Chapter Thirty-Eight
Stassi
B lackened branches sliced through my cheeks as I carelessly walked out of the forest, my arms only saved by the leathers I had stolen from the creepy creature back at the military base. No beasts approached me, all of them likely sensing what I was and rightfully fearing me. That, and Milo was being an energetic vermin at my feet.
Sighing, I pressed on.
The entire trip felt like a waste in some ways. Stella refused to come, unwilling to even leave her cabin. I wished then that I had any other option. Neither she nor Padon deserved the throne anymore. But she was better than him in the long run. We needed to focus on fixing our home. On rebuilding what had been broken. That required the empress.
She claimed that the future the Oracle foresaw required her to remain still, but I found that hard to believe. It was selfishness that pushed her—all of them. Padon. Asta. Achari. Bellamy. Fuck, even me most of the time. The only good thing about Asher was that she was different. The princess did not allow herself to be guided by self-serving whims.
With a groan, I slapped the final branch out of my way. As the light of the day met my skin and my eyes locked on Torrel’s, I felt a strange sense of doom. A chill dashed down my spine, my fingers tingling with the oddest feel of magic in the air.
“Torrel, I need you to take Milo and leave,” I hissed as I ran towards her, Milo dashing ahead of me. Her pink eyes scanned my face, contemplating whether or not she would follow my orders. A growl rumbled in her chest, Milo copying the battle cry as he wove between her four legs. “Please Torrel, you know I will be fine. But I need you and Milo to be safe.”
Every hair on my arms seemed to rise as magic flooded the air around us, Torrel going more on edge when she began to feel it too. Something was coming.
“Now, Torrel!” I screamed. My dragon nodded, grabbed her little one with a clawed foot, and then shot into the air. She was but a speck in the distance by the time a cloud of emerald green magic appeared.
Venturae, then.
Just as I suspected, from the smoke-like substance walked the high demon of Fate and Chance.
Venturae’s long braids were the same color as the leaves in a forest at night, the tips nearly touching the ground as she neared me. Her smile was large, white teeth framed by full, round lips. Her skin was black as night, shining in the daylight. She wore a dress made of strung crystals that exposed sections of her skin with each step.
“Venturae, what a pleasure.” Sweetness coated my tongue, the sound of my voice practically a hum.
“Stassi, there’s no need to lie.”
“Fine. I want to kill you where you stand. Happy?”
“Immensely,” she remarked, chuckling. Then she stopped before me, her hands behind her back and a smirk upon her face. “You test fate, Stassi.”
“Of course I do,” I said, crossing my arms. “Padon has a vision for fate and wishes to remove chance, right? Is that why you’re here?”
“Oh please, he isn’t thinking of you at the moment. The idiot cares about his mortal pet more than anything else.” The two of us simultaneously rolled our eyes. He had made a mistake sending Venturae. She never was his biggest fan. “But, you are messing with the rule of Eternity. I can feel the way the magic of chance pulses and writhes within me. Fate is weaker than normal, and it pushes me towards you.”
Fate and Chance had always been one of the most volatile of the ten original seeds. Venturae called it hypnotic. The two opposites warred inside of her, shoving her towards different paths so that she may alter the future in their favor. While she didn’t see what was to come like the Oracles of this world, Venturae could change the future irrevocably. With her magic she could incinerate entire strings of possibility. All she had to do was listen to the beasts upon each shoulder.
Which meant that if she was here and telling me I was weakening fate itself, then she was very likely being urged to eliminate me.
“What do the monsters within you say you must do?”
“My darling fate wishes for you to cease this nonsense or die. You are destroying divine purpose,” she responded, shrugging off the insinuation that she would kill me at the behest of the magic in her body. “On the other hand, fate seems to have been suddenly fed with whatever occurred mere minutes ago. Something you did just pushed the future back on the course it was meant to take.”
“How did you know I was here?” I asked, changing the subject. Stella being seen by anyone would be bad, but Venturae had a habit of losing herself to the seed within her, and I wasn’t sure how her magic would react if she saw the empress or even merely found out she lived on this world.
“Followed the fetch, duh.”
“Of course you did, the nasty creature.”
“It already knew you, so it was the easiest option,” she shrugged. “Plus, I thought we might benefit from a chat.”
“About?” I asked with a raise of my brow.
“You coming back home.”
“Venturae, I fear you’ve lost your mind in your old age.” My words were meant to be haughty, but they came out far more strained. “Padon will kill me if I come back. Then you will be short three high demons instead of two.”
“Chance calls to me, Stassi. It says we are on the cusp of great change. The two of them argue within my bones. They push and pull and shout and scream. Of all the things they fight over, they agree on one thing. That is the importance of getting you home. Something about you being here is changing things, and not in our favor.” Her words held a haunting edge, but I couldn’t help myself from clarifying.
“Our favor? Or Padon’s?”
“Shamay’s,” she corrected. I stilled, looking up at her in horror. What could me being here possibly do to hurt our entire world? I was trying to save it for fuck’s sake! Venturae’s head quirked to the side, her eyes going distant. As if she were listening to someone speak. “Stassi, tell me, have you found Stella?”
Every ounce of my self-control was tested then as I willed my face to remain straight. Giving away Stella would do the exact opposite of what I was attempting to accomplish. It would ruin everything,
“How would I find her so quickly when none of us have sensed her in fifteen millennia?” I asked instead, opting not to answer with a lie.
A smile split Venturae’s face, fate and chance warring upon their respective halves. “How indeed.”
“Does Padon know you’re here? That I’m here?”
“His fetch had already checked here, so he assumes you aren’t. I cornered the fetch after and told it to keep looking on this world just in case. Which was why it came straight to me instead of him. As far as he knows, I’m huddled up in my manor willing Fate and Chance to side with us.” Her smile became even more devious as she lifted her hand and twirled a pink strand of my hair. Great, she was going to negotiate. “Come home with me and I will hide you away until he calms down. Let him take the girl and this world, then he won’t be angry anymore.”
“If I say no?”
“Then I will be forced to tell him that you are here.” When I merely scoffed in response and slapped her hand away, Venturae straightened, her forest-green gaze bearing down on me. “And I will tell him that our empress lies in wait within a forest full of creatures of Death and Creation.”
I couldn’t stop the gasp that slipped from my lips, my jaw dropping open as I stared at the high demon before me. She knew. How the fuck did she know? It had to have been those foul things inside of her, the only seed of the ten that was somehow capable of thought—of will.
“You don’t understand, we will all die if we don’t restore the seeds. How can we do that with Padon running our entire world into the ground?” I asked—maybe even pleaded. I couldn’t leave, not before everything was said and done. While this world meant nothing to me, it meant everything to Stella and Asta. I might have hated them in that moment, but I never wanted their heartbreak.
“Well, I think—” Venturae cut herself off, both of us sensing the swell of magic as it came from not the forest, but the ocean to our right. Heads jerking towards the source, we both watched in horror as Jonah appeared from the deep brown mist of his magic. Even worse was the realization that we were currently upon a world that was on the verge of war. Jonah would be horribly—terrifyingly—strong here.
He wore plain black trousers, his cream long-sleeved top billowing in the wind as he walked. His skin was a light brown, the yellow undertones nearly hiding the blue blush beneath. With every step he took our way, his upturned chocolate eyes seemed to dig deeper into us.
“Stassi darling, how are you?” he asked, opening his arms wide. I felt his magic seep from him, the sparkling cloud of deep brown smacking into me and willing me to be peaceful.
Growling, I hit him with my own magic as I simultaneously fought off his. If what Stella said was true, then we were capable of more feeling than we realized. Perhaps that meant I could find a deeper sense of virtue within him now that I was back on Alemthian.
We continued to face off, the two of us grunting from the force of attempting the other to submit. As expected, males proved themselves weak when push came to shove. Jonah let out a final groan of displeasure and then dropped to his knees in surrender. Raising his hands, he looked up at me and smirked.
“You win.”
“I always do.”
“Padon would disagree. In fact, I think he’d be quite interested to hear you were able to suggest that to me at all.” There was a hint of a threat there in the depths of his words. “Tell me, do you think he knows you’re on the same world as his beloved?”
“She isn’t his beloved.”
“Testy, aren’t we? Care to explain to the class why you are suddenly so defensive of our emperor’s mortal pet?”
“What can I say, I’m a sucker for an underdog,” I replied with a shrug. Jonah only smiled wider at my words, as if I had said something exciting. “Why are you here?”
“Boredom, mostly. I want war. Something new and interesting. You’re offering that.”
“Battle is inevitable but getting Anastasia home will make it smoother. Less likely for chaos on our shores,” Venturae said.
“Iniko brings chaos wherever he goes. War will come to Shamay, regardless of what happens on this pitiful world.” Jonah continued to smile up at me as he spoke, an odd sort of knowing in his eyes that, quite honestly, terrified me. “There is a throne to win, after all.”
Eternity damn them all.
“How about this,” I said, straightening my spine. “You both leave and I don’t kill you where you stand.”
I had always been one to act stronger than I was. It was the only way to compensate for how little magic I possessed. Alemthian changed things. More magic coursed through my body than ever before. Maybe I could actually follow through on the threat.
Jonah snorted loudly, staring at me with humor in his eyes. When I did not back down, his gaze went wide. I thought I had him. That perhaps he was finally scared. But of course, that wasn’t the case at all. The idiot bent forward and burst into laughter.
Laughter!
“It won’t be funny when I’m bathing in your blood and holding your seed in my fist!” My shouts were met with his abrupt silence, my tone finally forcing him to take me seriously. He stood, looking at me as if he were seeing me clearly for the first time. Sadly, there was no fear in his eyes.
“How about this. You come with us, and we don’t kill you where you stand, you pathetic—”
“Jonah, fate grows uneasy,” Venturae cut in.
“—ridiculous—”
“Jonah…” she said once more.
“—unimpressive—”
“Chance feeds, Jonah!” Venturae shouted.
“—weak little creature!”
It all happened rather quickly after that. Jonah’s hands gripped my arms as his magic erupted from him. At the same time, I let my own magic free, groaning with the effort it took to shove into his chest. Venturae ignored us both, screaming with more terror than seemed necessary.
At our backs, the real threat loomed. A burst of swirling white and black magic slammed into the three of us. The blast hit me, sending my body soaring through the sky and then crashing back onto the grass below.
Lifting my head with a hiss of pain, I caught sight of Stella as she approached. She was a vision of sun and moon, the two colliding to tear down the universe. Her hands were held outwards and kept low at hip level. Black surrounded the right half of her body and white surrounded the left, splitting her into night and day. She stared at us with eyes entirely void of color. Each step made the ground beneath her quake, the clouds above us turning a deep gray as they swirled.
Despite being banished, Stella was still the holder of Sun and Moon, the rightful empress of Shamay. The ethers themselves bowed to her will. We were reminded of that as lightning streaked the sky, followed closely by a boom of thunder.
“You have reminded me just how horrid life is as a high demon,” Stella drawled. The tone of her voice was the antithesis to her stance of fury and power. Jonah peered up at her in pure terror. There was no being in existence that was as feared as the high demon of Sun and Moon.
“Stella—My Empress—it’s so wonderful to see you again.” Jonah adjusted, letting his body fall into a deep bow. A giggle escaped my lips when his fingers touched her bare toes. Pathetic.
Venturae was not far, standing and making her way to the fallen empress. She shook with each step closer. “We must, of course we must. She is the empress. No, we cannot make decisions based on your whims. Stop arguing. Please, I need to focus.”
The high demon of Fate and Chance continued to mumble as she approached Stella, falling into the same bow at the empress’s feet. But then Stella looked at me, fury blazing within her eyes. The wrath of a high demon.
“Anastasia, get back where you belong. She needs you.”
Scoffing, I pushed myself to a standing position and immediately crossed my arms. How did she not see this situation as proof of our need for her to return to Shamay?
“Just because she is your great granddaughter plus like twenty greats—“
“Twenty-nine,” Stella cut in.
“What?”
“Twenty-eight generations of Asta’s line have come and gone. Asher is the only living member of the twenty-ninth generation that came from the love between a high demon and a mortal. I don’t think I need to remind you how important she truly is, beyond sentimentality. Now. Go.”
How dare she order me around!
I meant to say something, to stand up for myself in that moment, but all I could bring myself to do was stick my tongue out at Venturae and Jonah before giving Stella a curt nod. Then I made a break for it, shouting Torrel’s name as I went.