Chapter Sixty-Five
Reign
The female smiled. But there was nothing kind about it, not like she’d presented it before, as she glared at Aelia. Now, it was razor-edged and filled with malice.
“You finally figured it out,” Liora said, her voice somehow both honeyed and cold as ice. “Took you long enough, cousin.”
Cousin?
My shadows flared instantly, coiling around my shoulders like vipers.
Aelia staggered back a step. “What? No. That’s not possible.”
“Oh, but it is. Our grandfather sired many females, Aelia. My mother’s name was Sorynth, and she was half-sister to your mother, Sable.”
A faint gasp parted Aelia’s lips.
You can’t trust anything she says, starlight. I sent the thought racing through our bond.
Why would she lie about this, Reign? Helroth could easily confirm or deny it. Her response was immediate.
It doesn’t matter who she is. All that matters is that she betrayed you.
Liora rose fully now, and the illusion around her cracked, like glass shattering. She shimmered, then solidified into something wholly different.
Her skin darkened into an obsidian hue with veins of iridescent violet. Her eyes glowed like amethysts left too long in the void. Pure night unfolded behind her, jagged and sleek like the zar of the royal Night Fae.
Realms, she was a true princess of the Court of Infernal Night.
“So Helroth sent you,” I muttered.
Liora’s smile widened. “I was supposed to watch her. To guide her. To make sure her transition to power served our purpose. And it was going so well until you came along, Reign. I tried my best to distract you from her, but Zaroth, you were simply obsessed.”
Aelia’s daggers were in her hands in a blink, both hilts glowing with rais. “You lied to me. All this time—”
“I protected you,” Liora spat. “While you were flailing through your identity crisis, ‘Am I a powerless Kin, Light Fae, Shadow Fae…’ I was reporting everything to Helroth. Everything. He knows your strengths, your weaknesses. Your love for Reign. Your pathetic obsession with mercy.”
She lunged in a blur of shadows and rage.
Aelia met her mid-air, blades clashing in a blaze of violet and gold. Sparks flew. The forest around them trembled as rais and zar collided, the air splitting with the crack of the mystical discharge.
I surged forward, but Aelia’s voice stopped me.
“No. She’s mine.”
With a snarl of frustration, I dug my heels into the earth and watched—even if my every instinct screamed to do the opposite. I knew my mate could handle her.
Aelia fought like she had been born for this moment. Every motion was deliberate. Every strike forged from fury and betrayal. The two females moved like twin storms, dark and light, each strike dredging up another old memory, another wound.
“I trusted you,” Aelia shouted between blows. “I should have listened to Rue. I never should’ve given you the benefit of the doubt.”
“That’s exactly your problem,” Liora hissed back. “I pity you. You’re weak.”
Their powers tangled, then broke apart. Aelia’s dagger slashed across Liora’s side, and a streak of black blood splashed the charred ground. The Night Fae hissed out a curse.
Aelia stepped back, a gasp squeezing through her clenched teeth as she eyed the wound. Liora dropped to one knee. She was panting and wounded, but her eyes still gleamed with hatred.
Aelia stood over her cousin, blades raised.
She could have ended her in that moment.
But I knew my cuoré. She was too kind, too merciful, even with those who didn’t deserve it.
It was exactly what made me love her even more, while simultaneously driving me mad.
She blew out a breath and lowered her daggers.
“I won’t kill you,” she whispered, voice trembling.
“You may have betrayed me to our grandfather, but you are still blood. And that means something to me.”
Liora barked a cruel laugh as she reached for her sword. “You’re still so pathetic.” She jabbed it upward, but I was already moving. Because I was neither weak nor merciful. Shadows erupted from my body like a tidal wave, swallowing the space between us.
“You should’ve stayed dead in the Wilds,” I hissed, just before my shadows pierced her heart.
Liora gasped, something like shock rippling through her.
Her mouth moved, forming one final word, “professor,” but it never passed her lips.
Then, her body crumpled onto the blackened earth. Her lavender, vacant eyes lifted up to the sky on a final exhale.
Aelia fell to her knees beside her body, her expression unreadable. I dropped beside her, pulling her into my arms just as her blades clattered to the ground.
“She was my family,” she whispered hollowly. “And she betrayed me. Gods, why do they always betray me?”
“She chose her side,” I murmured into her hair. “And so did we.” Tightening my arms around her, I held her for as long as she would allow. But soon, the fighting surged around us, ripping us from the quiet moment within the chaos.
Ruhl appeared, fighting like a demon unleashed, blood on his teeth and war in his bones. “Don’t fall behind, big brother!” he called, slashing a beast nearly in half.
All around us, the tide was turning, but we hadn’t won… yet. I scanned the masses, searching for the Night King as Aelia and I rose to our feet, but he was nowhere to be found.
From deep within the trees, leaves rustled and crackled as something massive moved. Then the earth trembled.
“Aelia,” I said, breath catching.
“I feel it,” she whispered, stepping into my side.
The Moirai Shard in my pocket pulsed, warm and cold, light and shadow. It was as if it was waiting for something. Something big.
A low rumble rolled through the trees, ominous and menacing. The hair on my nape rose. Then it came again. Not the stomp of feet or the beat of wings. It was something deeper, like the forest itself groaning under the weight of some terrible thing waking from slumber.
Silence swept the battlefield in its wake. Even the Night Fae froze.
I took a step back, pulling her with me, every instinct howling at me to move. “Aelia…”
The sky darkened. No, it was blotted out, inky darkness sweeping in and blanketing corpses and scorched earth. From the shattered edge of the northern part of the glade, it emerged.
A beast of myth. Born not of bone and blood but woven from shadow and nightmares. Twice the size of our dragons.
Dozens of limbs, each one lashing through trees like blades. A crown of bones and thorns curled atop its head, where six glowing eyes bled black ichor down its face. Wings like broken sails dragged behind it, shredded but still powerful enough to stir a cyclone with a single beat.
Behind me, Phantom roared, and for the first time since we’d bonded all those years ago, I felt fear lance across her mind.
“Please tell me that’s a cursed illusion,” Symon spluttered. He, Rue, Devin and Heaton appeared beside us.
“Gods, I wish it were.”
It’s a Noctal Revenant. Phantom’s whispered words slithered through my thoughts. Something that should’ve died with the Night Fae at the end of the Two Hundred Years’ War.
“I thought they were extinct,” Aelia breathed, echoing my own thoughts as she processed Phantom’s words through our bond, awe and terror warring in her voice.
“They are,” Kaelith said grimly from behind us. “Or, they were. Helroth must’ve reanimated it and brought it from the nightmare realm.” His voice dropped, reverent and horrified all at once. “The Fae nicknamed it the Gravecaller.”
“How perfectly accurate,” Symon deadpanned.
The beast opened its maw and released a howl that turned the twilight sky to pitch and the ground to rot. The words of the scroll I’d found in Tenebris’s empty cage all those weeks ago at the Castle of Ethereal Light flashed across my mind.
Either salvation or oblivion awaits, for when twilight reigns, the final hour begins.
This was it. The child of twilight, the prophecy, me…
twilight reigns. My thoughts spun, but I shoved everything down, focusing on one thing only.
Aelia. I didn’t care if I shattered. I didn’t care if this forest swallowed me and everyone else whole.
As long as Aelia lived. That was the only victory I needed.
Ruhl cursed under his breath. “No sword will take that thing down.”
“Then we find another way,” Aelia said, reaching instinctively for her daggers. Infernium vein. She held them up and the crystals embedded in the hilts pulsed with light, flecks of the Moirai Shard. They vibrated with power, the echo pounding the surrounding air.
“Aelia.” I turned to her, shadows already curling tighter around my wrists. “You can’t.”
She was pale. Glowing. Her rais pulsed like the last flame in a dying world. “I have to try.”
Phantom and Solanthus landed beside us, the ground trembling with their fury. They roared in unison, the bond between us thrumming to life again, louder and wilder. The Tetrum Cordis pulsed with energy, begging for release.
“Then we do it together,” I replied.
The Gravecaller surged forward, crushing trees beneath its talons, its eyes burning holes through the battlefield as it locked on to us.
To Aelia.
Symon gasped beside me, having noticed it too. “It’s coming straight for her.”
“No,” I snarled. “Not today.”
Shadows exploded from my fingertips, but they weren’t alone. Rais flooded me with searing light. Zar twisted like liquid night down my spine. All three surged together—nox, rais, and zar—merging, writhing, and begging to be unleashed.
The Gravecaller reared, screaming a soundless wail that made the shadows bend and the Light Fae fall to their knees.
We charged.