31. Cress
Like when Braza created the tether between us, I experienced Phaeron’s memories as if I were him. Yet a tug in my gut reminded me I wasn’t a Moihan male, as if I wasn’t quite sleeping under the layer of his recollections. I existed as a tagalong for the journey through his past.
The pieces of memory were snippets from a very long life as ephemeral as a breath. Yet what I saw defined who he was.
Shadowborn. Soldier. Prince. Lover. Father.
His earliest memories were of shadows, curling and billowing between his boyish hands. They were always there behind the beacons of a goddess of light otherwise present on a world saturated in a deep shroud of night lit only by distant, cold stars.
What he truly remembered of childhood were bits and pieces of an ancient whole. Finely tailored suits reduced to shreds because they fit too snugly. The shadowborn rage, overwhelming in a boy’s body.
He associated his Iorsio mother with her disapproval; her pursed, white-stained mouth.
His father, however, let brief glimpses of sympathy through the cracks of his stony visage. Phaeron and his twin had taken after him, after all, beget of the strongest shadowborn to ever serve Myuna.
It was his father that’d put him into physical training early, and from there, he discovered his first love…a weapon in his hands.
The sword did not require manners or doublespeak, nor did it look at him with weighty expectations. It was straightforward, something to master. He learned with one, then two swords, moving through forms and stances until his fingers bled and it all became muscle memory. He honed himself to a fine edge of mastery made of blade and shadow.
Like any other weapon, he was put to use. His birth nation was constantly at war, conquering and expanding in the name of Myuna. The softness of his teenage years dulled as time progressed. One of the only constants he had was his brother. Early on, they would trade battlefields: from court to bloodshed and back. Phaeron preferred bloodshed, but he did his duty as a prince as was required.
He served for a drudgery of time, a murky pit that came to crystal focus with the ringing of claws on metal. Phaeron rapped the ends of his swords, peace tied in their sheathes, as he waited one cold evening at the mouth of a cave. Not just any cave, but Shenmaw, an underground town and home to the secretive Vess.
Restlessness shifted under his skin. I felt a shade of his discomfort and the weight of darker thoughts and emotions. It felt like he was here because of the despair, loneliness, and grief that filled him, though he longed to melt into the night as the passing seconds wore his resolve away.
He had announced to the Vrassorm male keeping guard that he was there to see Auric et Vess. The leader of the voidwhisperers was not usually one to be summoned casually, but Phaeron had minded their rules and kept to the line in the dirt he was not allowed to pass.
I was surprised when Auric arrived. He was nearly unchanged this far in the past, except he had two intact backswept horns and his navy-blue hair was long and woven elaborately into braids. The stain on his face glimmered purple, tracing jagged lines over his skin and horns.
He still had a spiked tail, tattooed blue skin, and a clouded eye, the other teal with a scratch-thin pupil. Phaeron tensed as the other male inspected him, tension threading the air between them.
Phaeron broke the silence first. “I have come to take you up on your offer.” Slowly, he inched his chin down in a show of respect for the elder Vess. Here in Shenmaw, Auric was the ranking male, practically a king of the tiny population he kept protected underground.
Auric held a precarious political position as the leader of an order separate from Myuna’s nation of worshippers. Shenmaw was within her territory, clinging to a technicality for its neutral existence. It was close to uninhabitable, reportedly close enough to a rip in the world that the Void’s madness twined through the air like a physical force.
None of the devout wanted to experience the Void that way, and they weren’t invited at any rate. As long as Auric sent a steady supply of Vess to predict the future for Myuna, Shenmaw was allowed to govern itself.
A smile broke across Auric’s face. “About time, kid. Leave your goddess at the line and enter.” His voice was also the same, a deep rumble from his barrel chest.
“Myuna does not dwell in my heart. I am a tool to her, a blade,” Phaeron said bitterly.
Auric turned, motioning to the guard, who resumed his post in front of Shenmaw’s opening. “Then you are welcome here. Come,” he said over his shoulder.
Phaeron followed, and time blurred. I felt his surprise as he walked Shenmaw’s spacious corridors for the first time. Many single-eyed Vess practiced their magic here, but there were others from all walks of life. The one thing they had in common, he knew, was they all spurned the goddess of light to live in the pitch-black depths of the earth.
I felt his loneliness deepen. There were families here, and the sense of loss within him grew more biting. “Will you look into the Void for me?” he asked.
“That’s what I do, kid.” Auric stole another glance over his shoulder. “But this is the first time you’ve asked. What do you hope to find?”
“Hope, perhaps,” he murmured.
Auric grunted. “The Void contains little of that. Come eat with Geryn and me.”
Phaeron resigned himself to the cross-examination about to occur with Auric and his mate. Later that evening, when their young children had been put to bed, he sat with them, nursing a cup of spicy-sour broth that was common amongst the seers. It helped clarify the sight and sounds of the Void, apparently. He couldn’t stomach much more than it.
He shared his news and his request. He’d only just buried his son, the final connection he’d had to his last mate. War had severed them both from this plane, and he found it hard to say the words, gazing into the depths of his soup rather than meet their eyes.
Auric’s hand on his shoulder was about as welcome as the sharp edges of shattered glass. But his only words of comfort were, “The Void cannot soothe your pain, nor will it give you an immediate answer. You would be better served by reaching for community rather than the unknown.”
“A promise of future peace would be enough. I have been unmarked for so long now…” Long enough that he’d forgotten the relief of a True Light’s soothing touch. He needed something to anticipate, something to hold on to. Desperately enough to truly anger Myuna, should she know he’d visited Shenmaw and ducked into the one place her all-seeing light did not reach.
Geryn glanced toward Auric. She was also of the Vrassorm tribe, but not a Vess, her belly well rounded with child. “He could stay here for a while. We have the space.”
“If it pleases you.” Auric gave her a tender smile. He wouldn’t invite another male into his mate’s space unless she approved. She’d be bedding down soon to rest for the last months of her pregnancy, exhausted by the needs of the growing child.
Phaeron masked his discomfort with a sip of broth. “I don’t mean to impose, especially not at a delicate time.”
Geryn smiled warmly. “Nonsense,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand.
So, Phaeron stayed and eventually learned the peoples’ many reasons for hiding from Myuna in Shenmaw. He started acknowledging his own resentment of her, created by the thousand cuts of indifference she’d led her followers and his parents to inflict upon him.
Auric took Phaeron on days’ worth of tours deep with discussions on magic and meaning. He showed Phaeron how easy it was to call upon his latent soul magic here, so close to a rip in reality, implying with his knowing smirk that he should practice with it. The Void must have informed him of a possible future where he needed it.
The problem with the Void, though, was that all true things it possessed represented all that was, is, and would be. Soul magic was akin to a party trick on Soiluire, though Myuna took a shine to those who had true skill in it. Most of them became torchbearers…except for Phaeron, ever the forgotten shadow to Endaeron.
Still, he made a mental note to practice glancing deeper into others, stealing glances at their souls.
Long before he ever saw the rip in reality, his conversations with Auric and Geryn steered him toward airing how deep his burden had burned into his being. “Without a family of my own making, I’m not sure of my purpose anymore,” he murmured to his friends, who listened well. “I am tired of making war for no benefit of mine.”
He only wanted peace. The desire echoed back to me full definition. He still yearned for it.
When he finally accepted this truth about himself and began to feel his pain ebbing, Auric took him to see the Void. It was in a cavern deep within Shenmaw, where the blackness of the Void leaked into reality. Their surroundings distorted in the narrow corridor, and Phaeron felt the chill of the space between worlds for the first time.
Its laugher immersed him, and he growled, swinging his head around, looking for the threats mocking him. He kept a leery eye out, fearful of the alien presence of the magic and how it felt digging into his senses.
Visions played across the walls. Faceless figures drifting in and out of focus, interacting with Phaeron’s shadow in various ways. Creatures dying, spraying blood from a slash of his sword. Females laughing, giving him the charmed looks over their claws that he once strived to earn. Laughter. Screeches. Demonic, warped noises that could’ve once been words.
He hunched and covered his ears as the whispers pushed in, too many to be understood.
“You have to ask it to focus on what you want,” Auric advised over the cacophony. He took him by the arm and guided him to the site of the rift, where the visions and sounds were at their most real.
The Void responded to Phaeron’s thoughts, a blessing when he’d have to scream over the echoes as they intensified in the small, cavernous space. He wanted to know there was a future for him, that the piercing loneliness he contended with each day would pass.
The Void’s chill intensified, prickling over his skin like ice needles, and answered. Half or more was madness and distortion, but Auric was there to wave away the worst of it.
The future immersed him. Voices of all kinds spoke his name. Male, female…kind tones, needy ones, furious intonations.Auric and Geryn swirled in with them before stopping abruptly.
I didn’t recognize any others at first, but woven into the tapestry of sound was Keshora and then Morgana. And…my voice. Ben and Geo were there too, and all our friends and eventually Auric once more. Phaeron didn’t realize there was a change of worlds and languages. The Void presented us all as the same: those that would cross his path in the future.
Phaeron raised his head, letting his eyes slip closed. My voice caught his attention, and his lips curled slowly. Definitely a lover, he thought, picturing me as a curvy Moihan female.
When he opened his eyes again, the Void showed him children. Delicately clawed hands holding an infant that could’ve been Ravai. A scramble of insanity that Auric quietly dispelled for him. Then toddler Braza shyly meeting his gaze as he placed her on a countertop.
Phaeron reached out, scalding his fingertips on freezing cold Void mist. He hissed and flicked his hand, only regretting that he’d disrupted that particular vision. He longed to hold them with a fierceness that was nearly painful.
The two girls reappeared, older. He watched them from the edge of a field, soaking in their laughter as they played within the shadows, using them to jump around trying to tackle one another.
Hope kindled in his chest. Those were the only sweet laughs within the whole Void so far.
“It could be a turning of the millennia before this happens,” Auric said. The visions became nonsense once more as he relaxed the fist he’d been holding at his side.
The scene was just changing. There was a third child, who he caught a fleeting glance of. Phaeron noticed and ended up shrugging, embracing the knowledge that there might be more family further into his future. But I could’ve gasped, creating a dissonance that completely shifted the course of his soul memories.
Time sped by. For an age of his life, he’d stayed with the Shenmaw rebels until he became one as well, before returning to the capital with a new mate and fitting ill at ease into his old life. He’d had a spell of contentment that was ruined by the loss of everything.
I saw him with Morgana next, and yes, he’d loved her dearly. It wasn’t as hard as I’d expected to watch them together, even though I learned that he’d figured out how to elevate her to demigoddess status just so they could be together into eternity.
Phaeron’s memories jarred forward. He’d woken to a world changed, damaged librarian witch runes fading to black on the ceiling above. He’d been locked away for two hundred years by Morgana, a huge breach that betrayed the vows of their mating.
“Why?” he’d asked in a pained whisper.
The emotions were still real, as recent as an echo. He’d later stood before her ghost and heard her reasons, but her memory was tainted now, a complicated blip in time for him. She had picked him up at his lowest and helped him acclimate to a new world. Her presence in his life was once hope, a promise that he was not alone on this strange world, where his people were feared and hated. Now that she had found her purpose in death, he could wish her well and allow them both to move on.
But in sealing him in stasis, she had still cut him off from everyone and everything that’d still mattered to him. He had essentially risen from his grave by waking up. That it was an accidental side effect from a blood baron’s plot to unleash the Hungering Darkness made it worse. He could’ve been lost to time in that room.
My heart twisted as I watched him struggle, his lack of a purpose now a resonant note in his memories. When he wasn’t blacking out from the Hungering Darkness’s attempts to control him, he sat in an alley with a homeless man, sipping the cheap alcohol he kept in a paper bag. I barely recognized David, a bear shifter Phaeron had later introduced me to, under a layer of hair and grime.
When he wasn’t searching for any sense of normalcy in the modern world, Phaeron was in that alleyway, contemplating. Lanie had just died, and he saw me in his mind’s eye, all grief and ugly tears and incorrect conclusions.
He had no place on Earth. No people, no mate…nothing but the ear of the shifter next to him, who drank to muffle the pain of his soul damage. He spoke in depth about a place called Aurora Heights, where shifters rejected by their mates gathered for second chances.
“Why don’t you go to this place?” he’d asked.
“I dunno, man,” David slurred, knocking back the rest of a nearly empty bottle. He looked into its depths, and his expression darkened. “I guess I keep expecting someone from my sleuth to come find me.”
“Your family?” Phaeron guessed.
“Yeah. Maybe they’re just ashamed of me now. My perfect match rejected me…so there has to be something wrong with me.” With a shrug, David placed the empty bottle aside and transferred the paper wrapping to a new one. He turned the cap toward Phaeron.
“While you yet live, there’s nothing to stop you from finding a new path.” As he spoke, he used his shadows to remove the cap with an effortless twist. His shadowborn abilities…reduced to a party trick.
Yet David barked a laugh. “You’re like a fortune cookie, man.”
His eyes narrowed. “What is a fortune…cookie?”
David just laughed harder. He seemed to think Phaeron was hilarious for some reason. They shared the bottle, and Phaeron cringed after the first few sips. Had distilleries not improved while he rested in stasis?
“You know, like from Chinese restaurants.” Sometimes he took pity on Phaeron and tried to explain. “You break the cookie open, and it tells you your fortune. Sometimes they’re all mystical like you are.”
“The cookie tells… You know what? Never mind.” He leaned back, his head full of fuzzy warmth.
There was nothing to stop him from trying to find a new path, too. He saw me again when he closed his eyes, this time walking side-by-side with Lanie. We’d been dressed nearly identically, something my seer friend had done methodically.
Phaeron was sure she’d been targeted because of me. My proximity to his release meant it was a miracle the Hungering Darkness hadn’t immediately killed me and eaten my soul to soothe the edge of its starvation. But if it had a sniff of me, then it would hunt me tirelessly until it was my eyelids he was forced to close.
As the only one who could go toe-to-toe with his undead brother, he had a duty to try to protect me, even if I hated him in those days for assuming he was the monster.
I’d lived most of the memories that passed by next. He didn’t find much purpose until he was kneeling in the dirt, bleeding out from protecting me and my friends from our ill-fated first fight with the Hungering Darkness. As áine healed him back from the brink of death, he’d asked, “Do you see now that I am not a monster, bright soul?”
My shaky “yes” had meant much more to him than I’d ever expected. There was a chance we’d make amends, even become allies, now that it was understood that we had the same enemy.
He began to think of me as lovely and often triggered his soul sight to see my form haloed by it. Light was anathema to a shadowborn…but not the kind I put off. My soul flickered around me like liquid gold, an eternally flattering light source that limned my cheeks and put a shine to my purple hair. My brown eyes turned honey-toned, shining with reflected light.
He’d been admiring me for longer than he’d admitted to. I was soft and rounded compared to the females of his own species, confusing his attraction. Fate reminded him when it was my voice to bring him back from Endaeron’s control twice, helping him shake off his cravings to bite into my soul since he admired it so.
As early as the evening he’d walked me to my dorm room, he’d known I was supposed to be his True Light. From then on, he’d taken the duties of my Shadow and embraced new purpose gladly in training and spending time with me and my friends. Tempering Geo’s stone form and protecting Ben with his presence were merely a part of it.
With the tug of hunger in him every time he glimpsed my soul, his role as protector was all he felt he could offer. That didn’t prevent the little touches and teases as both of our feelings deepened, but each was a test of his control. One slip, and he’d hurt me beyond repair…but he couldn’t bring himself to stay away.
If I could’ve caught a breath, I would’ve at the feeling of yearning that deepened in him with time. He’d ached with unfulfilled need so acutely each time he denied both of us more. Enough to have a spike of shadowborn rage toward his oldest friend when Auric called me “a mate in name only.”
I saw a closed-door conversation between him, Geo, and Ben; then with the finality of a last glimpse, the memories took a single step back in time from his diplomatic request for peace between my three men. “It is easy to love Cress” in a conference room became the soft slide of covers against his naked body and my slight form so close to his.
“I have missed you far more than words could convey.” Underneath the tender whisper was the horror he’d barely staved off, the control Myuna had failed to fully exert over him. He’d refused to give in to her with me on his mind, my name on his lips. Knowing he would one day return to me kept him awake, aware, and alive just long enough to save his life and soul.
I’d comforted him and run my fingers through his hair, blunted the disjointed edges that existed within him after his torture at her hands. But it was my reaction when he’d tried to pull away again that’d tilted his self-control straight to possessive desire.
I will not go quietly into eternity without lying with you,he’d thought.
That had truly been lovemaking in the dark. My skin glowed to his sight alone when I was surrounded by his shadows, and he’d touched my face enamored by the sight and the utter trust I’d surrendered to him.
From that night on, I was fiercely his and the one to complete him in his new Earth life. I was his mate, his future, his purpose, and his much-longed-for peace.