Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Page Fourteen. He is gone, and this book…how can I show her the failures of her father?
I toss and turn in the sheets, rolling over and over again until I realise that I’m lying on the ground, deep within the forest, right before the mansion, and there are the brightest yellow and silver flowers blooming right in front of my face. I turn over, staring up at the mansion in the brightness of the moonlight shining down on it. The glass top shimmers in the light, and it is stunning like this. It stands so tall, towering above me—not derelict, not broken, not burnt down like I imagine it is now. No, the towering mansion looks as if it has been freshly built. The bricks shine, the gates rise tall behind me as I stand up. Rows of perfect flower and garden formations line the pathway to the steps, to the door, with dragon statues perched along the path.
My heart races as I see a woman tending to the flowers, and something about her makes me stare, as goose bumps prickle my skin. She is pale, her skin like pure ice, and her hair matches the same, falling in wispy strands all the way to the floor, but her hands are painted red, along with a strange red mark on her right cheek. When she lifts her eyes, I freeze. Her eyes are white, no pupil or iris, just white and all-seeing. She looks so familiar, and I know why. She is the deity I’ve prayed to, begged for help, asked to save me. I know it in my blood, and she looks like Ziven.
“It’s about time we saw one another,” she whispers, her voice as soft as lullabies sung to babies in the dead of the night.
“Who are you?” I whisper. My voice echoes, sounding odd—like it doesn’t belong to me in this strange place. I’m dreaming, I have to be, but it’s more than that. This place is alive with magic, tempting and pushing, and I simply don’t exist here.
“You pray to me. Many do, even when my sisters are locked away and my power is not—not at my strength without them. You chose to walk away, and that was not your choice, Story Dehana.” She looks up at the moon. “I do not have a name that fae like you can pronounce or call me. I am simply one of the three.” Her eyes look like the moon, so bright in the night. “I am not a being, not a thing to be named. I am a deity. A magic bound into a form that comforts you. I have blessed your birth, watched your life, and lent you my power. Your magic is mine.”
“My name has changed. I am married now,” I correct her because I don’t know what else to say to that claim of hers. Suddenly, she is in front of me. I jump back, but her hands grab onto my arms. She doesn’t hurt me like I’d expect her to; instead, she simply stands there, making it hard to look away from her. Her sisters would have hurt me by now, and I learnt from them never to trust a deity.
She closes her eyes. “They were once kinder than even myself.” When she opens her eyes, her lips are pressed into a thin line. “When you wake, do make the right choice,” she warns. “You’re playing in a game of power that is much stronger—much more than you can possibly understand. I set things in place when the curse was set. I wove my power into the land to make your soul exist and be bound to the sun and moon heirs. United. My sisters are locked away from me, and I chose you to change it. The sun, the moon, the stars. Light, dark, and the shadowy grey between them—it’s all the same. All three. Only one can undo the errors of the past.” She touches my hair, and a single strand turns the brightest of white. “When you wake, make the right choice and make a future of peace for us to bless again.”
She pushes me back, and I gasp as I wake up, reaching for Ziven, for him to chase away my nightmare and remind me what is real, but my fingers find nothing but cold stone lined with dirt. My eyes widen as I look up to see the book—the deity book—right in front of my face, hovering above a puddle. Next to it, a box floats in the air with its sister held inside. The box and this room were laced with protective spells, and this shouldn’t be happening. My mouth is dry as I crawl backward, shaking my head as I look for a door, but there isn’t one to be found. There’s no way out. Eventually I know I don’t have a choice but to speak to it. “How did you break the spells and get me here? Are you the reason for the dream of the deity?”
“My sister’s power overtakes the sun and moon,” the book answers in that female voice. “My sister cannot touch us. The one that’s always been free and not tainted by any of this has left you before us to make the right choice and set us free, to be with her in the skies once more.”
“No,” I snap. That is not happening.
I’m surprised when the voice that speaks to me is different, and my eyes drift to the box, to the book that is somehow speaking to me. “When you beg us deities for help, does it come?”
I think of all those who have prayed, of all the horrors I have seen, a million times over—including ones done to myself.
No, because we are not free. “She cannot alter our path, cannot change it. If she did, she would be no better than the vampyres we want to overthrow. We deserve to be free,” I whisper. “Every single one of us, and it’s what I fight for, alongside my mate. We want a world where my life isn’t on repeat for thousands of blood slaves, for all the slaves. It has to stop.”
I’m not sure which one of the books speaks, their voices are similar now. I know it’s not what they sound like; they are using the voice for me. “And what is it you believe you deserve?”
“My life with Ziven. I fought for us.” I rise to my feet, but I do not want to fight with them anymore. Because, despite everything, I actually pity them, both of them, because they are like this and it’s clearly sent them mad. They are trapped within the pages of a simple book—powerful deities that we once worshipped. “You once loved us fae and helped us. I was told about how fae loved you all.”
“We loved you once,” she tells me. “And you loved us. You built temples and statues. You prayed to us, and we blessed you with everything you asked for. If you could not conceive a child, we found a way to bring children who had no parents to those. If their crops failed to grow, we wove them fresh fish in the rivers and animals to hunt so they would not starve. When the water from the mountains was tainted with poison, we broke a new waterfall into the mountain with clear water to fix this. When you were sick with illnesses, no one thought you would survive. We kept you alive. We saved your children. We granted your kind long lives of high health. And we did so as a gift because we enjoyed the joy on your faces and in your hearts…and then you did this to us.”
“I didn’t,” I remind her, my heart hurting for them. They were our deities, and we betrayed them. “I wouldn’t ever have done that to you, and not many would. We are not evil. I am here, still debating helping you when you hurt my friend.”
“A mistake in anger.”
“Look into my mind,” I challenge. “You’ve been there often enough now and see what your mistake did and cost. She was innocent.”
“What I see in your mind is love.” She exhales sharply. “And that makes you very, very risky to make any sort of deals with, Story Dehana.”
“Why?” I tempt fate by asking.
“Because your mate is dead.”
She shoves into my mind, forcing me to see the truth, and it kills me. I see Ziven—his body dying, absorbing too much power until his heart stops. I scream as time stops, and he dies right in front of me, and I can’t move as I watch dragons, one by one, tearing him apart, only to use magic like shadows to fix him. Mark him. My heart plummets into my stomach. I reach for him, desperate—only to grasp at nothing but thin air. I stumble back, breath hitching, before I realise—I am still in this room with the books. I dig my feet in and stop. “That isn’t true.”
“It is. I will not lie to you. You cannot lie to me.” I swear there is empathy in her voice, and I hate it. Ziven can’t be dead…I would know it. Magic, no matter what, couldn’t hide that from me. But I felt him go, felt the bond empty out into nothing, and then he was back, and we can’t talk in our minds. We… Was that why? Not this place…but what he did to save me and his people. He took too much power from the shadow dragons, and they took his life for it. “The time is coming for the war, and when the war is over, the dragon’s magic will fade. His body will not survive it—neither will his soul. He has nothing tethered to this world anymore, and he took the power and the deal, knowing he would die and only get these moments with you.”
“No.” I shake my head, wanting to step back, but I can’t. My feet feel rooted into the stone. And I know—I know—she’s not lying. I can feel she’s not lying.
“You have a choice. A choice that has been foreseen for thousands of years.” Her voice snaps me back from the feeling taking over my body. A desperate feeling.
“What choice?”
She continues. “You have two futures. One—the war that never truly began and was won from the start. The war stops when you make the deal to turn the vampyres back into fae, one by one. It would drain us of our power, what is left. But we would make it to be free. It would cost you everything.” Everything. My everything is him, and that is too high a cost to lose. I won’t lose him. “And the other future is this.” She brushes into my mind like a storm, and I don’t fight her. I am in a warm library, painted black with silver bookcases and glass moons, hundreds of them, hanging from the ceiling high above me. The library is multi-levelled and rich with books, setting my soul on fire just thinking about reading them all. It’s bigger than the mansion’s library, and I just want to stare and stare. A laugh from a boy jolts my head up, and I see him, wrapped up in Ziven’s arms, and they are both laughing. The boy has red hair and bright silver eyes as he looks down with a moon marking on his neck.
“Mum!” he calls out, waving wildly. “Mama!”
I raise my hand and wave, feeling someone else holding my other hand as Ziven’s eyes search for me. I look down and see a little girl—she’s older than the boy, maybe ten, maybe a little older. Her hair is also the brightest red, but black streaks run through the front, braided back neatly in a way my mum used to do for me. “You said there was a new book, something found deep in the South that you read a week ago and thought of me. Mama, are you okay?”
“What’s your name?” I breathe out, and I barely get to touch her face with my fingertips before she begins to fade away. I take in how she looks—the perfect mixture of Ziven and me. She looks like the boy I saw in the other vision with Emyr but something is different about her, strange. The name Mama rings over and over in my head as I open my eyes, and I stare at my fingertips. “No!” The girl, my future daughter, is gone. Not that she ever existed, but she isn’t here. I am suddenly right in front of the book, my fingers reaching out, hovering just above it.
“That is the second future.” It almost warns.
“I can’t have children, and you must lie. This is cruel.” I shake my head.
“You carry a child right now.” She brushes off my concern and reveals something impossible. I can barely move, barely take in her words as my hand drifts down to my stomach. It’s all I ever wanted—a child. A child with Ziven.
“Promise me,” I whisper. “On everything that makes you a deity, that you’re not lying to me, because I already know you can be cruel.”
“I vow it on my power and my sisters existence. I sense the life inside you. New, innocent and real. I want to be free, and I want my sister free.” A warm breeze blows around me. “Make your choice. You can ask me to turn the vampyres back with my sister or ask us to save King Ziven.”
“If I ask you to save Ziven, I’m condemning millions to death, and I am his queen now. Their blood would be on my hands,” I whisper, staring at the book, my mouth drying. “I can’t make this choice like this, not without something more.”
“What if I told you there’s another way?” she coaxes me. “But…there will be a price for power. I will give you something to win the war.”
My hand tightens over my stomach. Not me, but her. A warning of what the price will be. “You’re telling me you’ll take the child from me?”
“Not take,” she corrects. “Send on a divine path when they come of age.”
I double-check. “A path that is without danger?”
“No life will be without danger. She will be god-touched.”
I take another step closer to the book, tasting its power in the air. “And what does that mean?”
“You will see—if you choose Ziven.” She waits, her voice steady in my mind. One word. One choice. Vampyre or Ziven. “What is your choice?”
As selfish as it is, as desperate as it is, I would choose him over the world a million times. Because there isn’t a world without him for me. I have tried everything. Everything for a life with him, and if it makes me a monster to choose him, then it does. I love him and he has already chosen me and given his life for a chance to save me. I will always be his, and he is mine. “Ziven.”
Magic explodes around me and it’s bright, dangerous and unholy to witness. The box opens with a click the moment I touch it. The two books slam together with a smack that shakes the very ground beneath my feet, and then—I free fall into the magic, knowing nothing and everything all at the same time.
The deities are free.