Chapter 35
Chapter
Thirty-Five
Time had become a true construct as I floated in a space of magic and unfathomable, ancient power. My father was the Fae King, and his magic felt like an ember compared to…whatever this was.
I’d lost myself for a while, no idea how long.
But Ash had kept my heart protected in a cage of bramble and ironwood, and eventually I, or whatever was left of me, had awoken, floating in this strange never-ending place.
I had no true body, or nothing I could see anyhow, nothing but my mind and my burning heart filled with grief and rage and love.
And so, I’d spent my time floating and thinking in the nothingness, wondering how I could possibly come back to myself when the tree had taken everything. My life, my friends, my magic, my…everything.
I had no greenery, no flowers or fauna, no friends or family, no Caelan, no love.
Nothing but the emptiness and a well of grief so profound I could drown inside it if I let myself.
Fury rose in me, an anger so vast I could set the world on fire. I had everything, and I’d gotten tangled up in politics I had no right to be involved in and look at me now.
Fae princess. Ha.
Just a girl made up of atoms and a thorn encased heart with nowhere to go floating in a sea of tree magic.
My memoir would be explosive.
I had nowhere to go and nothing to see and nothing but time on my…
Oh yeah. I had no hands.
This would be funny if it wasn’t happening to me.
I rued the day I’d gotten caught up in the fae. I’d been too trusting, too open, too willing not to tell them to fuck right off and go play in the trees and mounds from whence they came.
But if I hadn’t done the things I’d done, would I have met Caelan or realized my mom and dad had sacrificed so much to keep me safe?
Would I have known a tender touch from a lover or met Rowan and grown apples in the greenhouse?
Would I have made Seymour or laughed with Simone? Made a giant Jacaranda to piss off a Shifter Lord?
Accepted the parts of myself that terrified me and allowed me to become the person I needed to be to survive?
Granted, this wasn’t technically surviving, but I was still conscious. And that meant there was still a way out. I just had to find it.
My thoughts wandered to Moira and how she’d healed me when nothing another fae had done. Was that the key? I wasn’t in tune enough with my fae side to know what I could or couldn’t do, but if my father couldn’t counteract this magic, what hope did I have to do the same?
But I wasn’t just fae, was I?
A thought occurred to me, something so outlandish and wild that I spent the next…
Sigh. Time. I could have been here for a hundred years, and I wouldn’t know it, would I?
Let’s just say I spent a long ass time working the plan out.
And you bet your ass, I had a plan.