Chapter 26
Gemma
T hat night, a storm hit.
It was a full moon, a bright silvery orb hanging low in the sky. It would have been a perfect night—until the windows began to rattle. Until the wind began to howl like a lowing wolf outside, setting my teeth on edge, my breaths coming quicker as I paced the floors of my bedroom.
Ludayn was long gone for the evening. She’d had a hollow look in her eyes for most of the day, distracted and quiet. Truthfully, the whole keep seemed to be on edge, but the energy held excitement. Anticipation.
For the storm? I wondered, grinding my teeth together, squeezing my hands tight when I heard another strong gust tunneling right toward the keep from across the sea. I’d never experienced winds like this before. I could hear them coming, like a wave about to crash.
My rooms were in the northeast wing, ones that looked right out over the Silver Sea. The view was breathtaking and thrilling normally…but not tonight. Tonight there was an edge of malice, of dread, of clenching grief that I couldn’t escape from.
The library, I remembered.
The library was in the south wing. The winds were traveling toward the keep from the north, but in the south wing, it might offer a reprieve. Perhaps I could seek safety from the worst of the storm, bury myself in the stacks and towers of books in the library until it was over.
Caught on the idea, I left my rooms, navigating the familiar route down a series of hallways and staircases, cutting through a passage Ludayn had shown me, to reach the south wing more quickly. There wasn’t a single soul in sight, which only made my breaths come quicker. Not to mention there was a chill on the back of my neck like a touch, something I couldn’t shake.
When I reached the library, I shut the heavy doors with a trembling hand, my breaths now coming in gasps. My gaze immediately sought out a little alcove in the wall, a rounded arch that at one time might’ve been filled with a shelf or a bookcase. Now it lay empty and I sat on the floor, my hands coming away dusty when I positioned myself against the wall. It helped block out the sounds, and when I closed my eyes, I tried not to see the memory of my mother, dancing and screaming and laughing in the wind. That night.
During the storms in the Collis, I’d always taken on the role of protector for my sisters. My father would steadily drink himself into a stupor during the worst of them, locked in his office, his veins filled with thick liquor. But with my sisters, we would bury ourselves under mounds of blankets in Mira’s room and distract ourselves with ridiculous stories or giggling over videos on the Halo orb, in languages we couldn’t even speak.
I’d always been so focused on making sure my sisters were watched over during a storm that I’d never truly noticed my own deep, deep fear of them. Until now. Right now. In this place, in this keep.
The library’s alcove helped shield some of the sounds, but when a particularly strong gust seemed to whistle straight through the keep, I couldn’t stop the whimper that escaped from my throat.
My heart was throbbing like a wound in my chest. I was so focused on trying to calm my breaths that I didn’t hear the door creak open.
“Gemma,” came Azur’s voice. “What are you doing in here?”
To my mortification, my eyes were blurry with tears when I looked across the room, watching as Azur began to step toward me.
“How did you know I was in here?” I couldn’t help but ask, trying to hide the wobbliness in my voice.
“I tracked your scent here. You smelled strange,” he murmured, his red eyes furrowed as he studied me. He paused at the alcove, his wings flaring behind him briefly, and he frowned. “Different.”
I wanted to laugh, but another gust of wind slammed into the large, arching windows that overlooked the village of Laras below.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I repeated softly, “Different.”
He could smell my fear.
It always amazed me how sensitive other alien species’ senses were compared to humans’. We’d gotten the short end of the stick.
There was a creak of stiff leather as Azur crouched in front of me. When I moved my legs so that my knees were drawn up my chest, I hated that I could still feel the tenderness of his bites along my thighs. Loved and hated it.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, his voice oddly soft. Gentle.
My eyes snapped open, saw he was closer than I’d realized. The bulk of him cut out the view of the library behind him. I hadn’t turned on the orb lights when I’d come in. I’d only wanted darkness to hide in.
Then his wings spread, nothing more than a whisper as they stretched. Completely encasing us within the alcove, his wings were like a barrier, a door, that allowed nothing else in. Even the wind outside seemed to soften, as if it didn’t dare to disobey him.
My shoulders relaxed. I might’ve been wary of my husband and disliked him when he was cruel…but it seemed that my body trusted him to protect me from the storm.
My eyes caught on his fangs, sharp and glinting. I didn’t even care that I was supposed to still be mad at him. I knew that those fangs could offer a much needed distraction.
“You want to feed, don’t you?” I asked, my voice coming out breathless. I reached for his hand. “Come here.”
Azur’s eyes glowed brighter. Twin embers nestled among the smokiness of his skin.
He shook his head. Even though he allowed me to pull him deeper into the dark alcove, he resisted when I tilted back my neck, wrapping my hand around his shoulder and tugging.
“Gemma,” Azur said, his voice smooth. Full of want and need, but his tone was endlessly patient. It set my teeth on edge. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
I bit my lip, suddenly on the verge of tears. “Just feed from me already.”
“No,” he answered, the word softened by his gentleness as he slid his hands beneath me, lifting me until I was settled in his lap. He turned us until his spine was pressed firmly to the alcove wall.
I blinked in astonishment but my hands delved into his vest, clutching tight, when I thought the next gust of wind would blow the glass windows right in.
“You don’t like the storm?” Azur guessed. I felt the rumble in his chest before I heard the words.
“I’m still mad at you,” I whispered, lowering my face to press my cheek into his chest. His warmth, his strength against me—which I felt in the ropes of his arms, and his scent wrapped all around me.
“I know,” he replied. With his back to the alcove and me in his lap, he stretched his wings around us. Cocooning us in.
Quiet. There was quiet. Only the steady, reassuring thud of his heartbeat beneath my cheek and my own shuddering breaths as I fought for control.
I was still upset with him—what he’d said to me had been cruel and cutting, and he knew it—but I was thankful he was here. He was… comforting me. And Azur had been the last person on this entire planet that I’d thought would do that for me.
Slowly, I began to relax.
“Tell me,” he murmured gently.
“So you can use it against me?” I couldn’t help but ask. Then I immediately felt guilty, a strange unhappy mess tangling in my chest, making me even more miserable.
“You have every reason to believe that,” he told me, sliding his arms around me until one bracketed my lower back and the other rested along the stretch of my legs across him, a heavy palm cupping my outer thigh. “But I won’t.”
A soft huff left my lips. Azur was telling me the truth. Because if there was one thing he wasn’t, it was a liar. He’d only been honest, even if his honesty made me want to fight against him.
“I don’t like storms.”
“These are the moon winds,” he informed me. Moon winds. Ludayn had mentioned something about them before, hadn’t she? “Every full moon, they come. When the barriers between our realms are thinned.”
My brow furrowed, my mind catching on that phrase. Realms?
“And Kylorr take to the skies and the winds carry us wherever it pleases. We go with it, letting it guide our wings,” he continued. “There’s no description that seems appropriate for the sensation of it. I had hoped to show you instead.”
I tensed. “What?”
“I promised you I would take you flying again,” Azur said softly.
“In this storm?” I asked, my stomach bottoming out at the implication.
I was shocked when a small chuckle left him. The sound was soft but gruff, as if the laugh had to be pulled from him. All the same, the back of my neck tingled at hearing it.
“Perhaps next month,” he told me.
“This happens every month ?”
“Yes,” Azur answered. “Rest assured, wife, the keep has withstood the moon winds for generations. And it will be strong for many, many more. Tonight, it will not fall.”
I licked my dry lips. The confidence in his voice made my shoulders relax.
“Really?”
“Yes,” he answered, dipping his head.
“What did you mean when you said the barriers between the realms are thin tonight?”
He was a wealth of information I so desperately craved, wasn’t he? He was the heir to the Kaalium, one of the oldest families living on Krynn, or so Kalia had proclaimed one afternoon.
He had the answers to questions I didn’t even know to ask yet.
“Our souls live in different realms here on Krynn,” he told me. “The living realm. This realm. We call it the Nyaan.”
The Nyaan?
“Where we are all born into this universe, the common realm we all share,” Azur said. His voice was just as pleasing as when I’d first heard it. Deep and gruff, it felt almost sinful to listen to. “When we leave this realm, in death, we pass into the next. We call that realm the Alara. The after realm. You might have already felt it. There are places in the keep where it feels tangible, at certain times through the month.”
I whistled out a long breath, my mind catching on the possibility and realization that I had . And the knowledge of that alone made me nearly forget the storm raging beyond his wings entirely.
“I think I have,” I said softly. I remembered when I’d been exploring the keep those first few days, of feeling not entirely alone. “Even just now. Tonight, when I was coming to the library.”
The chill on the back of my neck. A touch like a whisper.
Azur inclined his head. His black hair was shoulder length. Usually it was tied back, but now it brushed my cheek. I felt his exhale float between us.
He was different tonight. Calm.
“The Nyaan and the Alara,” I repeated, feeling the words over my tongue.
“There is a third realm,” he told me after a moment of tangible hesitation. “Zyos. We don’t usually speak of it.”
“Why?” I asked, wondering if it was similar to some humans’ beliefs of heaven and hell.
“It is the realm of the lost. Or even the forgotten,” Azur said, his voice tightening with his arms around me. “Those whose souls have been stained. Or taken. Souls that need to be guided back to Alara, or else they face an unfathomable eternity.”
I shuddered. “An eternity of what?”
“Of wandering. Of despair. Forced to relive their darkest moments. Over and over again until their souls are pieced back together and they are guided back to their families. To their blood,” Azur told me.
“And that’s possible?” I couldn’t help but wonder.
“Yes,” Azur said. There was an unreadable tone in his voice. “It is.”
In the silence that followed, I heard the moon winds grow stronger, raging against the keep. I couldn’t fathom that the Kylorr enjoyed flying in such utter violence.
Had he been trying to distract me? By telling me about the realms?
“I don’t like storms,” I said again, staring at the thickened membrane of one of his wings, reaching forward to trace the veins, feeling it flutter beneath my fingertips. My hand dropped. I didn’t know why I said it, but the words came tumbling from me all the same. “My mother died in a storm.”
Azur stiffened beneath me, tangible and sudden.
His reaction made a thick lump rise in my throat. And I told him something I’d never even voiced out loud.
“She drowned herself actually. In a lake behind our estate. Five years ago,” I whispered raggedly. “We found the stones in her dress when her body was discovered the next morning.”
“ Raazos’s blood, ” Azur murmured.
“We didn’t let my sisters see her like that. Only my father and me,” I confessed. “I’m the eldest. Mira was only eighteen at the time. Piper was fifteen. We thought it best.”
“Instead, you bore that burden, that grief in seeing her like that,” Azur said. “With no true outlet for it.”
“I would do anything for my sisters,” I told him, suddenly tired. “You know that.”
“Do you know why your mother did it?”
I remembered that night like every breathless moment was imprinted in my memory with the finest of details. I couldn’t forget it even though I wanted to. Five years had done nothing to soften the torment of that night.
Mother had been drinking. She’d just gotten a treatment from the doctor, a fresh implant under her skin. I remembered the storm blowing in with a deep, booming rumble of thunder. I remembered her beautiful voice, singing through the halls, a haunting melody that didn’t have a predictable rhythm. She’d been matching her pitch to the storm.
When she’d gone outside, it had been me who’d told my father. I’d seen her twirling and dancing in the downpour, stumbling over the grass, laughing into the wind. I’d been scared. I’d never seen her like that.
And perhaps in my own selfishness, I’d been too wrapped up in my own ridiculous sorrow. My twenty-fifth birthday had been a week before. I’d just slept with Petyr and awakened to find him gone. I would never marry. I would never have a home, a family of my own. I would likely grow old caring for our crumbling estate in the Collis and trying to manage my parents’ drinking.
Perhaps I had turned a blind eye to my mother’s own sorrow. Because looking back now, it had been apparent she’d needed help.
And we’d failed her.
I’d failed her.
Father had gone outside in the pouring rain, trying to drag her back inside. They’d fought in the front garden. My mother had been screaming words at him that I couldn’t make out as the wind howled against the panes of glass, as I’d pressed my face against the windows to see them better. Then Mira and Piper had woken up and I’d done my best to shuffle them back to their rooms.
Father had come back inside. Alone. Soaking wet. He’d been furious, a red tinge on his cheeks that told me he was in a foul state.
“She’s in one of her moods again,” he’d told me bitterly. “Ignore her. She’ll come back inside once she gets cold. I’ll call the doctor in the morning to get her dose adjusted.”
One of her moods.
That was what my father had always called her depression. She’d struggled with it her entire life. It had only seemed to get worse after Father had returned from the war, even though we’d moved to the Collis, even though she’d had everything her own father had ever wanted for her. Money. Children. Prestige.
The horror of the next morning…how could I ever forget it? I hadn’t found her. Father had discovered her, and I’d woken to a deep roar of grief that had nearly shaken the entire house.
Our lives had changed that night. We hadn’t known it at the time. But as we’d slept, as a storm had raged outside, my mother had filled her pockets with rocks and stepped into her beloved lake, where she’d taken her afternoon swims. She’d never surfaced alive.
I told Azur all of this.
I wasn’t even sure why.
Once I started, I couldn’t stop.
It was like draining an oozing, pus-filled wound until it ran clear again. Getting all the rot and muck out of my brain that had been festering for years.
I hated my father. I blamed him for that night. But I hated myself more. For not going outside in the rain to retrieve her, to make sure she was tucked in her bed and warm. How many nights had I stayed awake, sobbing into my pillow, thinking that if I could just go back to that night I could take five minutes to save my mother’s life?
Instead, I’d hid.
“Don’t, Gemma,” Azur said, his voice cutting through my words when I told him why . “You will gain nothing from thoughts like that. They will eat you alive and never stop feasting until there is nothing left.”
He sounded certain in his proclamation. As if he knew exactly what it felt like.
But whatever that might’ve been…he didn’t tell me.
“I thought she would get better,” I whispered, drained and tired, my throat raw from talking and my emotions strung out. “We were happy once. Before the war. Even when my father was gone. She felt present. She felt there . But it was always lingering just under the surface. I can’t imagine the pain she must’ve been in.”
Azur was silent for a long time. I felt calm, strangely, considering what I’d just told him. Before tonight, every time I’d encountered him in the keep these past few days, I’d glared and turned away. Still stung from his words in his office.
But right then…my ire felt silly.
“I’m sorry, Gemma,” he whispered against my temple. “I’m so sorry for your mother. I’m sorry you lost her much too soon. I’m sorry you had to deal with her death when you yourself were still so young.”
I recognized that he was trying to comfort me. My foolish, prickly heart was beginning to soften at that realization.
“Thank you,” I said quietly, turning my face into his chest. I sighed, relaxing. “Thank you, Azur.”
“But please,” he said, “recognize that your mother was her own person, too, with flaws and hurts and pains. Recognize that her death was a tragedy, but please do not put that burden on your shoulders. You don’t deserve that, Gemma.”
I processed his words. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t thought myself.
“I’m still trying to do that myself,” he confessed. “I know it’s hard, to silence those thoughts. To forgive yourself. But you’re not alone.”
Whatever it was from his own past, however, he didn’t tell me, and I didn’t push. He would tell me in his own time, if he wanted to.
“Maybe…maybe we can try to learn together,” I whispered. I was tired. I felt like I could let my eyelids droop, that I would be perfectly content to sleep in his lap for the rest of the night.
His lips pressed to my temple. He grunted, “Perhaps we can.”
Silence lapsed. I listened to the wind howling but strangely, the edge of terror had softened.
Azur shifted. He pulled a familiar orb from his pocket. He held it in full view, small and silver. A model so new that might’ve not even been released onto the market yet.
A Halo orb. I recognized the delicate pattern of the striations on the orb’s surface. I stilled and pulled back to look up at him, my sleepiness forgotten.
“For me?” I asked.
“For you,” he replied.