23. Arran
I had been tortured before. I was little more than a child when I was stolen away, tortured until my beast exploded out of me.
The pain did not ebb, but my thoughts cleared.
Thoughts or dreams?
I could not open my eyes, no matter how often the command echoed in my mind—my soul.
This pain… it was a soul wound. Deeper than anything I’d ever felt… ever allowed myself to feel…
I landed softer this time. Did not land at all, really. Just appeared on that dusty orange plain, trapped by the ring of mountains. But this time was different. The pain was gone.
Most of it, anyway.
I pressed a hand to my chest, where the dull ache remained. The place where I should have felt—
“Perhaps now we might actually have a conversation.”
My hands went for my weapons, only to find none. Reached for my power, but there were no plants in this wasteland to command. But my beast, I could feel him inside of me, the snarl building.
“Where have you taken me? Who are you? What do you want?” The demands flew from my lips, more growls than words.
The male who stood before me raised one dark brown eyebrow, scanning me up and down, then dropped it. Thoroughly unimpressed. “At least you have stopped screaming.”
He waved his hand and two simple wooden chairs appeared. He lowered himself to his with casual grace, every movement refined, guided by muscle memory. He propped one foot across a knee, folded his arms over his chest. “Sit.”
Not likely.
“Where am I?” I did not have weapons, but I had the strength of my body. More than enough to kill.
The male rolled his shoulders. He did not flick his hand this time.
The pain roared back, spearing through every muscle and tendon, fogging my brain. I knew I was screaming, but I could not stop it. Whatever willpower I might have had ceased to exist in this nightmare realm. I hit my knees, clawing at my head, anything to stop the pain—
Gone. Just as quickly as it had come.
It took every ounce of will to keep myself on my knees, rather than collapsing to the dusty ground with relief.
“I have taken away the pain so that we may have a coherent conversation.”
A different sort of torture then. Not continual pain, but the stop and start of it. I began to adjust my expectations, my approach for managing the pain—
“Stop planning your attack and sit in the blasted chair.” The voice was harsh even behind the refinement. A noble. Powerful. Pointed ears, fae like me. Terrestrial or elemental?
“What in the Ancestors-damned hell—”
“I have not damned anything. I saved it. Now sit down so I can tell you how to do your part.” It was not an entreaty or suggestion. That voice was pure command. A voice that expected to be obeyed. I recognized it as the sibling to my own—the one I used to command legions in battle.
Ancestors… this male was an Ancestor.
I summoned all the strength and control that three centuries had given me. I did not question what portions of myself I could access in this nightmare. I commanded the strength to rise, and it came. If it was because this male had taken away the pain… didn’t matter. What did was using it to my advantage.
One foot on the ground. Pushing myself up. Two feet. Lowering myself into the chair. Playing by his rules, for now. For long enough to pick him apart and decide how to flay my enemy.
For anyone who would give and take pain like that could not be anything else.
There were no identifying markers on him. Well-made leather clothing, the style neither elemental nor terrestrial. Close fitting, like it was meant to be worn beneath armor. A warrior sat across from me. That fit with his lethal grace and air of command. There was only one Ancestor known as a warrior. The warrior.
“Accolon.”
He lifted his chin and gazed across the dusty orange yards between us. I’d seen portraits in Wolf Bay, could see the resemblance now. The aquiline nose, the imperious tilt of his green eyes as they judged me. A warrior. A shifter like me. A king.
“Very good,” he said into my sullen silence. “Where are your questions now, Brutal Prince?”
My hand itched for my battle axe. “You were not going to answer them.”
“You are correct about that,” Accolon agreed. “Sit there like a good dog and listen to what I have to say, and I will consider answering your asinine questions.”
I forced my hands to loosen. Forced my face to neutrality. Brutal cold.
Accolon marked the motions with a flick of his eyes—first to my hands, then to my face. A small smile curled the corners of his mouth, but there was no warmth in it.
“You have gotten so much better at masking your emotions,” he said. “When you were a child, every tiny feeling exploded outward.”
I refused to let my fingers curl, even as the growl of my beast built within me. “What do you mean, when I was a child?”
Accolon ignored the question. “It’s a skill I never quite mastered, no matter how long I spent with my mate and her court.”
His mate—Nimue. The Queen of the Elemental Fae. Accolon had ruled the terrestrials. Their union had ended the Great War, brought peace between the two ever-warring fae kingdoms, and set in place the procedures for the Offering and the Joining of the elemental and terrestrial heirs for seven thousand years to come.
“We went to the priestesses seeking help in ending the war. We were cursed with the prophecy instead.”
He’d spoken true. There were so many emotions in those sentences I struggled to parse them. Disdain, anger, hate. Maybe sadness in his eyes as he flicked them away, gazing at the sharp red-orange mountains that rose in the distance. So different from his terrestrial home—our home. A land of green and trees and lakes. Of life—while this place was devoid of it entirely.
Accolon spoke again, his voice low and fathomless. Devoid of emotion. Careful. Reciting each word with tenacious, agonizing accuracy.
“Then comes a queen in the age of uncertainty, when shadows cast doubt upon the realm. Born under a double moon and marked by a radiant star, a faerie queen shall rise to command the depths of the voids of darkness. Twice blessed, the realm of shift and mist, when comes the awaited queen who shall possess ethereal might. With a touch, she will feel the heartbeat of her subjects and she will unlock the secrets they guard within.
Together they must stand, to defeat what once thought dead. Together they must give, if any shall live to the end.”
The Void and Ethereal Prophecies.
But those last two lines… “You have botched the ending.”
Accolon’s eyes swung back to me. Yes, that was sadness lining them. “History has forgotten those last two lines, but I have not. It cost my mate everything, to write them down.” His dark eyes clouded with a feeling I recognized instinctively—anger. “And of course, you all forgot.”
Understanding flickered through me. “You took away my pain, brought me here, to tell me the prophecy in its entirety. So that I would remember.”
Accolon inclined his head, lifted his hand.
I knew what that meant—this reprieve was at an end; the pain would come rushing back.
“You said you would answer my questions.”
His hand stilled. “Ask.”
Who are you? What do you want?He’d answered those without me having to ask again. “Where are we?”
His shoulders shook in a harsh, acerbic laugh. “You do not recognize the Effren Valley?”
There it was again—understanding. I looked at the dusty red plain and the sharp mountains, dotted with narrow trees, fronds at the top the only sort of leaves. Bits began to fit into place.
This was where the last battle of the Great War had taken place.
I was not a student of history, but I was a battle commander.
Accolon surveyed the valley around us, his eyes colder now. Similar to how I imagined my own looked. “This is how I knew it. Before Baylaur was a mighty city, when the goldstone palace was carved into the mountain itself and did not yet rise above it.”
I opened my mouth to ask him more, the questions bubbling up in my chest. New questions, infinitely more important in light of what he’d told me—and the gathering dread in my stomach about what those forgotten words of the prophecy might mean.
But Accolon was standing. I was too, compelled by some phantom urge. The chairs disappeared. “I would have given you more time to heal, but alas.” The dust kicked up around us, swirling faster and thicker until it swallowed the mighty mountains entirely.
“Your rest has ended, Brutal Prince,” Accolon sighed. And it was not sadness in his gaze any longer. It was pity. “She needs you now.”
Then he was gone, and there was nothing but darkness. Nothing but me and my pain and that ache in my chest, that demand that superseded all else. The hollowness that called out, that could only be filled by one being, in this realm or any other.
I opened my eyes.