Chapter 31 Ezekial #2
I cup her jaw, gently urging her to listen.
“Every being, even immarus, are born with both dark and light inside them. Some beings like to try and forget that, some even pretend they only have one. But it’s a lie.
” I brush her cheek with my thumb, then lower my voice.
“We don’t know what happened to you, Jasmine, but…
if it was anything like what happened to me…
” I glance away, looking into the shadows that are always there.
“Your darkness was encouraged to grow, something happened that made the Dark Goddess reach out and gift you.”
I feel it then, her darkness. The thin slivers that often remain hidden now appear, wrapping around her and me like velvet smoke.
“This,” I say, nodding at the one curling along my arm. “And your ability to meld minds. They’re gifts, Jasmine. It doesn’t mean you have less light, just that you carry the dark too.”
“How… how can you say that it’s a gift?” Her voice is laced with bitter self-hatred. “My family were terrified when I first used it, I made someone slice open their own throat. I could barely control it.”
“But you did.”
She scoffs, but I refuse to let her self-deprecation continue.
“And we should have been there, as your bonds.” I bite the words back before they spill out too violently.
“Kane had to teach me how to use both gifts, the dark and the mind melding. I know what it’s like to battle the dark and light.
We could’ve helped you. We should have. We should have searched for you—”
“Ze.” That nickname will be the death of me, slicing through my heated words. “How could you look for something you didn’t know existed?” she says, a soft, sad smile in place, and it guts me, because she’s trying to ease me.
Trying to make me feel better.
And I don’t deserve that. I don’t deserve her.
“I felt something,” I admit in a whisper.
“We all did, like a… hollowness. But I had Kane, and then Sai and Julien. With them, it became easier to ignore.” My chest tightens, the sharp guilt of knowing what that ache was all along hitting me.
“I thought it was tied to our past, the trauma we’d all suffered.
” Soft silver tendrils entwine with hers.
“But it was you. The ache was always you.”
She’s so still, the steady rise and fall of her chest and our powers rustling over covers are the only sounds.
Her eyes lock with mine when she whispers, “I felt it too… I spent years trying to name it, but I could never find the right emotions until…” She wets her lips. “Saudade.”
Kane taught her that, I know he did because it’s his language, and now she’s using it to describe us. To describe the ache we all feel. Bittersweet doesn’t cover it.
She felt us too, all this time.
“I’m sorry I didn’t listen, that I pushed it away.” I draw back, hands falling from her, power rescinding. “I never thought it could be you.”
Now, she reaches for me, delicate fingers holding my face. “I ignored it too, Ezekial,” she whispers. “I assumed it was connected to my past, and that over time, it would pass.”
I close my eyes and fall into her touch, letting her warmth give me the strength to share everything. “There’s another reason I shut it out,” I murmur.
Her thumbs brush over my cheekbones, and when I open my eyes, I see no judgement, only tender patience.
“Kane’s told you of our father.” The title burns on my tongue. “How he took me… us. Me and my sister. He dragged us from the Light Realm and into—” I break off, my jaw clenching against the memory.
My mother’s screams as he tore us away, watching the realm, our home, crumble to pieces—ashes. I barely remember it now, cowardly, I melded most of those memories away.
“He didn’t want children, he wanted test subjects, specifically, he wanted to meld an immaru and idimmu into a single vessel.” I try not to remember, but the worst memories, the ones that cling like poisonous tar, can’t be fully erased.
They always carve their way back to the surface.
“With my father’s orders, they started experimenting on us. Injecting us with darkness in a liquid form.” I grit my jaw as the cold, sickly sting rushes through me. “But it never went deep enough. Never took hold the way they wanted.”
Jasmine’s gaze flickers to the black lines snaking along my throat. I still have my shirt on; I rarely ever remove it.
“Most times, it left marks,” I murmur, and her eyes linger over them. “And when that didn’t work.” My chest feels on fire as the memory claws its way in. “They cut into my chest, pried open my ribs, and took the light out.”
I’ll never forget the pain.
“I was always awake, watching them extract physical shards of light from inside me. Pieces wrapped in tissue, threaded around nerves, it was… agonising.”
A soft noise escapes her, eyes glassy with tears, but she never speaks, and her fingers never stop brushing soothing touches over my cheeks.
“It was worse when it was her turn.” I wince as the words spill out. “When they removed her light, replaced them with fragments of dark, stitched them in. Piece by piece. And there was nothing I could do.”
My hands tighten into fists.
“They’d experiment on us, then throw us back into The Divide. Never letting us heal, barely surviving, starving.”
I breathe through the burn in my chest, remembering the unbearable agony of simply waiting for the next set of torture to arrive.
Jasmine doesn’t interrupt, but by simply being here, the pain becomes something less.
“He succeeded in his goal,” I say, voice hollow now. “Eventually, I became what he wanted. A mutilation of Light and Dark. But only after I lost…” My words fail me, because I’m tracking the tears falling down Jasmine’s cheeks.
“Your sister,” she finishes for me.
“Sherida.” Her name shreds my throat. Flickers of her cries, screams, pleads, erupting in my mind. “We were held in The Divide for so long, the things he did. She didn’t…”
“We did it, brother, we survived… we’re going home… No, no… I’m fine. I’m just… resting. Wake me… wake me when we’re home, brother…”
I see her dying face in every shadow, her cries in every silence. And some nights, I wake and reach for her like we’re still in The Divide, in that cage together.
“We’re here, Sheridan. We’ve made it… We’re out of the Dark Realm, we’re out…
” I brush her cheeks. Cold. “Sheri, you can wake up now. You can wake up… Sheri… Why isn’t she waking up, Kane?
Kane… Why isn’t she… No. No! Sheri… Come back to me…
please… I can’t do this without you… I can’t… I… come back…”
“I held her dead body in my arms, and in that moment, something changed—something answered.”
Jasmine’s fingers move again, tracing my throat with her thumb in a tenderness that aches.
I hesitate, because this is the part I never say aloud. Not since I told Kane all those decades ago when we were just boys. He dismissed it then, refused to believe it. Because why would he believe in a saving goddess when no one ever came to save him?
“The Dark Goddess spoke to me,” I say, and my darkness stirs at the name. “As I held my sister, she spoke into my mind.”
Maybe I’d made myself believe it was her, maybe I just needed to believe in something, that some being out there saw what had happened, what I’d lost, and was coming to save me—us.
But it felt real to me, and it changed everything.
Jasmine’s eyes search mine. “And Kane knows this?” I nod. “But he told me he doesn’t believe in gods.”
“After everything we went through, after watching people worship a man who thought he could become one...” I shake my head. “Kane stopped believing in anything but survival and revenge.”
We watch one another, that small line between her brows deepening like she’s trying to make sense of something.
“I believe in the Goddesses, but the Goddess isn’t the one who saved me. All she did was give me a choice. To let the pain and rage devour me, or let it become power.” Our powers entwine, metallic flickers making light dance over her face. “She gave me the ability to meld minds.”
Jasmine still holds my face, but her fingers are rigid. “That’s when you and Kane…” she whispers.
“That’s when we stopped being children.”
She pulls back slightly, just enough to really look at me. Not with fear, but with a kind of dawning horror.
“I don’t know how much Kane told you, but we could have left. We were in the Pit, the Earth Realm was just on the other side but instead, I let the dark consume me,” I admit in a low murmur.
“We both did. Kane and I…” I exhale a breath that tastes like bitter blood.
“We tore the Dark Realm apart, we slaughtered every guard, every scientist, and we never stopped. And when we found our father.” My lip curls.
“There was no mercy left in us, we were insatiable beasts, and like beasts, we ripped him apart.”
I shake my head against the violent flashback, remembering as Kane and I stood over the oozing, limbless body of a man who once held scalpels to my skin with glee.
“Instead of escaping, instead of choosing mercy, we chose to unleash hell.”
I see it ripple across her gaze, the weight of what I’ve said, the brutal truth. The grief, the fury. But also, I see her aching, I see her imagining how a boy who held his sister’s body is the man she sees now.
“I don’t know how we survived it,” I say, quieter now. “I only know that we walked out of the Dark together.”
Her fingers move again, brushing my cheek as more tears slip down her face.
“I’m so sorry,” she breathes. “For all of it. For the boy you were, the sister you lost. For the man you had to become.”
“I don’t talk about this anymore,” I admit in a whisper. “Not even with Kane.”
“But you told me,” she says.
“I’ll tell you anything.” And I mean it.
Because we are the same. Two creatures caught between dark and light. Irrevocably bound. I am hers, and she is mine.
Ours.
I study the freckles scattered across her cheeks, over the bridge of her nose, like delicate constellations that remind me of the Light.
Of home.
“So when you asked me what I am…” I pause. “I don’t really know. I can only tell you what I was.”
“Was,” she echoes, gaze hardening into something sharper. “That’s what you think? That what happened to you, what he did, stripped you of who you are?”
“I am not the same, Jasmine.”
“None of us are after trauma.” Her hand lifts, fingers trailing over the scar threading through my brow. “And this?” Her touches are gentle, but the memory flares sharply. “How did this happen?”
“He wanted to take the light from me, literally.” My lips twitch, not quite a smile but something like it. “After my other eye darkened, and this one refused, he tried to tear it out.”
Her fingers still upon the scar.
“But Kane stopped him. I don’t remember how exactly. I just remember the sound of our father striking him, and Kane not even whimpering.” I glance at her hand, how it lingers, then to the storm in her eyes.
“He never tried to take it again.” I curl my fingers around hers. “I think that’s when I realised how powerful Kane truly was. The fact that this man, our father, feared what Kane was capable of even as a boy.”
With her fingers in mine, I trace the shape of the scar from memory, from the tip above my brow, along the arch, to the bottom in the hollow of my eye.
“Kane hates it, the scar. I see him looking at it sometimes, feel his darkness bursting out, like he blames himself for it. But to me, it’s a memory of him.
Proof he wasn’t like his father, that he never would be, because he cared enough to intervene, cared enough to bring us…
” I swallow. “Food. When we were being starved.”
Her breath stutters, eyes widening just slightly. “Kane… never told me those parts,” she murmurs, searching my gaze. “All those times he pushed me to eat…” Her voice fades as the meaning settles.
“That’s because Kane doesn’t see himself as a hero. He never sees himself as the good guy. But I did. I still do. Kane is the one who saved me. Not some Goddess.”
Her soft expression is something caught between heartbreak and grief. Then her thumb brushes my scar again, so gently I barely feel it.
“I see it now too,” she whispers. “And you didn’t lose your light when you gained the dark, Ezekial. I see it. I feel it.”
“But it’s different now,” I murmur. “I wouldn’t call myself an immaru anymore. I haven’t for centuries.”
“Why?” she suddenly snaps. “You were taken, broken, forced into something you never asked for—” Her voice cracks, eyes burning with a rage she’s trying to suppress.
And I know that rage isn’t just for me, it’s also for Kane.
I just want to kiss her. Her sincerity, her fury. The way she feels all of this for us.
But her words… they twist something sharp in my chest.
“It’s funny,” I say with a quiet laugh. She stiffens, eyes narrowing into blazing slits, so I quickly continue, “You’re so sure I’m still an angel, but you won’t believe that you are.”
I edge closer, brushing my nose with hers and hearing her breath catch.
“You see the light in me, Jasmine. Start seeing it in yourself. Because when we look at you, that’s what we see. And more.” Her fierce gaze softens, shifting into something more… hungry. “You’re so much more.”
I don’t know who moves first, maybe we both do, but my hands are in her hair, and hers are gripping my face, and there’s no space left between us. Just heat and breath and everything we’ve yet to say.
But we’ll have eternity to say it.
And the way she kisses me… like it hurts, like she’s angry, like she’s desperate to prove something to me—to herself.
I kiss her back like I’m starving, until we finally pull apart. Our foreheads rest together, and our breaths tangle.
“Tell me what you are again?” she whispers, a teasing smirk curving her swollen lips, provoking my darkness to no end.
“Yours,” I murmur, mouth brushing hers.
She gasps, then laughs sweetly. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
I kiss her again, never stopping as I say in her mind, “But that’s all that matters. You are all that matters, ana mea.”