Chapter 27
Daemon climbed up the last of the handholds and braced his feet along the wide rim of Helviti’s cone. Clouds obscured any sight of the city, but above he had an unparalleled view of blue skies and the nearly-perpetual clouds spread out below him like a woolen blanket.
So many years, he’d gazed up the mountain’s throat and yearned for a glimpse of the sky through the obscuring haze of heat, ash, and fumes. Now here he was, able to leave the volcano whenever he wanted, able to see that sky, and restlessness churned inside him.
The world stretched out in front of him, all of Fjordlandi open to him—and he had no idea what to do with it.
“You could start by asking for guidance.”
Daemon spun at the voice, familiar and yet so long unheard that he questioned his own memory. But there he stood—his father, as tall as ever, just as young, just as imposing.
Had his smile always been so bright?
Daemon frowned. “Fodur.”
“Son.” Amusement danced over Fodur’s strong features. “It’s been a long time.”
Where had he even come from? Were there paths that came this far up the mountain, through the bank of clouds?
His father chuckled. “All these years, and you still expect me to behave like a human? You know by now that I’m not, Sigmann.”
Daemon winced at the name. And, figuring if his father had found him here, he wasn’t likely to vanish in the next second, Daemon lowered himself to a seat on the ledge, looking out over the sky. Was that Fodur’s natural domain? “I haven’t answered to that for a very long time.”
“Because you embraced a name never meant to be yours. Why were you so quick to accept what they told you? To think Elyon would abandon you so completely?” Fodur sat too, close enough that Daemon caught a whiff of the fresh air wafting off him—a stark contrast to the smell of the mountain.
Daemon dragged in a slow breath. “I don’t know. I didn’t know, I suppose. How this existence could be anything but the evil they said it was.” He turned his hand palm-up, where his Awakening mark scored it with white flames, and called an actual flame overtop it.
Fodur watched with a smile. “Fire brings life as surely as water, air, and soil. Without the volcanoes, Fjordlandi would be a barren wasteland, too cold to sustain life. You’re part of that.”
Daemon closed his fist. Looked over at the features he hadn’t seen in a hundred fifty years but could never forget. “I’ve failed the Giver. Failed the family he sent me to lead. You’d have been better off Awakening Thorin.”
“Elyon’s will cannot be circumvented by your failings, Sigmann.
He knew which of you would cry to him first. He knew how long you’d forget him in Helviti.
He knew how you would struggle—and he knew you would end up here, ready to listen.
” His father, gaze set out over the clouds too, drew in a long breath.
“It is so strange, this form. In my natural state, my will is perfectly aligned with Elyon’s, my mind fully capable of grasping his ways.
But the moment I don human flesh, with it comes all the complications.
The limitations of understanding and yet the love so tangled up in the unknown, the love that requires faith in what is unseen. ”
Daemon stared at his father’s profile. Perhaps Perla chatted easily about such things, about the seraph she called grandmother, but two weeks hadn’t been sufficient for him to wrap his mind around it. “We thought you were a revolutionary.”
Fodur flashed him a grin. “Who says I’m not?
Look at your homeland, son.” He stretched out an arm, and a stiff wind blew, parting the clouds enough that Daemon caught a glimpse of Reykstoll Harbor to his right, the plains rolling out beyond the city before him.
“Fjordlandi is desperate for revolution. For a return to its proper order. I thought, in my human form, that you or Thorin would be the one to bring it, that when you felt the fire in your veins, you would use it to displace King Axel. I thought that, much like Queen Arden, you would take your place and your throne.”
His throne? Daemon’s chest went tight. “Then I have disappointed you. Disappointed the Giver.”
But Fodur laughed. “Impossible, Sig. There are many paths you could have taken. Elyon knew which you would choose, though he did not share this knowledge with me, not then. Now, though, now I have seen. You could have taken the throne a hundred fifty years ago—and if you had, then it would have been Nik ruling now, Kyrja rising up to Challenge him and the system you’d have put in place, that legacy he’d have inherited.
Those two are the ones meant for this time. ”
“Nik ruling.” Daemon gazed out over the land, wondering where Nik even was. He’d sensed him here and there since that first burst that said he was back on land and had called up its heat. Enough to know he was traveling, but he hadn’t tried to pinpoint him. “Where would I have been?”
“Gone.” Fodur said it easily, but Daemon’s attention snapped back to him at the word.
“Gone?”
A nod as easy as the word. “You’d have lived your story. Lost your throne to the one you call Elianne in a Challenge. It was always going to be Nik here, now.”
As a young man, the thought of ever living to his current age would have been so baffling that he’d have thought Of course I’d be dead before now.
Today, though? Today the thought of a world in which he’d already have died chafed like new, unbroken leathers.
“Elianne would have beaten me?” He heard the disbelief, the arrogance in his tone.
Fodur laughed again. “For the sake of her son, you’ll find that woman can do many things beyond what anyone—herself included—thought her capable of.
” He looked over, met Daemon’s eyes. “The path you chose has left your story yet unlived. But your days are not yet up, Sig. It’s time to stop hiding in Helviti.
To trust your family to do the work you’ve trained them to do. To pursue what Elyon wants for you.”
Beneath them, the volcano rumbled with its constant churn of life, new rock melting, other hardening, magma pulsing through its veins like blood through a body. Through his body. This mountain had been Daemon’s heart for so long… “What is that? What does Elyon want for me?”
An enigmatic smile curved his father’s lips. “You think I can just tell you that, when everyone else in the world must seek it for themselves? I’ve given you a might-have-been. The what-will-be is up to you.”
Frustration burbled like lava. “You’ve told me I could have had a throne but that now I can’t, because it’s no longer my time.”
An arch of thick gold brows. “Do you want a throne?”
“No! I just…” Daemon heaved out a sigh, fist clenched around his mark. “I don’t know what I want.”
“And that’s what you need to discover. Start here.” Fodur swept an arm out to encompass the land before them. “What do you want for Fjordlandi?”
That was the easy part. “Security—for all the Fjordic people.”
“Including the Fjorders?”
He had to battle back a sneer. “They’ve had plenty of opportunity, all these years.”
“And is Dania not worthy of it, as an example? Her brother Sven? Laila and Magnus? Would you strip the rights of those people who declared they would fight for the thanes?”
Would he? Not them, particularly. Not having met them, having seen with his own eyes and heard with his own ears their vision for the future.
But if he hadn’t been in that meeting Kyrja called?
Would he have been the sort of king who’d made broad, sweeping regulations to take from the oppressors and turn them into the oppressed, heedless of the good individuals that got crushed in the process?
Clearly he would have been, if Kyrja would have been rising up to Challenge Nik, if things had gone differently.
The thought made a burning coal settle in his chest. “I would have been a bad king. A tyrant no better than Axel or Isidor.”
“Then perhaps you made the better choice, hiding in Helviti all these years. Perhaps now you have the chance to live a story that will give you a different legacy. A better one.” A big hand clapped his shoulder.
“Your queen needs you. Now, today. If you truly want a fair and equitable Fjordlandi, then give her and Nik your allegiance and your aid, not just lip service.”
His father’s tone had gone urgent, and the untethered feeling Daemon had been struggling with blew away like the clouds in his father’s wind. The wick inside him lit. “What do I need to do?”
Fodur motioned to the city. “She needs her High Council to fully take the reins while she settles things with her father, and the Great Council to keep the people in order.”
Daemon frowned. “She doesn’t have a full High Council.”
“And that’s the problem. She has you, though.”
“I can’t take her reins.”
Fodur lifted those brows again. “You know very well who can, Sig. You’re the current First Seat of the High Council. Go appoint those Blessed who have been helping her as interim members so they have the authority to do more. Step up. And be ready.”
Though already drawing his legs up to lever himself to his feet, Daemon paused, feet under him but knees still bent. “Ready for what?”
His father chuckled and stood with him. “Oh, don’t worry, son. You’ll know.” He turned toward the plains, straightening in a way that made it look as though he meant to leap from the ridge and…what? Fly?
Maybe so. A thought which strangled him in a way Daemon didn’t even know how to define. Made questions spark, ignite. “Fodur.”
“Mm?” Fodur turned his face toward Daemon without shifting otherwise. His muscles looked coiled, ready to spring.
Daemon glanced behind him, into Helviti’s gaping mouth. “If you’ve been alive all this time—why only now do you come to find me? I thought…”