Epilogue One
Adelasia
The North is quiet in the winter.
It’s not a harsh winter either. Snow drapes over the rooftops of our little village, but it’s soft and gentle. Hard, bitter ice has no home here, only the kind of snow that children laugh in and the kind that melts evenly into fresh water on your tongue.
The air is also clean here. Crisp and fresh. It settles into my lungs differently than it did in the palace. The air there was cold too, but in an uninviting and lonely sort of way, where the cold here makes for soft memories by the fireplace.
It’s been nearly a year since I defied my destiny. Since that defiance cracked open the earth and swallowed the last of Eternity’s plight on this world and dragged her evil into the depths of nothingness.
And since, despite all odds, I somehow survived becoming the thing that Dark Goddess wanted me to be.
Magic is gone now. The Well, the Vampires, the Blackwood, the demons, the Coven. All of it disappeared when Eternity did, making for a long, bloody section of history books.
Though I wasn’t inhuman for long, to return to the body and soul I was born with feels so…new. Like my life started over the moment magic was wiped from the earth.
But the newness does not come without hardship.
I still dream of marble halls lined with blood, and I still feel the phantom aches of Eternity’s rot in my fingers.
Sometimes Rowan wakes up gasping in the middle of the might, clawing at the remnants of pain left behind when the Priestesses tore his wings from his back.
And Kaius, even now, still stares at himself in the mirror for long periods as if his hair will return to the silver-white I met him with, and his eyes will return to that of monsters.
We all still carry the weight of what we went through, but we carry it together, and that makes the burden so much lighter to bear.
The theater smells faintly of beeswax candles and chalk.
My satin slippers whisper across the stage, only making sound when I land a leap between the melody of the orchestra below.
These are the moments I used to dream of, the moments I used to crave more than anything.
The moments I begged for when dark magic tore through the softest pieces of me.
I spin, I stretch, I leap, and every moment is measured and perfect, coming to me as easy as breathing.
The audience is silent, and the room is dark save for the single spotlight on me. Yet, somehow through the pounding of adrenaline in my ears, I know they’re watching me.
Kaius and Rowan sit in the front row. The former with a straight back and folded hands, wearing soft black finery I chose for him.
He’s allowed his dark hair to grow out, and his piercing green eyes touch every inch of my skin.
I can almost feel his quiet, reverent smile drape across me when I turn in his direction.
Beside him, Rowan lounges in his seat dressed in deep, navy blue with his hair falling into his deep brown eyes.
In the fleeting moments where the light catches his body, I see his fingers tapping with the rhythm of the music as if he’s trying to remember every move of my body, and his gaze follows every motion with the same intensity he’s never bothered to hide from me.
Two halves of my soul sit side by side, no longer tethered by fate, but by our own choices, and that makes our vows to each other so much deeper than magic.
When the final note of the orchestra dissolves into silence, I hold my position for a breath, my ears blocking out the roar of the crowd. The applause breaks like a wave across the stage, but after I rise from my bow, the only place my eyes go is to them. Always them.
Later, when the crowd has filtered out and I step outside, I find them waiting for me.
Rowan leans against the stone wall, arms crossed, mouth curled into a faint smirk.
Kaius, beside him, stands tall and regal, waiting with an extra coat in his arm because he knows I still get cold despite them walking home on either side of me.
His expression is that of awe, just like the first time he watched me dance in his obsidian halls.
“You didn’t trip once,” Rowan says as he helps Kaius put my coat over my arms. “Disappointing.” I give him a breathless laugh as he pulls me into his chest, kisses my temple and whispers: “You were beautiful.”
“You were perfect,” Kaius adds as he pulls me out of Rowan’s embrace to kiss my cheek. I lean into him, letting the warmth from his breath fan over my head before we begin to walk. His arm is firmly on my back while Rowan tangles his fingers with my free hand.
For a moment, as we walk home, there’s nothing but the soft snow under our boots. No magic, no rot, no curses. Just the three of us, walking through a quiet village to our quiet home to live our quiet human lives.
We don’t try to erase the scars of what we went through, but we learned how to live in spite of them. We learned how to build something steady and beautiful from the wreckage of Eternity’s rot.
No one knows it but us. We purged the world of a great evil, and nearly lost ourselves in the process, but we did it without the desire to be hailed as heroes.
We did it for each other.
We did it for our small piece of forever.