Chapter 31 #2
I braced for off-tune notes. But the music that drifted around us was startling.
I gasped, shocked at the sound coming from my own hands.
The melody was mournful and beautiful and it spoke to things in my heart that I had never showed anyone before—not even Zefiah.
I had the urge to stop, to shield these tender parts of myself, but I couldn’t.
The music played on, and my fingers just kept moving.
I looked up to see that the clouds had shifted. Instead of soft, sparkling nothingness, we were now surrounded by the world that I knew, grey and dark. A stone tower loomed above. Dread fell over me at the sight of it.
The Hegaellan temple—where their bodies still lay.
I wanted to stop, but it was now beyond my control. The music continued. Surely it was far too inviting, far too beautiful, to show me something so ugly.
Until I realized that the temple was different than it was in my nightmares.
There was warm light in the windows and voices in the streets.
Three figures appeared at the door, and though they were far away, I recognized them immediately.
Valentina’s casual slouch, Mirie’s straight-backed nobility, Marko’s broad-shouldered confidence.
They were so real, so alive, as they stepped from the temple entrance, laughing with each other over jokes I was too far away to hear.
“How interesting.” Ix’s voice caressed the shell of my ear. “Even in your deepest dreams, you do not wish for them to come to you?”
The notes soured. My fingers halted over the strings, though the song continued on. I blinked, confused.
I said, “Deepest—?”
“Desire.” Kajmar’s voice was now behind me too, so close I could feel his breath on my cheek. “This is the harp’s power. The power to reveal one’s greatest desires.”
A fierce vulnerability crashed over me, the frantic desire to slam the doors shut on this dream, but I’d already been sucked into it—I couldn’t step out of the vision if I wanted to.
And gods, I didn’t want to.
I just watched them. Watched them walk over a bridge in the distance. There was some kind of village or town on the other side—I couldn’t make out what, but I knew, somehow, they had friends waiting for them there. It was the dream I’d conjured while I was traveling alone.
“Alone,” Ix repeated, as if she had heard my thoughts. “You do not wish to go to them?”
I was silent. My throat bobbed. I watched their silhouettes disappear into the distance.
I found myself shaking my head.
Understanding fell over Ix’s face. “Your desire is not that you have your lost friends back, but that they had not met you at all.”
I was eternally conscious of another stare—one that I refused to meet. Septimus.
“How grim,” Kajmar sighed. “That hardly helps us. Play another tune, girl.”
Ix let out a playful giggle and twisted the harp’s tuning pins. The melody shifted, the notes lowering. Clouds puffed around us like great surges of mist over the ocean, and for a moment, I couldn’t see anything at all.
And then, I felt a mouth on my throat. A hand sliding up my inner thigh. A familiar scent of smoke, of vanilla, filled my lungs with my sudden intake of breath.
Ix chuckled softly. “Ah, there we have it. Developed a taste for the fallen one, have we?”
But I was too entranced to answer her. I felt familiar elegant limbs fold around my body from behind, smoke-tinted kisses pressing to my throat, my jaw, my ear.
I lifted my face and, with a jolt, felt the warm sun on my skin.
Gods, it felt so real. I missed the sun like I missed the version of myself that existed before the sun fell. I missed it like I missed my innocence.
I looked down, at the hands holding the harp, and saw that they were covered in blood. The black blood of vampires; the red blood of humans; the shimmering metallic blood of gods. All of it poured from my fingertips and dribbled to the floor, spreading around my feet. I saw my own reflection in it.
And in that reflection, a smile.
Because somewhere in my heart, I knew this blood belonged to those who deserved it. This was the blood of my mission, finally complete.
The craving spread through my stomach until my whole body was suffused with warmth. Here, with lips on my throat and sun on my skin and blood on my hands, I had found everything that I had been chasing with each swallow of wine. I felt complete.
Ix laughed softly. “How morbid.”
“Mortals are morbid creatures,” Kajmar said.
“Perhaps we could offer you blood,” Ix said to me. “But think buried beneath this is something you desire even more.”
Again, her delicate hands danced over the tuning pins. The notes warped like a reflection distorted by raindrops.
Ix looked into my face. I met her gaze steadily. She was so beautiful that I kept slipping into a trancelike admiration for her features. Her eyes were inviting cups of tea, tainted with poison.
I saw it, the moment she discovered what she was looking for. Her brows lowered. She looked genuinely sad for me—the kind of pure compassion that one rarely saw in a world so dark—and I was surprised by how much it hurt to witness it.
“I see now.” Her hand caressed my cheek. “The truest desires are always hidden beneath so much pain.”
The mist surrounded us again, and a beat of fear skipped in my heart. Still, I didn’t move. The melody just kept playing.
Ix murmured, “How often do you think of the one you lost?”
Pain wrenched in my heart, and I jolted, but Ix pressed her hand to my chest, shushing like a mother comforting a child.
I tried so hard—so hard—to push away the memories of that night.
But under Ix’s touch, the broken flashes came anyway.
The pain. The blood on my hands, blood in the dirt.
Hold on, I had begged. Hold on a little longer.
But that fragile little life hadn’t listened.
A wrinkle of sadness formed between Ix’s brows.
“It is all right,” she murmured. “Hush, hush. Let me show you what she could have been.”
No—I wanted to beg. But maybe Ix’s magic made the word die in my throat. Or maybe it was that ugly part of me that was still grieving. The part that actually wanted to see.
“It would have been a girl,” Ix said softly. “A beautiful little girl. And she would have looked just like you. She would have thrived.”
She waved her hand, and a figure stepped from the shimmering mist. My heart caught in my chest. The child was perhaps ten years old. She had wavy copper-brown hair, my tan skin, my hazel eyes.
My first thought was not, She looks like me. My first thought was that this child—the would-be daughter I had lost ten years ago, bleeding out in the dirt—looked so much like Valentina.
A tear slithered down my cheek without my permission. I was ashamed to let this part of myself be seen—by the gods, and worse, by Septimus. But I couldn’t stop it, and shamefully, I didn’t want to. Didn’t want to tear my eyes away from this child’s face.
I had told myself many times that it was better this way.
Better to bury some bloody remains in the plains than to bring a life into a world so freshly cruel.
Better to mourn a child who never took their first breaths than one who would fall to starvation or a soulless or any other terrible cruelty, when I would know what they felt like in my arms and not just inside my body.
I had never wanted a child; not when I was seventeen, and not now.
The one night I had allowed myself to weep over what I’d lost, I’d been furious at myself for it: Why are you mourning this? You never wanted this.
And I felt that same frustration, now, as another tear joined the first, as I found myself unable to look away from that face.
But the child, of course, was not just a child.
A world in which this girl lived was a world in which the sun did not fall. A world in which the vampire wars never began. A world in which I never picked up Zefiah.
And gods, I desired that. I desired it deeper than sex or revenge.
I reached out before I could stop myself.
But the mist cleared.
The melody faded.
My daughter was gone.
I was once again standing in that beautiful room of clouds and marble, Ix and Kajmar before me, my hand reaching out for nothing at all. The want in my chest was unbearable. I had to clamp my teeth down around an involuntary protest.
Septimus’s eyes were so piercing that I could feel his stare without looking.
Kajmar looked at me pityingly, the way one might look at a fox failing to free itself from a trap.
“We could offer you that,” he said. “A world in which all your greatest desires are fulfilled, in reward for your service.”
“It wouldn’t be real.” My voice sounded small and pathetic in contrast to the ethereal loveliness I’d just seen.
Ix smiled softly. “But what does it matter, sweet child?”
I felt a sudden, fierce pang of understanding for the drugged-out acolytes we had seen in Kajmar’s pleasure temple.
Because what did it matter? Who cared about such a distinction, if it was the difference between a life worth living and one full of pain?
Who wouldn’t want to escape into something so beautiful?
{Kyrene!} Zefiah called. Her voice seemed so distant.
I stared into the mist, my hand still slightly outstretched. I could still feel the sun on my skin. Could still feel . . .
Kajmar leaned close to me. His beauty was intoxicating. He smelled like the dream I’d been ripped away from.
“So what do you say, god slayer?” he purred. “Would you like us to build that world for you?”
I said, slowly, eyes never moving from Kajmar’s, “I would like that.”