Chapter 13 #2
“A life produced by convergence, not conflict. Light and dark, not at war. Chosen. Accepted.”
Elora’s voice went deadly quiet. “You want her child.” Cassie hadn’t told Elora that she’d already figured that little tidbit out. She didn’t figure it would go over too well with her bff.
“We want what was denied us. Our own choice to exist. To be free.”
Cassie felt the lie coil inside the truth.
“You don’t simply want to exist,” she said softly. “You want to control.”
The clearing shuddered.
“We offer choice,” the voice insisted. “Allow us to have the child of your own free will. Let us finish what began here. Let the realm be spared another fracture. Shadow is the result of the two paired. We are exactly what is needed. Would you really deny this to the realm you rule?”
Elora laughed once, sharp and humorless. “That’s not a choice. That’s a threat pretending to give her an option.”
Cassie’s hand tightened over her stomach. Her child’s magic flared in response, not wild, not afraid. Defiant.
“No,” Cassie said. The word rang through the clearing, absolute.
“You would doom the realm?”
Cassie shook her head. “I would save it from you. Yes, shadow is a product of light and dark. But you seemed to have missed the fact that without light and dark you literally cannot exist. The absence of the two means there are no shadows.”
The presence pressed harder, urgency bleeding through its control.
“We have forgotten how young you are, and how human. You do not understand. Our leader, darkness and light, born of a sacrifice, is enough to ensure our existence, even without either race. And he brings his own light. They are all we need. But, you, daughter of light, and Elora, daughter of dark, shall strengthen us, and your child will tip the balance.”
“How?” Cassie asked, afraid she already knew the answer.
“Triktapic will not survive the loss of his Chosen and his heir. For true stability in the realm, there must not be none with more power than the rest. He should not exist. He is unrest, chaos, and division. After all, he was divided within himself. The realm will be better off without him. We will rectify the mistake the Forest Lords made in his creation.”
“I was wrong. You’re not batshit crazy. You’re suicidal,” Cassie replied, voice unwavering.
“Triktapic has already done what you could not. He made the choice to choose light over dark, and in doing so defeated the dark. He joined the realm. It will never be perfect because we’re not perfect.
Darkness lives in each of us. We must choose the light.
And my child will never be a weapon used against us. ”
Elora stepped forward, planting herself beside Cassie like a wall.
“And you can’t take what’s already been claimed,” she added.
“If you want to stay in your own lane, like the rest of us, then perhaps you can exist. But your idea of balance is a load of crap. You’ve contradicted yourself multiple times.
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt that being trapped inside a Chamber for eons might make you a little dense.
Perhaps with time you could actually learn truth, but understand that if you can’t get on board with the current establishment, Trik will not simply leave you trapped this time.
He will eviscerate you, and my Chosen will be right there by his side. ”
The clearing darkened.
“You can’t even see that you are like us. Shadow. A child born of light and dark,” the voice said to Elora. “You already belong to what was forgotten. You cannot escape what you are, and until you are joined with your own kind, you will always feel separate.”
Elora’s smile was sharp and unyielding. “No. I was born of a woman who chose to reach into the dark, and a male who reached back, allowing her to pull him into the light. He did not live in the grey of shadow. And like my father, I choose light. Every single day, I refuse the dark. I am nothing like you. And I never will be. I have those in my life who love me and would never let me live in shadow.”
Silence fell, thick, and strained.
Cassie felt the pull falter. “You said you had a leader who protected you. Perhaps, he saw the possibility of what you could have been. Maybe you could have been a form of balance. A third race of this realm, living in peace with us,” she said quietly.
“And instead of embracing it, you rejected it, choosing power instead. We won’t let you do that again. ”
The presence recoiled, not retreating, but surprised, and perhaps even a little wounded.
“Then you refuse.”
Cassie nodded. “For my child, for my Chosen, for the realm.”
Elora’s hand found Cassie’s, fierce and grounding. “And on behalf of every shadow elf you’ve been drawing power from while they’ve been trapped in your influence. Who knows, maybe they’d have chosen something different if you hadn’t had them.”
The clearing trembled, the braided light and shadow cracking along fine fault lines.
“This is not finished,” the voice warned.
Cassie met the pressure head-on. “No,” she agreed. “It isn’t.”
“Your Chosens will come. And if you will not give of yourself freely, they will on your behalf. And our leader will as well, as will his light. We will still prevail.”
The forest surged back in around them, sound and movement rushing to reclaim the space as the clearing began to collapse in on itself, not vanishing, but withdrawing, like a wound pulling closed.
The pull did not disappear. But it changed. Cassie attempted to move but her feet felt as if they’d been cemented to the ground.
Elora tried to move as well and then growled like an angry beast when she, too, realized they were now held captive. “Well,” she said, flexing her fingers. “Guess we just pissed off an ancient, sentient magical Chamber filled with shadow elves that no doubt have some serious PTSD.”
Cassie managed a tight smile. “We did.”
“What now?” Elora asked, her eyes roaming around the clearing.
Cassie straightened, resolve settling deep in her bones.
“We hope that neither of us has to pee before Trik and Cush get here to rescue our stupid asses. It’s bad enough that we decided to go on some mission that we actually thought we could handle.
Peeing my pants would be the damn icing on his ‘I told you I was protecting you’ cake that he’s probably going to feed me piece by piece for the rest of our long lives. ”