need you now, to help with the curse. And then we can fulfill our task.”

“I thought you didn’t care about the Incarnates.” I felt a slight give in the rope as another fiber split beneath my fingers.

“They can give me what I want,” she said with exasperation. “But on their terms. They need a Threader to bind their curses. They’ve exhausted almost all the stores we had from before you learned how to drain your magic through your blood. We have far more use for the raw magic you produce now anyway, but with the dwindling reserves of your Threads, they’ve had to slow down new rituals significantly.”

My magic.

The glowing jars surrounding us. The energy pulsing through the room.

The curse had been created with my magic.

Every patient I couldn’t help, everyone I had watched take their last breath…

They had died because of my magic.

“Once we fulfill our end of the deal, I get what I want. They have no idea,” she scoffed. “They think if they sacrifice all that power, if they burn on their own pyre, they’ll be the chosen ones, like Lux’s. Like you. But they have no idea what they’ve started. No idea what I have with you. Their narrow-mindedness will only aid us, and we’ll become what they only dream of.”

She laughed, and the familiarity knocked something loose in my soul.

“But fucking Genevieve and her meddling slowed everything. She has no idea, the fool, what her husband and advisor do beneath her nose. She thinks she’s running the shambles of that realm while they busy themselves with far larger schemes.” she hissed. “And that son of hers is about as helpless as she is.”

A growl escaped from my chest.

“He was going to take you from me. I could see it in your eyes,” she snarled, reaching into her pocket. “He was going to use your weak little heart against you and make you his.”

She released me, my head lolling to the side.

“You are mine,” she whispered.

“What makes you think I’ll help you?”

“Because I will make you believe you should.”

She tipped my head back, nails digging into my cheeks.

“You won’t remember any of this, dearest.”

The cold liquid slipped down my throat, and oblivion followed.