Chapter 52
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Aeriden.
—From Lyvia’s list.
Fury surged into the chasm of my powers. Saros’s blue eyes narrowed before his lips curled over his teeth, and he attacked with a viscous blast of wind.
But I was ready.
My magic gaped at the raw strength of the king, his power somehow greater than Carina’s…
than Queen Antares’s... My shield held against his attack, though it buckled and pushed me back, my boots sliding toward the bloody hall we’d come from.
His arms rose above his head, the wide sleeves of his robe floating down and revealing his thin, gaunt arms as he rallied more strength, more power, ready to snap through my shield.
I braced myself as a strange, foreign sensation tapped against my mind.
I blinked.
So did Saros.
His momentary hesitation was enough. Wrath, devastation, and the need for revenge collided with whatever force linked my two powers as I tapped into my amplifier. Two thick ribbons of darkness snapped through the air as they slashed at King Saros’s shield.
His eyes widened as he caught sight of the darkness, and he twirled his staff around him, a new sort of energy snapping into his being. His lips tilted upward as he hammered his staff against the stone floor.
A force rippled through the ground, and as it hit my shield, my ribbons dissipated. I caught my balance, reinforcing my shield, as the king launched himself at me.
He leaped forward, his staff pointed at my shield, as he rallied another blast of magic and raised his blade high above his head.
Not his blade.
Snowflakes and delicate flowering vines danced up the elaborate hilt of the ancient sword.
Enya’s blade.
A snarl ripped through my lips as rage pounced. The sight of her blade in his hands snapped whatever restraining tether remained connected to my powers, and I unleashed myself.
Two sets of glowing, golden eyes blinked open as they raised their dark heads, their twisting bodies and black scales flowing from the power in my palms. Saros’s eyes widened as he took in the twin snakes of darkness rising through the air.
I smiled, reveling in his shock. No, the woman whose blade he held… The elf he murdered… The warrior he killed for the power of death had commanded the shadows, but she’d never transformed them.
His eyes glazed over for a moment, awe, fear, and greed slipping into their depths.
And I lunged. I threw everything into the serpents of death.
Pain seared at my chest, and my energy drained by the second.
My snakes of shadows snapped through the air as they ripped through Saros’s shield and wrapped him in an armor of darkness.
His staff crashed to the floor as their tongues flicked the air and tails rattled, twisting tighter. I raised my hands from a distance and let my powers lift him into the air, the darkness shining with a hint of gold in the rising moons’ light that crept in from the back window.
Emotions flooded me. Being here, back in Mount Telum, over a year after my discovery of Enya’s burial site… The betrayals and deaths that followed. Morwyn. Aeriden. My father. Eira. Oslo. Xenelpha. Bear.
The Tribute. The war. The bodies in Odessa. The slaves on Kayj. It was all his fault. This man. I fed my rage to the union of Obscura and Transcindiel might that streamed from my palms in a constant flow.
Rage.
Loss.
Devastation.
Shouts of battle and the clang of weapons in the room were distant as I kept my gaze on the king.
The king, who seemed to have aged decades over the past year.
His tan, weathered skin sagged, the wrinkles forming along his cheeks deep and harsh.
He looked weary as he hung suspended in midair, his gray brows pinching in disgust as he watched me.
Kresida’s curse drew my attention as she spat a mouthful of blood on the shining floor.
She bellowed at her opponent, the final kingsguard left in the grand tower, possibly the kingdom.
Dark liquid stained his black armor, and his white cloak flew as he spun, meeting her attack with unmatched fury.
Kresida crouched, ready to leap, as he paused for the briefest moment.
His sapphire eyes caught mine from across the room.
Impossible, impossible, my heart chanted as it beat frantically for a moment before everything stopped.
My breath, my blood, my powers, my rage… My entire being came to a halt as my gaze met Cantor blue eyes staring through the slit in his helmet.
“STOP!” I screamed as Kresida lunged for my brother.
Her blade was positioned ready to slice through his armpit.
Aeriden ripped his gaze away from me as he met Kresida with a growl and a blade of his own.
“DISARM!” I bellowed at Kresida, my voice coming out strange and distant. “Disarm only!”
She shot me a look that would have wilted me a year ago, but I held my gaze on her, eyes hard.
She snarled as she finally swung her leg out behind Aeriden and knocked the longsword from his hands with a swipe of her blade.
She grabbed hold of his other arm, twisting it before he let out a grunt, yielding to the elf towering above him.
“Lyvi—” he began as he craned his neck to look up at me.
Kresida shot a look at me before removing his helmet, and it took everything in me not to crash to my knees and weep.
Aeriden. Aer.
Aeriden was alive. He wasn’t dead. He was here, in Sultira. He was here. He was…protecting the king… He was a kingsguard… And in his eyes… That was… Oh gods…
That was horror.
Fear and disgust, even, at who, or what, he saw standing before him.
My thoughts spun in the wild flurry of impossibilities as my heart cracked at the look he gave me. What did he see in me now? A monster?
A soft chuckle rasped from Saros’s lips. I snapped my attention to the king, hanging in the serpents of darkness, my magic remarkably still flowing, cutting through my shock. The heart-shaped heads of the snakes sent me back years to a certain solstice festival… Aeriden’s fear…
The Transcindiel reacted to the thought, dissolving the snakes and spinning them into thick, unbreakable fortissa chains instead.
Saros’s withered lips tilted in a slight grin as his eyes slid from mine to Aeriden’s, and his expression turned mocking. My powers reacted without me thinking, tightening their grip, the thin fortissa chains slithering over his body.
“You’ve made a grave mistake, Lyvia,” he gasped, his breath constricted through his closing throat.
I gazed upon the old King Saros. The man who had traded thousands of his own people, had sold them into a life of misery to the dark king in the north, and I felt only one thing. Hate.
Hate for manipulating me, for thinking he could manipulate my father.
Hate for arresting me. Arresting Drystan and Father Marcus.
Hate for sending his forces to Rivaner. For killing Morwyn.
Hate for allowing High Priest Helmar to conduct his sick experiments with the Obscura Bone, the power that belonged to me.
Hate for sending his forces to Odessa.
Hate for torturing Bear, for killing him.
Hate for what he did to Enya all those years ago.
My eyes snapped to his three-fingered hand, now hanging limp at his side.
I fed my powers that hate, urging them on, urging them to somehow burn darker and brighter at the same time.
They twisted and writhed around him in hundreds of tiny chains as they spun a web of power.
A growing sense of unease reached me, and though I couldn’t see him through the window in the back of the room, I knew Aquila approached.
“Lyvia,” Kresida warned from the corner of the room.
She had Aeriden on his knees, her fist in his black hair. Longer, shaggier than I’d ever seen it. Unruly and wild, like when we were children.
“What are you doing? Why are you doing this, Lyvia?” Aeriden’s disgust and outrage boomed in his challenge.
“Are you going to kill me, Lady Lyvia?” the king whispered.
I stared at him as he let out another soft, vicious chuckle.
“You are not the first to want me dead. Though I think this is the closest anyone has come. Enya tried, you know.”
Numbness spread through my lips as I prepared for whatever lie the king prepared to spew, whatever excuses he was about to throw my way. For however he thought he could trick me into sparing his life. But there would be no trial. Not for this monster.
“You’re a murderer,” I breathed, the words coming out quieter than I wished.
“You sold your own people to keep the ashen off your shores. To keep your more valued citizens, your priests, your soldiers, your scholars, shielded from the atrocities in the north. You’re despicable.
A pathetic king, not worthy of the title. ”
“A king must make choices,” Saros said, blood dripping from the corner of his nose.
“Lyvia…” another warning from Kresida as my powers tightened on the king, the fortissa chains twisting and constricting around his chest.
“Everyone makes choices,” King Saros stressed through an airy breath. “We must all live with them until we live no longer. I’ve endured thousands of years with my choices. More than any one man should. But I would do anything to save my people.”
My gut twisted alongside the darkness in my veins. Bayne had said something similar.
“Liar,” I whispered.
“What reason do I have to lie to you, Lady Cantor?”
I paled at the title, and realization crossed the king’s face in a flicker.
“And how was the Horse Lord when you saw him?” he asked quietly. “I wondered if the rumors were true of your time in the Crystal Castle. I’d ask you, but I can read it well enough on your face.”
The king licked his dry lips as he studied the horror on my face. Small buds of tears formed in the corners of my eyes at the words and the accusing certainty with which he spoke.