Chapter Forty-Four
Remus
It’s all a lie. My life, my purpose. All of it.
I wasn’t born to help Xyrannis become an untouchable empire.
It was never my purpose to protect my siblings.
I was born heir to the Celestivine throne.
And my mother, sick of the life she was forced into, took me from that—took Xion while she was still in her belly from that.
She created the person I became the moment she took us from our home.
From the moment we set foot on Xyrannis, her manipulations began.
The visions I was having when we returned were of my life before.
My life so many different times before. The vision of me killing Leviathan wasn’t a vision.
It was a memory. It was my initial awakening, and my mother locked me away for years after that to protect her precious new home.
That is why I have no memory of my childhood.
I never had one. That is why, in Leviathan history, she “went away” before reappearing to release her children.
It was never her who was locked away. It was me.
And she waited generations for that terrifying story to become a legend on the wind before she returned, keeping me locked away.
She only released me when Ezra was born, and this star system turned against Xyrannis.
She released me to protect the home she had come to love, and the son she always wanted, as Xion still wasn’t old enough to do so.
She released me to fight her wars, and bring her worlds for her son so that she would have the span of an empire to hide him if need be—so that he could rule it someday.
She created the rings to control us. They keep her manipulations in check, and mask our energy from outsiders.
Over the years, she learned to trap our energy levels so that they would never be able to be sensed by Kuron if he was still looking.
But she made a terrible mistake, bonding with Ezra’s father.
It was then that she realized weaker beings could not mask our power.
Their bodies have no way of creating blocks or having blocks placed in them.
They are incompatible, leaking our power to those who can sense it.
She was so desperate to remain hidden from Kuron and what she had done, that she killed Ezra’s father for her mistake, putting it in our heads that bonding is something we should never do. Unfortunately for her, I made a mistake, which set everything into motion.
Time feels nonexistent in this moment. I merely exist, right now. I don’t know whats up or down, left or right. It’s overwhelming. It consumes me. A door has been opened that has kept everything that I am hidden. I have spent centuries of my life, roaming mindlessly doing my mother’s bidding.
The day I almost died was the day my body awakened out of desperation.
My mother had been slowly wiping things from my mind, like my father’s face and memories of places I grew up in.
But the thoughts were still there. The day I turned on her precious Leviathan, she saw me as an enemy.
She manipulated my mind, my memories, and has been embedding intentions within me for years.
She took everything that I was, and made me everything that I am.
She is as wicked as Iris warned me, if not more.
I choke on a gasp as the name comes to me so clearly. Along with it comes every single moment we’ve shared.
Iris.
The human who stood up to me. The human who questioned me and made me question myself.
The human who looked beyond her fears of me to understand what I am—the human I admire everything about.
The human I bonded with, who set this all in motion.
The human I brought with me to my home. I see her and every moment we had.
Every moment, her trust deepened. Her smile, her curiosity, her determination.
I see it all, and I feel bitter resentment that it was taken from me. She was taken from me.
Pain flits over my head as I see everything I did to her after my mother took my memory.
I can’t stomach the fear, the pain I see in her eyes as I torture her again and again.
And yet… she continued to fight for me. My stomach twists and knots as I see myself touching her in my lost state, understanding all the damage done to her body.
“No,” I sob aloud. But even closing my eyes doesn’t stop the knowledge from crashing into me.
I sensed the loss of life at the time. But it meant nothing to me—she meant nothing to me.
I was the wicked being my mother created, doing what it took to have my questions answered.
I didn’t care that she shivered in the cold, almost dying, and it irritated me that she was in such bad shape that I could barely get my answers.
That didn’t stop her, however. She told me the truth over and over again, fighting for me.
Telling me she would never stop fighting.
And for that I punished her. I voiced her deepest fear to her in a vicious attempt to break her down.
My last words to her were so venomous, and intended to hurt her.
Even after she cried in the corner, and was faced with a battle beyond her comprehension, she did what she could to fight for me.
She continued to help me, even dragging my brother from the rubble.
And in her final moments…
I open my eyes as all the information converges. We are still being held by Kuron. Xion lays barely conscious, and my mother watches me, her features twisted in fear as she watches me come to after all this time—after all these centuries.
I release my pain in the form of a howl, lunging for her.
The desire to kill is overpowering. The energy beams are nothing compared to the pain in my chest at this moment.
I see the same fear in my mother’s eyes that I saw each and every moment she resorted to wiping my mind and manipulating my memories.
This time, I finally understand where it stems from. It is the fear of what I am and what I am capable of.
“You should have killed me!” I seethe at her. “I will take everything you have ever loved and make you watch as I destroy it!”
Her eyes are wide, and she doesn’t respond to me.
Tears roll down my face, accompanying my rage as my memories continue to bombard me a mile a minute.
All I can focus on, however, is Iris. She was the only real thing in my life out of all of this.
She was the only thing I was able to choose for myself.
She was the only person I was ever able to love fully.
She was someone that I loved so much that the thought of her death forced me to bond.
We shared a bond, and my mother ripped it out of me agonizingly slowly and painfully.
She knew what I felt, and watched me with cold contempt as she intricately severed the connection between us.
Her actions cost me to almost kill Iris with my own hands—my bare hands. And the child that existed for a split second, was taken with them.
Everything I have ever cared about it gone. The life I thought I knew, even the brother I thought I loved, Iris and the unborn life we will never know—it’s all gone.
She’s gone.
“You should have killed me!” I scream at my mother, pulling against the energy bonds. “You should have fucking killed me!”
Iris
I jolt awake, my chest burning as I heave water from my lungs.
My throat stings, and my eyes burn. My skin feels like it’s on fire from how tight and dry it is, my clothes freezing as they stick to me.
And as my brain connects with the rest of my body, my arms fly to the wound in my side, the pain unbearable as it tears a scream from my throat.
It feels like someone is holding a lighter to my skin, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
“Iris, calm down!” I grunt in panic as hands quickly grab me, pulling my hands away from the wound. “Don’t touch it!”
I recognize the voice. It’s Sky. It takes me a moment to come down from my adrenaline-induced panic, and I blink several times for her to become clear enough that I can not only see her, but I am now aware of my surroundings.
We’re in a cave.
The mouth of the cave opens up to the ocean, and there’s still water around us, but we’re on the slightly elevated ground with rock and sand beneath us.
“How—” I break off into a coughing fit, my throat angrily punishing me for speaking so soon after I nearly drowned.
“Shhh,” Sky murmurs. Her voice is eerily soothing, and I note that as I focus more on her, she looks terrible.
There’s dried blood near her forehead; her hair is wild and filled with dirt and sand and her eyes are tired and bloodshot.
The dress she wore is dingy and torn, and she has multiple scrapes along her body.
Despite that, she is finally conscious from the attack, and somehow survived our fall into the water.
I am somehow alive.
“H-how?” I whisper.
The last thing I saw was Remus being held down as he screamed for me. I felt the rock crumbling under me, the frigid chill of the water, then nothing. Sky lowers her head, shifting it in the opposite direction of the cave. I follow her gaze, my eyes widening when I see a body.
“Noah,” she murmurs. I saw him get thrown over the side of the cliff by their mother. I didn’t realize he could have survived until now. But the longer I focus on his body, the heavier my heart sinks.
He isn’t moving.
“I-is he…?”
Sky nods, wiping her eyes.
“A few hours ago…his body couldn’t take the strain anymore,” she murmurs.
Tears spring into my eyes as well, and I shiver as another human becomes part of the list of those to mourn who were caught in the crosshairs of these powerful beings.
I slowly shift, the world blurring as pain shoots from the wound their mother inflicted on me.
She had zero regard for our lives, using me to not only taunt Remus, but draw him to her trap so she could do the same to him.
“You shouldn’t be moving,” Sky says, helping me, but I wave her off.
“What about Ezra?” I ask.
She shifts her attention to the back of the cave and I follow it. Ezra’s lying still with his eyes closed.
“He’s alive, but I don’t know for how long. Their mother did something…but I don’t know if it’s enough,” she says.
“Help me up,” I murmur to Sky. She hesitates, obviously not wanting me to move. But I need to see for myself where we are. I wrap my arm around her shoulder, and she helps me to my feet.
“Agh!” I cry out as pain radiates from the wound, settling in my veins. My breath hitches as we both limp to the mouth of the cave.
“How long have I been out?” I ask.
“It’s been hours. Ezra hasn’t stirred. He’s breathing, but even that is shallow,” she says.
I don’t know how he could have survived something like that.
Each time I close my eyes, I see Remus and that Celestivine fighting like it’s nothing as they destroyed their surroundings.
Ezra’s survival is only thanks to his mother.
“Where’s Xion?” I ask in confusion. I can’t recall anything after being stabbed. But I know she was with us. There’s no way something like that could have taken her out.
Sky shrugs.
“All of them are missing,” she says.
We finally make it to the mouth of the cave.
It’s barely light out, so I can see that we are somewhere at the bottom of a cliff.
But I see no way out. Or up. I shift my attention to the sky, my eyes widening at the empty space.
The rings are gone and this time, I don’t know if that’s good or bad.
I look around, seeing a shore in the far distance.
We need to get there and we need fresh water, or we’ll die in this cave before we can figure out who won this battle.
“We need to find a way to—ngh!” I flinch as pain radiates from my injury, my legs giving out.
“Iris!” Sky calls my name, but my body feels paralyzed as I collapse onto the edge of the water. I glare into the sky with wide eyes, the sound of my heart beating in my ears. My hands try to find the wound, to stop the pain, but Sky grabs them, shouting at me not to touch it.
She talks me through breathing, telling me that the pain will pass and everything will be okay.
But I hear the uncertainty in her voice.
I hear the tremble as she fights tears. There is no one coming to save us.
Remus won’t be appearing out of nowhere.
He’s either been taken or is dead by now.
We’re all alone in this alien world; our desperation to survive unable to help us this time around.