Twenty-Nine
T WENTY - N INE
ESTRELLA
I sank through the water, until the ground beneath me gave way. Dirt fell through the opening, the chasm spreading until I fit through the riverbed. Looking toward the surface, I would have sworn I’d seen the familiar ashen white hair of my mate through the shimmering water.
Just before the river swallowed me whole.
I fell through air, the wind of my fall whipping against my skin as I dropped. The surface I landed on was soft, leaving me to bounce off a cushion filled with the plushest of material. My cheek came to rest upon the velvety smooth surface, my fingers running over the buttons sewn into the cushion as I forced my body to sit.
The area around me was a tropical oasis, the clearing surrounded by trees and lush greenery. The vines that hung between the trees were longer than the roads in Mistfell, the trees taller than the ruins I’d seen in Calfalls.
Across the way, a single obelisk stood with a handful of people waiting at the top. Khaos stood front and center, his face as expressionless as I’d ever seen it as the Primordial who oversaw the trials. I wanted nothing to do with the lack of emotion and care I found there as I got to my feet, the fresh wounds of Medusa’s words bleeding like open sores.
Whatever Medusa thought to be true of the man that was supposed to be my father, there was no trace of that affection as he stared down at me.
Gold jutted out from the earth below me, a single spike striving for the sky and the river that flowed overhead. A scale hung from a support beam overhead on either side, and it was on one of them that I stood.
I looked toward the other, finding the figure of a woman who glowed with golden light. It was far more faint than Khaos’s own light, as if she was a step removed from the power he possessed. Her skin was milky white, her hair split down the middle. One side of her head was straight hair the color of night, and the other was the complete absence of color. The pure white of it shown against the night sky of her other side, and the colors of her dress mimicked the pattern of her hair.
She nodded at me slowly, glancing down to the ground below us. An enormous lion prowled through the grass of the clearing, pacing around the scales that held us aloft. Its fur was the softest muted gold, each of his paws the size of my head and tipped with claws that would easily tear the eyes from my skull. Its face was surrounded by a mane of darker brown that framed its broad-chested, long body.
“Melinoe is the Goddess of Nightmares and Madness,” Khaos said, his voice carrying over the distance between us. “She will guide you through a series of nightmares, giving you pain and fear in unison. It will be your job to overcome each and every one, for every nightmare that you fail to pull yourself out of, for every dream that you succumb to and fail to overcome your greatest fear, your side of the scale will drop.”
“What if I do not succumb?” I asked, glancing toward the Goddess who took her seat on the scale. She laid back, staring up at the river overhead as I lowered myself to sit once more.
“Then she will lower. By the end of the trial, only one of you will survive the beast’s hunger. The Fates have chosen this as your trial for the River of Pain,” Khaos said, forcing me to look toward the other woman. With her own life on the line, she would do whatever it took to make me suffer. To make me forget who I was and where I was.
She’d bring me back to the weakest moments of my life, and I couldn’t even blame her for it.
I laid my head down, staring at the waters above for a moment before my eyes drifted closed unwillingly. It should have been impossible to fall asleep under the circumstances, knowing that a test and trials of my worst imaginings would wait for me as soon as I did.
The warm shimmer of magic coated my skin, forcing my eyes open to find specks of golden light falling from the river above. Melinoe stood on her own platform, holding my gaze as the magic in that golden light turned my insides warm and brought me comfort, easing my path to sleep.
My eyes drifted closed once more, the sounds of the onlookers fading as my ears rang.
And the nightmares began.
The cool wind of autumn blew across my face, teasing my skin with the familiar smell of home. The salty brine of the sea lingered just beyond the scent of freshly harvested earth, the tingle of Twilight Berry sweetness tickling my senses as I slowly pried my eyes open.
All sense of comfort faded as I watched the High Priest take his place at the edge of the Veil, the upturned earth between him and I telling me more than I cared to know about the time of year. His face was less weathered by the elements, less wrinkled with the stain of time to hint at a much younger age. I vaguely remembered a time when he’d looked this way.
He ran his thumb over the edge of the ceremonial dagger, testing its sharpness on his own skin as my throat caught in horror of the day that had changed everything for me. For my mother and my brother, for the path my life had taken for the next fourteen years. That first drop of blood sliding down the edge of the blade had been forever committed to my memory, a slow and tormenting glide that I saw when I closed my eyes.
To relive this moment all over again, as an observer watching one of my worst memories unfold…
This was true agony.
“Macario Barlowe,” the High Priest announced, raising his chin as sighs of relief echoed through the group of villagers gathered at the edge of the Veil. My mother’s familiar sob caught my ears, forcing me to look back to where my family stood.
My father’s mouth dropped open in shock, letting me observe the subtleties I hadn’t seen when I was a girl and so lost in the grief that consumed me. Brann’s eyes closed, his arms wrapping around himself as if he could shut out the desire to interfere. At the time I’d thought him just as lost as I’d felt, but I saw it now for what it was.
Restraint.
My father pulled my mother into his arms, ignoring the soft encouragement from the High Priest at the front of the gardens. His words were lost to time, the ringing in my ears drowning out all traces of sounds around me. Lips moved, but I couldn’t see past the pain in my head that came with that ringing.
I watched their gazes hold steady, stepping closer in an attempt to hear those words he’d given to her that had escaped me. The childlike version of me stood at his side, clinging to his legs desperately as he held my mother’s gaze and murmured to her with their foreheads pressed together. I snagged Brann’s gaze finally, something in that familiar warmth chasing away the ringing in my ears.
Sound rushed in all over again, so quickly that my head throbbed and I couldn’t help the whimper of pain. No one noticed me, no one but Brann anyway, an unseen intruder watching an event of the past.
“No one can know, Elora. Promise me,” he said, waiting until my mother nodded through her tears and glanced down at me. My father pulled away from her, reaching down and grasping the younger me at the waist to lift her into his arms. He propped her up on his hip, wiping the tears away from her cheeks with the warmest expression I could ever remember until seeing the way that Caldris looked at me.
“Don’t cry, Little Bird,” he said, touching his forehead to hers. I hurried closer, stopping behind him so that when he turned I’d be able to see the warmth of his face for myself. “I gladly make this sacrifice. Do you know why?”
She shook her head, her lips pursed tightly as she tried to keep her sobs quiet. The suffering of a child made the grateful people around us shift uncomfortably with guilt. It was a strange mix of feelings, to be both thrilled that one’s own loved ones were safe all the while feeling horribly for our neighbors. It kept families ostracized from one another, and I supposed that was the point.
Loyalty to the faith above all else became far, far easier to achieve if they could limit the people we cared about and turn us against one another. It was easier to keep us subservient if we were stranded islands living in proximity to one another, rather than a community that looked after our own.
“Why, Daddy?” the younger me asked, sniffling through her sobs. Watching the exchange, I shoved back the surge of emotion that made the inside of my nose sting and closed my throat. I knew the words that came next. They’d haunted me all my life, following me with the inevitable feeling that he’d be disappointed in me.
I hadn’t managed to do the one thing he asked of me.
“Because it means you’ll be safe here for another year,” he said, and the words took on new meaning with all I now knew. With all he’d known in that moment about what I was—who I was. “But promise me, when the time is right, you’ll leave this place. Fly free, Little Bird,” he said, and my heart clenched as he lowered me to the ground and stood. He smiled at her one last time, his cheeks tipping up even from behind as he turned toward me slowly.
He paused, as if he could see me lingering in the nightmare of this memory. I held his stare, the mossy green of his eyes searching mine as I waited for him to continue on. To turn away from the adult version of me, just as he’d had to turn away from the child. I didn’t know that he could see me, not until he gave me the smallest of smiles. It was a bittersweet thing, as if grateful for the opportunity to see me grown, as if he knew I was there watching.
Reliving.
He cleared his throat, a single tear trailing down his cheek that I hadn’t seen when I’d been a child and his back was to me. It was the final straw in my restraint, pulling a strangled sob from my throat. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth to try to suppress it as my childlike voice rang out when he took the first step forward.
“Daddy, no!”
He stepped through me, the mists of my dreamlike body parting to allow him to pass as I turned to watch him go. He put one foot in front of the other, and I had a newfound appreciation for the strength required in something that seemed so simple under other circumstances.
Knowing he was walking to his death took a different kind of strength, a peace with one’s life that I didn’t know I had any longer. There was so much left for me to do, so many wrongs left to right.
It had been easy enough to walk to my death when there was no one counting on me. It had been easy to justify it to myself. The world would go on, my loved ones would heal in time, the wounds of my loss scabbing over enough to get through the day.
I may not have been a parent, and I didn’t know if that was ever in the Fates for me given what I knew of the evils of this world, but I knew what it was to feel responsible for the lives of others now. I knew what it was to feel the pain of letting them down.
“Hush now, Child,” a deep male voice said behind me. I spun to glare at the man who had taken up his place behind my six-year-old self, placing stern, rough hands against my shoulders. I stilled, everything in me going taut as I realized this had been the place where it all began. That the tears streaking my cheeks had been what made Byron spend the next fourteen years tormenting me, preparing me for a life as his wife even then. “What’s her name?” he asked my mother, lifting a lock of wavy, dark hair from my shoulder. He twirled it around his fingers, forcing me to glance back at him.
“Estrella, my Lord,” my mother said, her brow furrowing in confusion even as she forced her body into a curtsy. Her face twisted with the pain of it, and my anger over Byron’s need for ceremony even in such dire situations only rose.
At the front of the fields, my father was readying himself to die. These were the last moments my mother could look upon the man she loved more than anything, and instead of having the privilege of embracing those moments, she was stuck entertaining a pompous and arrogant lord who cared nothing for her grief.
My hand tingled with warmth, magic coating the surface of my skin as I glanced down at my fingertips. They throbbed with pain as I gritted my teeth, feeling as if my fingers had pulled the agony from my heart and trapped it there. My breathing was uneven, ragged and rough, and I could do nothing to stop the strangled scream that wanted to escape. Pain and fear and hatred mixed together, marking me in a way I would never escape. Stained in the paint of the night sky, those fingers were so different from the unblemished skin of my child self. Of the innocence I’d lost to monsters like Byron—a reminder of what they’d turned me into.
My nails elongated where my hand rested at my side, forming the familiar black talons I’d seen on Caldris when he was lost to his feral side and his anger won out over his senses—when he called to the storms and made the earth shake with his rage.
Byron lowered himself to kneel at the younger me’s side. He was the same height as me when he placed a single one of his knees on the earth, putting his blue eyes level with hers. His silver, coiffed hair was far more polished than anything about her dirt-streaked face.
I’d spent my morning playing with Loris in the woods, racing through the trees without a single thought for what the day might bring. The adults all knew better, but I’d been foolish—blinded by the innocence of a child who didn’t understand the ways of the world around me yet.
Byron raised a hand, a handkerchief clutched in his grasp. He used it to wipe at her cheeks, using the moisture of her tears to wipe the dirt from her face. I glanced forward toward where my father approached the Veil, turning back to look at us while the High Priest watched the exchange in irritation.
Younger me’s voice shook as she forced out the words, her breath catching as she tried to avoid panic. “Please don’t take my daddy.” She didn’t yet understand that men like Byron didn’t do anything that was of no benefit to them. She couldn’t comprehend that the man who seemed so interested in becoming her friend wanted her weak and afraid. He wanted her fatherless and available for the taking.
Byron could have intervened. I knew that now, given his offer to save me from the very same sacrifice, but he’d never wanted to.
I closed my eyes, watching the hope die on the girl’s face as Lord Byron tilted his head to the side. “Please don’t take my daddy, my Lord ,” he said, correcting her etiquette as she forced her head to nod enthusiastically. “You think your grief is more important than the safety of Nothrek?”
I swallowed, pinching my eyes closed as my mother’s eyes flew wide and she turned to Byron to make excuses for her daughter. To explain that I was just a child, that I didn’t know what I was saying. He held up a hand to silence her without so much as glancing away from me.
“No, my Lord,” she said, stumbling over the words she knew she was supposed to say. What did a child care for the safety of the Kingdom when her father was about to die before her?
“I’ll ask you this, Estrella. Would you give yourself in his place? Who would you offer to save him?” he asked, and I ground my teeth together at the guiding words. At the deception in them, the hope he gave only to rip it away.
I saw it now for the test it had been, an evaluation of how much I would come to love and inspire love in my children one day. All because of the impression my father had left on me, on the ability to love fully and completely.
He’d been grooming me, even then and there. Even on that day.
“I’d give myself,” she sobbed, ignoring my mother’s shocked protest behind me. It felt like the brave thing to say, and I remembered being so proud of the words as I jutted my chin out and pursed my lips.
I’d been so proud in that moment, and looking back, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the moment I was meant to tear down the Veil. If Byron had deviated from what the Fates predetermined. How would I have returned to Alfheimr and the Cradle as I was meant to, or would I have just… died?
Byron smiled, his face lighting with something disturbing as he stroked a hand over her hair. “Unfortunately, The Father has already made his choice, Child,” he said, grasping a handful of her hair and turning her to face the Veil where the High Priest nodded finally and my father dropped to his knees before him. He scolded the child, shaking her head from side to side when she pinched her eyes closed to avoid seeing. “He makes this sacrifice for all of us. The least you can do is bear witness to it, Estrella.”
“We thank you for your sacrifice, Macario Barlowe of Mistfell. May you find peace in your next existence, warmly embraced by The Father,” the High Priest said, his voice spreading through the gardens as he touched his dagger to my father’s throat.
Behind me, the child version of myself whimpered as Byron pulled harder at her hair anytime she tried to close her eyes, forcing her with the pain I could still feel yanking at my scalp after all these years. He leaned over her, his voice seething as his nostrils flared. “Do not disappoint me, Child.”
My father’s throat split as I watched, the stream of blood falling to the ground before him. His head rolled back, his eyes connecting with mine briefly.
It was enough. That agony of loss flooded me, becoming something so all-consuming that I didn’t know where I ended and where I began. My body was weightless, everything around me going dark as I was lost to that pure hatred that came from my pain.
When light returned to my vision, I found myself staring up at Byron. His hand was buried in my hair and my mother stood before me sobbing as my father died. Tears stained my cheeks with wet, and Byron’s blue gaze tracked each and every one with interest.
I was the child once again, trapped and helpless in Byron’s hold. I knew the years of suffering that would come from this moment, I knew the way those hands would cause me so much pain only to try to bandage it and wipe it away—to soothe the hurt he caused.
I’d placed my hands before me, wringing them together as I fought not to scream out my grief. I watched as my fingers shifted, as the darkness inside of me climbed to the surface and consumed my innocence right then and there. It clawed its way up my throat with a rumbling growl that felt more beast than human, far more animal than a child could be.
I rolled my head to the side, fighting against his grip in my hair as I touched my hands to his chest. Darkness bloomed over the fingertips of a child, talons spreading from my nail beds into something from my worst imaginations—becoming a reflection of the monster I’d become.
I sank my nails into his skin and watched his shirt bloom with red beneath my touch. Tears streaked down my cheeks, drenching my dress where it met my throat, as the innocence of a child warred with the monster I’d become. I felt her within me, the little girl who was so completely horrified by what I was doing.
Not even death and loss could excuse murder, not to a child who saw the good in people.
I shoved my hand into Byron’s flesh, enjoying the way his bones cracked beneath my touch and scraped at the surface of my hand so similarly to the thorns of the Twilight Berry bushes he’d made me harvest all those years in the gardens so that he could tend to my injuries later after the sun went down.
These were the scars I would gladly wear for the rest of my life, the ones written in vengeance and justice.
My mouth parted into a scream, the shrill sound of a child’s horror filling the air as Byron’s eyes faded to white. I pulled my hand free from his chest, my fingers completely wrapped around the delicate flesh of his heart. I stared into the hollow void I’d created within him, feeling nothing but relief that he couldn’t hurt her.
He couldn’t spend the next decade erasing everything of the child who’d been kind and sweet and forgiving and molding her into a monster who could kill without mercy.
I split from my childhood form the moment he collapsed to the ground, shoved free from her and becoming weightless once more. Her eyes were wide as she stared at me, seeing me before her for the first time.
Her horrified eyes were the purest of night skies, the glimmer of starlight shining up at me as she tipped her head to the side. Tears covered her cheeks, her face a mangled red mess of terror as she studied me.
I stumbled back in shock, dropping Byron’s heart as I tripped over a swell in the earth and fell through space and time.
I’d thought I was protecting her from the monster who meant to harm her.
But I’d only shown her the even worse monster she would become.