Chapter 66
The blade carved through shadow and skin alike, whispering with each pass. Xyliria hummed softly, pleased, as if this were nothing more than a tedious ritual she performed out of habit.
A hobby. A craft.
Ashterion bled in silence beneath her hands, limbs bound, breath shallow but steady. The room stank of copper and ozone, thick with the sharp bite of magic. His shadows had retreated to the far corners of the chamber, too fractured to fight, too loyal to flee.
The silvery line across his ribs smoked where the blade touched it. Her favourite toy, enchanted specifically for him. It cut through everything. Flesh. Bone. Shadows.
“You’re being so well behaved today,” she purred. “No writhing, no snarling. I do appreciate when you remember your place.”
The blade dragged across his abdomen in a shallow curve, not deep enough to be lethal, enough to remind. To mark.
Ashterion didn’t react. Not even a twitch.
Her smile widened, pleased with herself, as if his stillness were submission and not strategy.
“I think that deserves a reward,” she continued, her tone dipped in syrup. “Perhaps I’ll let you keep your voice tonight. Or your shadows. Or maybe—” She tilted her head, lips brushing his jaw. “Maybe I’ll let you pick which part I carve next.”
Ashterion turned his head slightly, his lips brushing the skin of her throat where she’d leaned in.
“If it pleases you,” he murmured. “Then I’m glad.”
Xyliria’s eyes fluttered closed for half a breath. Her fingers slipped from the hilt of the blade to trace the line she’d drawn across his abdomen, smearing blood like ink across a page.
Xyliria’s bloody fingers lifted, tracing a lazy circle above his heart.
“But,” she sighed, almost wistfully, “as pretty as you’ve been tonight, I think I’ve had my fill of watching you pretend to enjoy hurting her.”
The words struck harder than any blade. But he didn’t speak. Not yet.
“I let you play at torturer once. A novelty. But it never really suited you, did it?” Her voice dropped to a venomous coo. “I prefer you in other roles. Decorative. Compliant. Obedient.”
The blade dipped, carving a shallow arc down his thigh. Ashterion’s breath hitched. Still, he didn’t scream. Didn’t give her the satisfaction.
“I’ll be sending you both to Ryleth.”
No.
No.
Xyliria smiled, sweet as poison. “He was so very excited when I told him. Practically purred. He’ll take excellent care of her spirit. Break what’s left of it. And as a reward…” She leaned in again, lips brushing his ear. “He gets you. Leashed and bleeding, just the way he likes.”
She drew back, tilting her head. “I told him you’d be most compliant.”
Ashterion swallowed hard, the taste of blood thick on his tongue.
“If that is what you wish,” he said hoarsely, exactly the way she liked it.
“You see?” she whispered. “You can be so lovely when you remember who you belong to. In fact—”
The door flew open.
Ashterion’s eyes flicked up, just in time to see Merrick freeze.
The breath left his brother in one violent exhale. His eyes locked on the scene. On the chains, the blood, the blade buried in Ashterion’s flesh.
Ashterion saw the shift happen—the fury, the betrayal, the bone-deep horror twisting Merrick’s expression. His hands clenched at his sides, trembling with the force of it.
“Get. Away. From him,” Merrick snarled.
Xyliria, of course, only smiled.
“Oh, please,” she sighed. “Don’t be dramatic. He enjoys it.” She trailed a blood-slicked finger down Ashterion’s chest. “Don’t you, darling?”
Ashterion met Merrick’s stare. And gave nothing away.
“Merrick,” Xyliria said, glancing over her shoulder. “Be a dear and close the door, won’t you? I’d hate for the court to think you’re the type to interrupt a private moment.”
Lightning flared across Merrick’s frame.
Ashterion forced his voice to work. “It’s fine,” he said, flat and cold. “You’re dismissed.”
Merrick’s mouth opened, then snapped shut.
Ashterion could see the war in his features. Could feel the storm of it. But then Merrick took one slow step back. And another. Until he was at the door.
Ashterion held his gaze the whole time.
Lightning still laced across his brother’s shoulders, crackling with restraint that would not hold forever. His chest rose and fell in trembling bursts, as if the act of not lunging forward was tearing him open from the inside.
Ashterion felt it then, the fractures forming in the facade he’d spent centuries constructing.
Because this was a problem.
He had made sure the worst of it remained hidden.
The humiliations? Those were public. The whispers of his obedience, of his usefulness in bed, of the leash Xyliria wrapped around his throat and yanked whenever the court grew too quiet.
But the blade? The bindings? This?
No one had ever seen that.
And now Merrick was standing in the doorway, fists clenched, lightning licking at the air like a living snarl. His eyes burned with something ancient. Righteous. Wrathful.
And Ashterion knew Merrick would kill her. The first opportunity he had.
The male had never been one to forgive cruelty, especially not when it touched family. And he could do it. Ashterion knew that. Knew how lethal Merrick was when he was angry, how sharp his instincts became when the people he loved were hurt.
But if he struck while she was consort… if he moved against her now…
Ashterion’s jaw flexed.
“Merrick,” he said again, low and sure. “Go.”
A muscle in Merrick’s jaw twitched, his throat worked around a word he didn’t say. His lightning flickered, then vanished.
But Ashterion saw it on Merrick’s face, clear as daylight. Every moment of the last four centuries folding in on itself. Every quiet question, every tense silence. Every time Merrick had pressed him, asking things he shouldn’t have noticed, things Ashterion had been so sure he’d hidden.
Every time, he had dismissed them. Deflected. Smiled. Lied.
“Merrick.” And fuck, his voice cracked. “Please.”
Agony flashed across his brother’s face. It came closer to breaking Ashterion than any blade Xyliria had ever pressed to his skin.
But then, with hands that trembled far more than they should have, Merrick reached for the door. Pulled it shut. And the room was silent once more.
Xyliria sighed as she resumed her work. “Well done,” she purred, dragging the blade lightly across his collarbone. “I thought for a moment Merrick had forgotten his manners.”
Ashterion hissed through his teeth, not from the pain, but to fill the sound where a scream might have gone.
Because he was already planning. Merrick wouldn’t let this go. He would kill Xyliria the first chance he got. And Ashterion couldn’t risk Merrick. He refused to lose him—not when he’d already lost so much.
He needed to protect him. There was only one way to do that.
The irony nearly made him laugh. Because the answer… the answer was already in Xyliria’s hand. It was one of only a handful of weapons in the world that could kill a High Lord like him.
Ashterion closed his eyes, just for a moment.
It would be difficult. But not impossible.
He’d already been considering it. In stolen moments. In the dead hush of sleepless nights when guilt curled tight in his gut and her face haunted him. He hadn’t been able to protect her. Not fully. But this… this he could do.
The power tethered to him—his hold over the Nyxarian lands—could be transferred. Xyliria had never been made High Lady, only consort. And that made things… simpler.
He could bind the magic to Merrick instead. Quietly. Finalise it the moment before—
Ashterion swallowed down the thought.
He didn’t want to die.
Gods, he didn’t.
But if it saved Merrick, if it spared Isara from what came next, then it would be the most useful thing he’d done in centuries. And there was something almost poetic about that.
He could see it, now. Merrick standing in the throne room, shadow-crowned and blood-marked, power humming through the floor. Xyliria choking on her last breath, finally, finally silenced. His people freed from her grasp.
And Varyth…
Maybe he would accept the offering. Maybe he would see it as enough. Ashterion’s own death in exchange for the pain they had inflicted on his court. On Isara.
Isara.
Her name flared through him. Her face rose behind his eyelids, vivid and alive. Too alive. It hit something in his chest he hadn’t let himself feel in years. Something tender. Dangerous.
He shoved the thought away.
No.
He forced his mind back to the plan. To the blade. To the thrum of power in the walls of this cursed chamber, the heartbeat of the court that pulsed in time with his own.
It was the only path. Ashterion knew it, down to the marrow. There was no clever manoeuvre left, no final card to play. No bargain that wouldn’t cost more than it saved. Only this.
And still, he grieved.
Not for the throne. Not even for his life. But for what he’d dared, once, to imagine he might have again.
He’d clung to it, stupidly. To the idea of return. As though he might someday step through that door again and find them waiting. As though forgiveness could be earned if he bled enough. As though the wreckage he’d become could somehow fit back into that place.
But that was fantasy.
He knew better now.
No death could redeem him. No blade could carve his sins away. Whatever waited for him beyond the veil—oblivion, judgment, nothing at all—was more than he deserved.
The steel sang across his skin again, another shallow cut, and he barely felt it. He was too deep in it now. Too far away.
Lost in the memory of golden light on polished wood, the flicker of candle flames at dusk, the echo of footsteps that no longer walked these halls.
He would never return. He would never be that male again.
The ache twisted in his chest, dull and constant.
He didn’t flinch when the blade nicked across his collarbone.
And then—
He heard them.
His shadows.
At first, a whisper. A ripple in the wrong direction.
They hummed to life at the edges of the chamber, a low tune threading through the air. It wasn’t one of his. He hadn’t summoned it. Hadn’t fed it.
And yet… it was familiar.
His breath caught.
A lullaby.
A soft, tragic thing he hadn’t heard in centuries—sung in cradles and bedrooms. Meant to soothe children through nightmares, through things they were too young to understand.
Where in the gods-damned realms had they learned that?
The shadows didn’t learn from others. Not truly. Not without his will behind it.
But this wasn’t his.
This was hers.
The melody Isara had sung when she killed the girl. They’d remembered it. Taken it in. Echoed it back. They’d chosen to learn from her.
Why now?
And before he could think better of it—before he could remind himself of where he was, of what Xyliria would do—he hummed back.
A different melody.
One older.
Darker.
A song he’d carried since he was a fresh-faced High Lord, standing on blood-soaked soil with too much power in his bones and too little wisdom in his heart.
It was a ballad of death. Of glory and tragedy and warriors sent to die for causes that never cared for them. A hymn to fallen brothers. To lost leaders. To the cost of war.
Fitting, really.
The moment the sound left his throat, he felt Xyliria’s presence shift, sensed the fury before it struck.
The blade sliced clean down his chest. A line of fire, of torn flesh and burning nerves.
But he didn’t flinch.
Didn’t make a sound.
Because the shadows had taken the two melodies and merged them.
And it was… breathtaking.
It shouldn’t have been beautiful. But it was. It filled the room like light slipping through battlefield smoke. And for a single, precious heartbeat—
Nothing else mattered.
Just the music.
Just the shadows singing.
A final gift, perhaps. From a power that knew, just as he did, that his time was nearly done.