Chapter 20
101 YEARS AGO
FOR AMELIA, DAYS repeated their tired pattern: hazy mornings bleeding into draining afternoons collapsing into listless evenings. She woke and slept, woke again and slept again, submitting to an endless routine that cut like a dull blade against her spirit.
One day, she woke up and realized she was running out of time.
It had been two months since Ezran’s proposal. Their wedding had occurred the following week. Her godmothers worked overtime for the celebratory event, arguing over dresses and decorations, fighting until the last minute that the bride and groom exchanged rings beneath the arch. The ceremony took place in front of the greenhouse. Since there was a year left before Amelia turned eighteen, they had no time to waste. The wedding was so rushed that they didn’t even invite most of the kingdom. Instead they promised to have a second, proper wedding in Zilar with Ezran’s family after the baby was born.
The baby. Amelia didn’t even want to think about that.
Moonlight cast through the window in her bedroom. Amelia placed a hand on her flat belly and listened to her soft breathing in the darkness. She was supposed to be pregnant and give birth to a new heir before she fell asleep forever. Maybe she would still be pregnant by the time the curse worked and give birth while sleeping. She wasn’t sure which would be worse.
Ezran had remained respectful, giving her time and distance since the wedding. He even let her sleep in her own bedroom rather than their shared one. Perhaps he knew she was nervous, or was waiting for her to fall in love with him first. But they were both aware of the expectations to fulfill their duty soon.
Amelia forcibly removed herself from bed, even though her skin stuck to the sheets and her heart remained in darkness. She crossed the corridor to her father’s bedroom, hoping to revisit their agreement and find a small sliver of chance that he might understand she wasn’t ready to carry a child while allowing Lilith to stay in Gyldan. Muffled voices stopped her fist from knocking the door, and she pressed an ear to listen.
“We barely know him. How can you expect her to have a child with a stranger?”
A small gasp escaped her lips at the sound of Lilith. Since King Victor had given up on having a child with Lilith, they slept in separate chambers. The queen must have outraced Amelia in confronting him. From the sound of their conversation, it sounded like she was not there to plead, but argue.
“You didn’t seem to have a problem with the arrangement when it benefited you,” he replied.
“I was hoping she wouldn’t follow through with it.”
“You often hope for such fruitless things. A ruler without an heir. A kingdom without borders. A world without war. I should have known, before I married you, how unrealistic you were.”
Amelia imagined Lilith biting her tongue so hard it bled in her mouth. There was a moment of silence, followed by a quieter tone.
“It’s not unrealistic to question why you’re more upset about losing a child that was never born than the child you already have.”
“That’s different,” he snapped. “I didn’t expect to lose an heir. I always expected to lose Amelia.”
Amelia inhaled a sharp breath and backed away from the door. Her grip on the banister kept her from falling.
Why did the truth strike so differently when it came from her father’s mouth? She remembered the times he looked at her, the way his voice rasped like sandpaper whenever they talked. Her father had always been serious, but there was a trace of vulnerability behind the blues of his eyes, a fracture in the glass barrier he put up. Sometimes the stones of his expression were so impenetrable that one would never realize it was a mask, blocking grief from ever reaching the surface.
He’d given up on her from the moment she was born. Like father, like daughter, after all.
She retreated to her chambers and dove back into bed, burying her face in pillows to stifle her gasps. Fabric suffocated her, while tears peppered the surface of her pillow. She balled her sheets into a fist and threw the blankets over her head, hiding from the rest of the world.
A half hour passed before she heard a knock on her door, followed by Lilith’s voice. “Amelia? Are you sleeping?”
Amelia didn’t reply. Ever since the proposal, she didn’t know how to face Lilith. If she did, she was afraid Lilith would detect the truth in her eyes and discover the real reason she said yes to Ezran.
“We need to talk. It doesn’t have to be tonight, but soon. I have something to tell you. It’s important.”
Amelia didn’t open the door. She would rather wait for Lilith’s footsteps to recede and let the mystery hang in the air. Likely, Lilith would restate that she didn’t approve of their marriage. If so, Amelia didn’t want to face it.
Perhaps this was what being an adult meant: forcing herself through unpleasant situations because she had to, not because she wanted to. Waking up every day and dreading what was to come.
? ? ?
AMELIA WOKE UP in the middle of the night and remained conscious for the next hour. She resorted to wandering inside the library and reading several books to lure herself back to sleep. The room was quiet, the stillness of a space that hadn’t been visited in a long time. Cherry-dark wood shelves surrounded her, and stained-glass windows shone fragments of moon as her reading light, paling pages in silver hues.
Her head leaned against the windowsill, where sunflowers she’d planted drooped over the ledge. They mourned whenever the sun disappeared and they had nothing to look for. As her vision grew blurry from boring scriptures, she mimicked the flowers with her own slouched figure. If sunflowers had emotions, she wondered if they would lose hope watching the sun rise and fall each night, never being happy in its light for long. Was staying alive worth it, she thought, when darkness was always inevitable?
She nearly nodded off to sleep before realizing the text she was staring at blankly was not a result of her blearing vision, but actual nonsense. The Book of Samael had a nondescript black cover, the material bumpy like scales of a snake. The tome was so old that when the royal family first discovered the relic, the pages were coated in thick layers of dust. Even after preservation, the vellum parchment felt rough like brittle autumn leaves. But the strangest part was that the writing didn’t make sense. Small slashes of black ink had been drawn in odd angles, thick letters, and crooked shapes.
Despite the illegible text, the royal family had preserved the tome for generations. People believed King Samael left the book as a parting gift before he passed. Some rumored that the nonsensical text was a secret language that revealed where Oleander, his advisor, hid the last treasure of gold. Still, no one could decipher it.
Amelia didn’t care for riches or gold, so the book hardly piqued her curiosity. Instead, her eyes wandered to the window, where in the moonlight, she caught the shadow of a raven.
She leapt to her feet and opened the window with a gasp.
Malicine’s raven. It had to be, looking at his eyes. The stars shone bright, yet his red pupils gleamed stark in the night. He was bigger than she imagined, darker than when she last saw him at her birthday ceremony, where she chased him in such reckless fury she didn’t even realize it had been her life she wanted to leave behind.
“Take me away from here,” she whispered.
The raven didn’t respond to her plea, merely staring back with glowing pupils. Then his wings spread and took flight. She called for him, reaching a desperate hand to catch the bird, but it was too late. She only snatched the black feather he left behind.
Amelia closed the window and held the quill delicately between her fingertips. Under moonlight, the feather glowed an iridescent blue. She pressed the feather into the pages and ruminated over losing the raven once again.
It took a minute before she realized the letters on the page were moving. Crooked shapes straightened together, slashes of ink bent backward. The letters floated across the page until they made discernible shapes, an alphabet that she could recognize. She gawked at the text until the first sentence completed itself.
To whom this may concern:
If you are reading this, I am writing to you from the Otherworld.
Her heart thundered against her chest, a quiet storm igniting for the first time that night. She was wide awake now, and suddenly the crinkled edges of the pages felt tinged with magic. When she pulled the quill away, the words rearranged to indiscernible text again. With the brush of the feather, the letters came back together in an alphabet, blue luminescence gleaming across the ink. Her pulse hummed. This was not a secret language, or even cryptic code. This was the result of writing from a different world.
Pages trembled in her hands as she continued reading. Her eyes fervently skimmed across the handwriting, each pen stroke illuminating long-darkened hallways. Beyond Gyldan’s walls was something extraordinary, and the barriers were finally crumbling down. Amelia assembled fragments of knowledge, piece by jagged piece, until the truth emerged:
King Samael was not dead.
He had opened a portal to somewhere else.