CHAPTER 30 ADRIA #2
Eridian inclines her head in agreement. “You may be a monster queen, Adria,” she says, “but you are not the one who called for war on the innocent.”
Standing upon two of her arms, Lail crosses the other four defiantly across her chest, her tail coiled close to her body, ending in a tightly clenched seventh hand.
“Once, Adria, I pocketed a memory of my greatest hope, rooted in resisting your rule. But now,” she says, voice rising above the ongoing tumult of battle around us, “it is your life, not your death, that gives us hope. That there may yet be peace. That Thaane can be stopped.”
I stare at the horizon without believing my eyes.
Perhaps the heat has addled my brain; perhaps the whirling sands and haphazard freezeshot and heatshot have caused my vision to deceive me.
But no, those really are a second wave of reinforcements, rapidly approaching to fight back Thaane’s assault.
And at the head of the descending battalion, far older than my memories of him, face deeply lined by hundreds more sleep cycles: Azarii himself.
Despite our civil war, I haven’t seen him with my own eyes since my childhood, when my father condemned him to an Elysian cell.
If Azarii truly hates nightfolk evolution as much as the reports indicated, he has very much to hate about himself.
Among the nightfolk, he is a singular creature, exceptionally built for battle, his mutations among some of the most overt our people have to offer.
Two sets of arms. Two pairs of wings, smaller than my own, more akin to Thaane’s—spread in
a more insectoid formation, built for speed above power. Four horns, one pair angled up and the other down, framing a devilish face. Strong square jaw. Amber eyes like hot coals.
This is the man who called me the ultimate monster, the usurper. My last living family, dedicating his entire existence to overthrowing my rule. Yet now he flies to my side, fresh soldiers assembled at his back—to take up arms not against me, but alongside me.
In the final hour, the enemy of my enemy becomes my friend. I showed a comparatively small mercy to Eridian, sparing her life in interrogation, but now she offers me far greater grace in return: a real shot at stalling the apocalypse.
Jaw set, Eridian pumps the barrel of her shotgun. “Lest Thaane destroy us all,” she says, resolved, “Azarii’s army stands with you.”
Fresh energy surging through me, I spread my wings wide. Blue energy blazes into being around my fists. “Then let’s make sure we win,” I say, even as we split apart, diving headlong back into the tumult.
My whole world again becomes the battle haze of discharged weapons, beating wings, and frantically firing dayfolk. In my peripheral vision, I catch snatches of my new allies, formerly my foes, fighting with all they’re worth to stop Thaane’s invaders.
Eridian, blasting slugs of freezeshot clean through rib cages.
Lail, simultaneously holding three opponents aloft, her many arms crushing enemy windpipes—alongside the seventh hand at the apex of her tail.
Neo, unleashing waves of overcharged telekinesis that reach as far as thought. Soldiers collapse in heaps before him, lay down their weapons, and even wail as their own will to fight is exorcised by someone else’s mind. He may not be a soldier proper, but he’s quite possibly the best we have.
And Azarii, darting deftly through the skies, launching blasts of gifted energy at the scrambling soldiers below. Amidst the fighting, our gazes lock. There is no exchange of words, not even of signals, but I feel an understanding pass between us.
After all that’s happened, we may never truly be family again—but for now, we are far from foes.
Thaane’s warriors fall in droves before his power.
I’m more thankful than any sentences could possibly express.
With his reinforcements’ arrival, my uncle brought me a fresh injection of hope.
And our locked gazes say more than enough.
Then his eyes suddenly go distant, cloudy. His rapidly flapping wings pull suddenly taut.
My stomach lurches.
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
“If you truly resent your strength, Azarii,” Thaane says, claws piercing deep into the rebel leader’s chest, “then you don’t deserve to have it.”
Azarii’s mouth works, but no sound is coming out, only bright blood bubbling on the quivering lips.
His eyes roll back into the empty skull.
His body goes rigid, twitching, seizing, and then utterly slack around his killer’s claws.
I hear a scream, so loud that it echoes in my eardrums, and barely register that the voice is my own.
“So I will free of you of the burden,” Thaane says, as Azarii’s body thuds with heavy finality into the sand.
I am truly the last of my bloodline now.
From the sky, Thaane turns his attention back to me. “Hello, little princess,” he hisses through his teeth. It does not escape my notice that he no longer calls me a queen. And as for princess … there is no reverence in it.
Thaane flies headlong into me. My oldest friend, my little brother, the best soldier I ever knew—his triple-clawed feet drive my wings into the sand, his own four wings slicing viciously through the air.
Despite myself, I make up for his monotone with an answer that bleeds emotion, each syllable a stabbing pain. “Hello, old friend.”
With all the strength I can muster, both wings already hurting worse than after the sun serpent attack, I fling him off me, then meet him in the sky, both of us grappling for the advantage, my lower lip dripping blood from the force of my gritted teeth.
We trade blows amidst the searing sunlight, every sound amplified by the immense emptiness of the Daylands’ seared surface.
“There’s still time, you know,” Thaane snarls between punches.
“You could lead our army into the Daylands, not make these sands your grave.” Every strike hurts worse than the last, but I’m bigger than my body now, adrenaline embodied, moving faster than thought.
“You could bring our people into a golden age.”
My forearm stings from blocking his blows, the impact reverberating down the bone and into my tightly clenched fists. “They’re not so different from us, Thaane.”
“Maybe not.” This time it’s Thaane’s teeth that sink into my arm.
I howl, my blood coating his tongue and teeth and lips as he presses in farther, through muscle, down to bone.
“But they’re weaker. You could crush them into dust. Reclaim Pagonian history for the nightfolk.
Why fight for them, when you’re the strongest of us all? ”
Eyes stinging with involuntary tears, I tear my arm free of his fangs.
“Because that’s what strength is for.” I drive both fists forward in a rapid flurry, arm hot with blood, my pulse roaring through me like a battle drum.
“Do you think I wanted this?” Every blow glances off his lean, honed muscle, but I don’t stop.
“Both parents buried? My body mutated beyond recognition? My waking and sleeping both haunted by what I’ve become? ”
My knuckles are bleeding now, too, scarlet speckles scattered about the sky. “But this planet needs its monsters, Thaane. It shouldn’t, but it does. Only a monster can hold back the dark. Only a monster can keep the last of the light burning.”
I taste rust and salt. I spit on the sand far below. Thaane’s gaze is lightless, loveless, desperately hungry, not the eyes I’ve known since my youth.
“So I’ll be a monster,” I say. “But not your monster.” With all my strength, in a whole-body blast of planetary energy, I hurl Thaane back down toward the ground. “The worst one—so I can be the last one.”
He falls, limbs sprawled, mouth open with no sound coming out. I hear his spine crack against the swirling sand.
The cycle ends here.
I hope to the stars, to sun and shadow alike, perhaps even to the dayfolk’s Dreamgiver, that Thaane will be dead when I land.
I hope I won’t have to look him in the eyes when I sever his poisonous presence from the planet.
But hope is a fickle, flickering thing. When I land, his spine is indeed twisted, wrecked.
But his eyes still know me.
“I could’ve been … good to you, you know.” His chest rises and falls with great effort, shivering, some ribs likely cracked, too. “All … our lives … I’ve craved it … dreamed of it.”
I shake my head, unable to process. I want to curse him, to silence him forever with a final blow, but instead I choke out, “You don’t know what you’re saying,” knowing in the pit of my stomach that he absolutely does.
Thaane’s broken voice becomes a demonic snarl. If he retained control of his limbs, I have no doubt that his claws would flay the flesh from my bones everywhere he could reach. “But you had … to have … that girl.” His gaze is wild, afire, but heinously lucid. “When you … could’ve had … me.”
And suddenly it doesn’t matter that I can see his eyes, that I’ll probably see them in the darkness every time I close my own. I don’t see the person I thought was my brother, my brethren, familiar as my own bones.
I see a boy who disguised his selfish need as familial loyalty for a lifetime. I see a predator who stalked my steps with silent thirst, with selfish hunger, despite knowing full well my heart was fundamentally inclined away from any man’s.
Every comforting hand on my shoulder, every reassurance he would remain by my side, every lingering glance that I thought spoke of loyalty—a bid for something I could never give. How long would he have kept up the ruse? And had the tables of war turned in his favor, would he have
done worse than kill me? Asked me to smother myself and take a throne beside his, the ultimate feminine trophy of his victory?
My own tear-streaked face gleams in his pupils, so I close my eyes.
I seize Thaane’s neck with both hands and twist, and twist, till the head pops free of the shoulders.
Silence surrounds me despite the battlefield’s clamor. I’m utterly alone in the chaos of warfare. I kneel in the puddle of blood, crimson soaking through my robes, painting me as a family killer thrice over—twice of birth, once of family found.
Thaane’s windpipe snapped, but I still hear him howling inside my head. His unseeing eyes still pierce like twin freezeblades. Hardly knowing why, I ease the lids closed with the pads of my fingers. And I’m not sorry, but I’m not a monster. Not really.
I grip both my horns with my hands, fingers buried in my overlong hair, and sob.
A gentle gloved hand on one shoulder brings me back to the battlefield. Weeping, choking, I lift my head to discover the same soldier I attempted a pep talk with not long ago. Folina, her yellow wrist bandana already ragged and torn, its edges smeared with scarlet.
“They’ll scatter without him,” she says, gesturing to Thaane’s corpse. “Look.”
I scan the combat, and indeed, Thaane’s rebels are wide-eyed and thrown off-balance. Their strikes are broader, less controlled, more fear than fury, even the six-limbed giants mostly punching the air.
“We can hold the line out here,” Folina insists. “You have to win the war down there.” She tips her head toward the elevator that leads down into the settlement. “Go to Kori.”
I swallow hard against another sob. “But how will I find her?”
At that, Folina stares at the sand, unable or unwilling to meet my eyes. “Follow the gunfire.”