Chapter 25 Morgen #3
He thought Sol might be shouting, thought that maybe, someone else was crying. He didn’t care, hardly even noticed the rest of the world existed as he pressed his palm to her sternum and forced the tired, burnt-out embers from his body into hers.
“Live,” he whispered over and over again, until the word lost its meaning. The embers failed to take each time he gave them to her. He kept trying anyway.
He didn’t know if she was breathing. He didn’t know if he was.
“Nya, please.” Please. “I love you,” he said, cupping her face and leaning his forehead against hers as a broken, agonized sound he didn’t recognize escaped him. He pushed the embers into her body again. Just one more; one more, and she might live…
His vision blurred and his chest caved open with a pain so potent, his back bowed. Still, he did not let go.
“It’s over, Morgen.”
He stiffened, and when he lifted his head, he found Sol standing over him.
An old memory flashed across his failing mind; Sol watching with the same stony expression as Kronos’ whip tore at Morgen’s bare back.
He had been seven or eight and had tried his luck at asking the God of Light about his mother.
He informed Kronos, who then resolved another attempt to beat the ‘weakness of love’ out of Morgen.
They had been so utterly wrong. Love wasn’t weakness, but the strongest force in existence.
It was why he was still breathing, still trying to bring her to life when he should have been dead.
Love carried out the impossible, against all odds.
It did not care what the chances were and was far more ruthless than the strongest magic in Arcadia.
“She’s too far gone to save, and you are dying.” Sol sounded impatient. “I need the embers.”
Morgen made a sound somewhere between an empty laugh and a dangerously wet cough, tasting iron in his throat. “Fuck you.”
“The world will die if you do not hand them over to me.”
“Then let it die.”
Fury glazed over Sol’s stony features, twisting them into something ugly no physical beauty could mask. He lunged, his hand digging into Morgen’s hair and dragging him away from Nya before he slammed to the ground.
Pain blinded him so completely, he lost consciousness for a few seconds. When he came to, he wondered why no one was coming to help him. It was a fleeting thought, the dying hope of an unloved child.
Sol gripped his throat directly over the place Kronos had once tried to slit it, pressing his thumb against the scar like a reminder.
Morgen was completely alone in the world.
No one had ever cared, not until her. He had failed to save the one person who made him want to live.
She had shown him there was beauty in the world, however broken.
“Here.” She handed him a smooth, dark stone, still damp and sandy. Her hair dripped with creek water, and her eyes were bright. When their fingertips touched, she blushed.
“Why?” he asked, glancing pointedly at the stone.
She shrugged, her lips tugging upwards. “I thought it was pretty. Add it to your pouch.”
Beams of sunlight shone through the trees as he stared at her.
She found the simplest, oddest things to be worth her attention.
He found he had involuntarily begun to see things he hadn’t before.
Sometimes, he heard her voice in his head when he was alone, commenting on a bird song or a tree.
It took him a while to realize he found her disarmingly beautiful too, more than anything she ever pointed out to him.
He had viewed his life through black and white for years. She was a vivid burst of color.
Sol kicked his side, and the memory faded like smoke, bringing Morgen back to cruel awareness. The god’s eyes were aglow with rage and desperation.
“You are pathetic,” Sol spat, baring his teeth. “You are not worthy of the embers or the power you inherited.”
Morgen smiled, a delirious, empty expression. He could feel the blood coating his teeth and dripping down his chin. There was nothing left to lose.
“Go ahead, Sol,” he choked out. “Take my life. I never wanted it anyways. You’ve proclaimed it many times before yourself: you never needed me because you kept a couple of the embers. Good luck with that.”
Sol roared in fury. His features morphed, and Morgen caught a glimpse of the immortal beast beneath his human face, formless light curled around a heart long blackened by an excess of power. The vision was gone in flash.
“Give them to me!” Sol screamed, his hand squeezing, suffocating until drawing air was nearly impossible.
Morgen knew it was over. He was teetering on the edge of a chasm he could never return from.
The embers still attempted to revive him, their efforts agonizing as they tried and failed to heal too many wounds.
The magic flooded his broken body in one last riotous attempt to revive it.
A drunken stupor hazed over his mind, but he forced himself to stay awake, to look at Sol and offer up one last taunt before he left this world to collapse in on itself.
“Beg.”
Sol’s fingers spasmed, burning where they touched Morgen’s skin. “You worthless fucking—”
“You should probably listen to him if you’d like to live, Sol.”
For a moment, Morgen thought he was already dead, because that voice…
It was Nya’s.
Through his clouded vision, he saw her standing behind Sol. Her eyes were no longer filled with midnight, instead glowing with strands of silver and the most beautiful shade of blazing amber-gold.