Chapter 10 #2
“I know,” Trik murmured, eyes never leaving the Book. “I feel it too.”
Something slipped through the room like memory–familiar, ancient, intimate. It touched his awareness without permission. Recognition.
The realization cut deep and sudden, like a blade between ribs.
“You remember me,” Trik said.
The Book pulsed. Slow. Certain. Yes.
The word wasn’t spoken, it bloomed behind his eyes, heavy with old satisfaction.
Cush stepped closer. “That’s the Chamber again?”
Apparently, it was letting the warrior in on the conversation too.
“No,” Trik said. Magic coiled beneath his skin, restless and waiting. “That’s what’s been hiding inside it. The shadow elves have decided to start a conversation and their keeper is allowing it.”
The pressure thickened.
As you mentioned king, you sealed us inside. You left us.
Images slammed through his mind, stone slick with blood, chanting elders, light crashing into darkness until the air itself begged for mercy. He tasted ash. Felt the echo of a choice made too quickly and regretted too long.
His lip curled. “You don’t get to act like the wounded party,” he snarled. “You were sealed because you were tearing the realm apart.”
A pause. Then came that voice again, soft, mocking, almost fond.
Balance requires sacrifice. There certainly was enough of it that night, wasn’t there Triktapic, King of the Elves?
A shiver slid down Cush’s spine. “Trik,” he warned. “Don’t listen.”
“I’m not,” Trik said.
He reached, not recklessly, but with the precision of the assassin he’d once been, every movement controlled, deliberate.
Darkness answered.
It rose smooth and alive, curling over his skin—not violent, not devouring. Familiar. Welcoming.
Cush’s breath hitched as black smoke climbed Trik’s forearms like living ink. “You swore you’d never use that power again.”
Trik didn’t look away. “I swore I wouldn’t let it own me,” he said. “That’s not the same.”
The presence leaned closer, warm as breath against his ear.
We were once part of this world. You could have been our king, too.
Trik smiled, slow, merciless. “But you weren’t content to simply belong, remember?” he asked softly. “And don’t mistake exile for erasure.”
Power surged, rattling the room. The castle shuddered, not an explosion, but a deep, resonant tremor that rippled through walls and wards. Above them, warning bells tolled, their echoes swallowed by the hum of magic spreading across the realm like a spark through tinder.
Trik felt it in his bones. Everyone would.
The Book snapped open.
Light and shadow poured out, twisting but never merging. Faces flickered inside the chaos, half-formed, eyes gleaming with resentment and longing.
Voices overlapped, a chorus both holy and blasphemous.
We are the forgotten. We are the ones who kept the dark from devouring the light.
We are the balance you feared. We were the result of light and dark killing each other.
Shadow elves, he named us. He led us to safety, and then he fled before you could seal him away, too. See? Sacrifices. Everyone makes them.
Trik stepped closer. His own power answered, light and dark meeting as equals, weaving together, ancient and alive inside him. The union became something more, like the Shadowed, born from light cast into night. “He?” Trik racked his memories for who they spoke of. “Who are you talking about?”
The warrior born of the light and dark from two who willingly laid down their lives on their own swords.
They called out for an end to the battle as they watched the creation of our kind, and realized it would be the light and dark that destroyed the realm if left to their own devices.
On their swords they fell, and the light and dark collided, creating the shadow ruler.
Reed and Zire they were so named and their creation was—
“Rezer.” The name felt as if it was sucked from Trik’s lungs.
Rezer was a shadow elf. More memories flooded his mind as he looked over the battlefield.
Thousands dead on both sides and hundreds of the newly formed beings.
Some looked terrified, some shocked, and others determined.
Trik heard a shout and his head whipped around and he saw Zire, a light elf warrior with a ready smile and quick laugh.
He stood beside Reed, a dark elf warrior who was the complete opposite of Zire and yet somehow, they had become friends.
Brothers in arms and forced to fight against one another.
They stood side by side staring out in horror at the waging battle.
Reed’s voice boomed as he roared. “STOP.” The fighting continued.
Zire’s eyes danced around the area wildly, his panic clear on his face.
Then he turned to Reed. They were speaking but Trik couldn’t hear them even with his supernatural hearing.
Not above the screaming, the clanging metal, the whirling magic.
Then to his horror, the two elven warriors switched swords.
Then took each other in a warrior’s handshake before impaling themselves on their own swords, held in their “enemies” hand.
And the moment their bodies collided, two forms erupted from their swords and entwined until it became one form.
Unlike the others created, this form wasn’t just a shadow with red eyes.
This was a fully formed warrior, his armor was a mixture of the two races, and when he turned and looked at Trik, his eyes swirled with light and dark.
“I AM REZER,” the new warrior roared. “FOLLOW ME.” And he ran. The shadow elves that had been formed from the battle turned to him, and they did follow.
“Rezer?” Cush asked, his voice rough. “How? How did we not remember this?”
Trik shook his head. “I don’t know. He wasn’t there when we went to the Chamber. I let them go. I waited to see how it would turn out. I allowed our dead to be dealt with and then the power began being pulled.”
Cush nodded. “I remember. It felt like all of the oxygen was being sucked from our realm. Like my bones would be crushed beneath the pressure. But, again, how the hell did we forget all of this?”
Sometimes the mind doesn’t want to remember. The shadow elves answered, as if they were welcome in their conversation. It’s easier to live with our choices, if we pretend we weren’t the ones that made them.
“Is there any way to shut them up?” Cush asked, his voice deepening with the anger that Trik felt.
“Why are you revealing all of this now?” Trik asked as he allowed his eyes to refocus on the present.
Once again dark and light have made peace. Not the races, but in a few who realize that one cannot exist without the other. Even you, king, have found balance, a child created of light and dark. Our leader, Rezer, has found his light and soon he will bring it to us. We will have them all.
“You need them,” he said flatly.
The voices fell still, the weaving of shadows slowing, then whispered almost tenderly: They are the key.
Cush’s head snapped toward him. “The key to what?”
The air thickened. Their presence sharpened.
Completion. Release. The end of waiting. Peace.
Trik slammed his hand onto the Book. The castle cried out in protest. “You will not touch them!” he roared.
“Not Cassie. Not Elora, Rezer, or whoever the hell it is that you claim is his light. Not now. Not ever.” Rezer might have been created a shadow elf, but he lived the life of a dark elf.
Trik knew him, had known the dark elf a very long time and in all those centuries, he never hinted at being anything other than a dark elf.
That meant he had no memory of it either and if he was being drawn like Cassie and Elora, he too, was a pawn in the Chamber and shadow elves’ scheme.
Laughter rippled through the air. You cannot stop the pull.
Trik leaned in until the Book’s glow turned his eyes molten silver. Shadows coiled around his wrists like armor. “Watch me,” he said, voice deadly calm. “Because here’s what you’ve forgotten.”
The presence stilled.
“I am not the king who sealed you away out of fear,” Trik went on, power surging until the air cracked. “I am not light pretending darkness doesn’t exist.”
Light and shadow erupted, ravenous, blinding, twisting together in violent harmony.
“I became darkness,” he said. “There is nothing you can do that would make me flinch. I am Triktapic, king of light, dark, and shadow, and I remember you.”
The Book screamed.
Not sound, something deeper. A vibration that sank into bone, into the fragile edges of the soul. Cush staggered, bracing as the force tore through the chamber, candle flames splitting down their centers.
Then—silence.
The Book snapped shut.
Power retreated, but the impact lingered, painful and raw. Too late. The Chamber had let too much through, and Trik’s magic had already interlaced with it.
Cush stared at him, the air still trembling. “You just announced yourself to every shadow thing in existence.”
“Yes,” Trik said. His breath was uneven, but his tone didn’t waver. “And I reminded the forest, and anyone who’s forgotten, what I’m capable of. There’s no obstacle I won’t remove, no person I won’t end, no civilization I won’t raze to the ground to get my Chosen back.”
He turned. And that composure ignited, quiet, lethal assurance sparking through the wards themselves. “Because I’m done standing still.”
Cush swallowed hard, then nodded once. “Then we stop waiting.”
Trik’s jaw flexed. “I was never really waiting,” he said. “I was preparing.”
The wards flared bright, humming through stone. Far beyond the castle walls, in the oldest corners of the realm, something ancient stirred, no longer amused. No longer patient. Because the King of the Elves was finished asking questions. He’d started making promises.
* * *
The forest changed its mind.