Chapter Forty-Seven
Mother collapses on top of me as Adria withdraws her blade and strikes her again and again.
Ronan pulls me out from beneath her, my hands shaking as I grip onto him, my body covered in my mother’s blood.
“She’s dead,” he says softly to Adria. “She’s gone.”
Adria crumbles to the ground, her body wracked with sobs as the knife falls from her hands. She turns Mother over, and the sight of her lifeless eyes nearly makes me faint.
How did it come to this?
I watch from a thousand miles away as Octavia hands Taran an elixir, which he gives to Seth. “What happened? Show me. Godsdammit, Taran, show me.”
“I don’t think—”
“Bring him here,” I choke out. I know it will hurt him to see, but there’s no way we can spare him from it, and I want my brother right now.
Seth heaves when he sees Mother’s body, vomiting up the elixir into a bush. “Oh, gods. Gods, Adria.”
“Stay away from me,” she says, backing up and holding out the knife. “Stay back.”
Taran helps Seth over to me, and the four of us stand arm in arm, leaning on each other as we watch Adria’s guards come up from the stairs.
“Your majesty?” calls a man in the blue cloak of her guard.
“Wait there,” she shouts, her eyes wild. “Everyone stay back.”
My head lifts towards a familiar sound from above: the flapping of wings. Quinn lowers Bitey back into the courtyard, this time with a companion.
Kira.
“Do you need help?” asks Quinn. She turns Bitey towards Adria, and he lowers on his paunches, ready to strike.
“Quinn, don’t!” shouts Ronan.
“Do it,” says Adria, dropping the knife. “Just do it.”
Quinn looks at our mother on the ground and then back to Adria, putting together what she missed.
“Oh no you don’t. You don’t get the easy way out.
” Bitey lowers himself to the ground, his paws curling beneath him so that she can get down on her own.
Quinn pulls the cane from her back and walks over to Adria, picking up the knife from the ground and tossing it onto the roof of the palace.
“Surrender, Adria. If any part of you regrets what you’ve done, surrender.
Don’t be a fucking coward. Surrender and make it right. ”
“This country is doomed,” says Adria. “It’s over. Don’t you see? The only chance we had was Brakkar, and I just killed the woman who gave us that hope. There is nothing left for me. For any of us.”
Lightning flashes again. I feel a raindrop fall on my arm, and I look down to watch the blood swirl within it.
The world shall end in fire and flood.
“There’s always hope,” I say. I turn to my sister, the woman who started all of this, who carried on my parents’ legacy and led us to this point.
The woman who killed my mother to save my life. To save me from having to do it. To save the man I love from having to do it.
“Let us go, Adria. We can save this world.” I grab Ronan’s hand, and he looks at me, nodding.
It’s time to meet our destiny.
“Go, Sylvie,” says Seth. “She won’t hurt us.”
The rain begins to fall. The blood washes from my skin as Ronan and I walk to Kira, our eyes on Adria. She watches us wordlessly as we depart, latching ourselves onto Kira’s back and taking to the skies.
The ground shrinks beneath us, the dusty land turning dark with rain as we climb into the night sky. By the time we’re above the clouds, my skin is clean, the last of my mother’s blood falling down on Faros with the rain.
“Sylvie, I’m so sorry, my love.” Ronan wraps his arms around my waist as I sink back into him, his head resting on my shoulder.
“It wasn’t your fault. I don’t think it could have gone any differently. She made her choice long ago.” She had chosen her war, her need for revenge, over her children time and time again. “She wasn’t the one who raised me.”
Tears spring to my eyes as I think of Larus, as I think of her blade in his heart.
“I’m so sorry for that too. You’ve been through so much.”
I cry quietly, pulling away to grip Kira’s neck. “I don’t deserve your comfort.”
“Sylvie.” Ronan moves forward and pulls me back to him. “Darling, I know why you did what you did. As much as it hurt me, there was a part of me that believed you were right. And I hated myself for being too weak to walk away myself. For forcing you to do it.”
“I just thought that maybe I could save you from dying, but look at where it got you. You almost died today. That was my fault.”
“No.” He strokes my hair as he holds me. “You couldn’t have known. We still don’t know. There’s a chance that we go to that altar, and it kills us. There’s a chance it ends everything.”
“But you don’t believe that.” I already know this from his feelings, but I need to hear him say it.
“No, I don’t. I believe this is exactly what we’re meant to do, and I know you do too now. I never gave up on you, Sylvie. There were dark nights after you left, but I knew in my heart it wasn’t the end for us.”
I press my head against his chest. “You came for me.”
“I’ll always come for you. You’re my wife, Sylvie. I love you.”
He says it plainly, simply, as if it’s one of the fundamental truths of the universe. He says it without pride, without a need to prove it to me or himself or anyone.
He says it just because it’s true. Because from the moment we met, it could be no other way.
“I love you too, Ronan. Until the day I die, and the day after that.”
He kisses my cheek. “And the day after that.”
We send Kira back into the sky after she sets us down on the hilltop on top of Avaris. Whatever happens next, it’s for us alone, and I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened to her.
She coos protectively as she hesitates to leave us, but Ronan assures her we’ll be alright.
And I believe him.
The hill where the temple once stood looks the same as when we saw it last. There’s no altar here from the visions, no temple.
“What do we do?” I ask.
Ronan looks up at the sky. It isn’t red like our dreams. It’s cloudy and grey but beginning to lighten. In the distance to the east, the sun is beginning to rise. “I think we wait.”
The ground shakes beneath us.
Ronan’s face goes pale, suddenly remembering something. “The visions we had…Sylvie, we don’t have to—”
“I want to.” In our visions, we made love on the altar under the burning sky. If that’s what we’re here to do, so be it.
I can think of worse sacrifices to make.
“Oh, thank the gods,” he says, reaching for my waist. “I need you so badly I can barely stand it.”
I pull him to me by the collar of his tunic. “I’ve missed you. All of you.”
“Fuck,” he whispers. He strokes a strand of my hair from my cheek. “You cut your hair.”
“So did you. Do you hate it?”
He chuckles, twisting his fingers in one of my waves. “Gods, no. You are so, so beautiful.”
“Kiss me,” I beg.
And godsdamn, he does.
He kisses me hard under the brightening sky, picking me up and holding me against him, parting my lips with his tongue and claiming my mouth, claiming my body as his.
The ground shakes violently beneath us as I return his kiss, my lips clinging to his in desperation, my body refusing to let anything tear us apart again.
To my left, the ground cracks and splits open, the altar of white stone rising from the earth. The torch rises on its pillar behind it, the sickle still lying in its groove.
I break from the kiss to look up at the sky turning red with the sunrise. “I think it’s time.”
“Good,” murmurs Ronan in my ear. “I couldn’t have waited much longer.”
Ronan carries me to the altar and sets me down. Before I pick up the sickle, I read the prophecy one last time where it’s engraved on the altar:
When light is dark and dark is light,
When sunless day claims starless night,
When Vahlo’s child joins Vayla’s blood,
The world shall end in fire and flood.
“Are you ready?” I ask Ronan.
He nods at me, his eyes on the torch. When I pick up the sickle, both relics flare with delight.
“Alright. Here we go.” I prick my finger with the sickle and let the blood drop onto the altar. It lies there on the surface, and for a moment, I’m reminded of all the blood that spilled last night. My mother’s blood, Ronan’s. The blood of those we lost before.
Maybe this will make it all worth it.
Ronan holds out his hand, and I prick his finger. When his blood joins with mine, nothing happens for a moment. Nothing we can see, at least.
But then the blood sinks into the altar, and it spreads, staining the white stone a deep red.
The torch flashes and burns red behind it as lightning streaks across the sky.
“Ronan,” I say as the red of sunrise spreads. His eyes lock with mine, and he’s on me, pulling me to him, tearing at my clothes.
It’s a culmination of everything, the desire that brings us together. It’s our lust for each other, our love, our bond, and the force beyond us that ties us together all at once. It’s a surrender to fate, the ultimate expression of our connection, the last step in uniting us as one.
The power surges through us as we strip each other naked, the shadow and light tendrils finding each other, touching and feeling every inch of our shared skin, giving and receiving all at once.
Ronan lifts me to him and then lowers me down to the altar, his light tendrils binding my hands to the stone, spreading my legs open as he kneels before me.
He wastes no time. His tongue tastes the flesh between my legs, his shadow tendrils parting them, opening me to him. He reaches up with one of his light tendrils and opens my mouth, and I suck it as he sucks on my clit, the tendril warm and soft, the feel of it unmistakably like him.
He teases my entrance with a tendril of shadow, and my back arches off of the altar, begging him to take me. I strain against the shadows holding me down, wrapping my legs around him until he pulls them apart with his shadows, opening me to give me what I want.
He plunges his shadow inside me, and it’s cool and smooth as he fucks me, filling me and stretching me as he rubs his light tendrils over my nipples, his hands gripping my hips as he devours me with his mouth.
I cry out as he pulls the shadow from within me and replaces it with light, the sudden change in sensation sending heat down my back as my core tightens around him.
When it feels like I can’t hold on any longer, he switches back to the shadow, and I throw my head back, hitting the altar painlessly as his light cradles it. My release is coming fast, but I don’t want just his magic inside me when I come, and he knows it.
He breaks away from my clit like it physically pains him to do so, releasing the shadows that restrain me so he can lay me back on the altar and climb on top.
“I’d make you come a dozen times right here if I could,” he whispers in my ear as his fingers pinch my nipple.
I moan and writhe underneath him, my hips pressing up to his hard length.
“But I’m not sure that’s in the prophecy. ”
I can feel what he means. We’re meant to come together as one, and as close as I am, it’s not going to take much. “Please fill me, Ronan.”
He moans and lowers his lips to my neck as he pushes himself inside of me. “Oh, gods. This is…this feels like the end of the world.” He closes his eyes tight, his neck arching with the pleasure of being inside me again after so long. “Gods, I’ve missed you so much. I could die right here.”
“Not yet,” I say. I pull him to me by my own shadows, running them down his back and onto his ass, pushing him into me deeper. “I need this.”
“Sylvie.” He thrusts within me, finding the rhythm he knows I like best. I rise up to meet him, our bodies fully entwined, connected on every level.
I pull myself up and push him down until I’m on top of him, riding him, my shadows holding him, his light holding me, until my back arches, his thrusts become frantic, and I throw my head back into a sky on fire.
We cry out as we come, Ronan pulling himself up to hold me to him, our bodies releasing and pulling and tearing at each other, and there is nothing else in this world, nothing else in the universe but our bliss, our bond, the golden thread that ties us together.
And the world, as if in answer, as if knowing it isn’t needed when we are all we need, falls away.
The sound fades, and the world turns white.