Chapter 83 Dianna
DIANNA
“The World Ender was not just his title but a warning for all to …” Unir huffed. “You’re not even listening to me, are you?”
“Nope.” I lay flat on my back, keeping as still as possible.
I didn’t want to hear about the prophecy of his destiny.
I believed in Samkiel more than myself. My husband was more than stubborn and would do anything to save me and others.
He would make it, and gods be damned, as soon as I was free, I’d show them what their world ending really looked like.
I concentrated on the ceiling, humming quietly to myself and counting the stones.
“You refuse to listen to what I have to say?” Unir asked.
“Excuse you,” I said, groaning as I pushed up on my elbows to glare at him. He sat on the ground in his bubble, watching me. “I finally got to two hundred before you distracted me. Again.”
His eyes flicked toward the ceiling. “They’ve obviously hit you one too many times on the head.”
I nodded. “Probably.”
Slowly, I shifted to lie on my good side, the one with fewer broken ribs, facing Unir. “What’s taking her so long? I thought she would eventually come down and threaten us, tell us her master plan, and then we would escape at the last minute.”
Unir’s brows rose, and he looked at me for a long moment. “You are very strange.”
I snorted and winced when it hurt my nose. I cupped it and said, “You know what I find super strange?”
He tipped his head and waited.
“Did you know your daughter can change forms like me, and her silver eyes often shift to red?”
Unir’s throat bobbed.
“Yeah,” I said. “Want to tell me why?” I waved a chained hand, gesturing toward the smelly, dark room. “I mean, we have some time to kill.”
I’d caught a glimpse of it in the blooddreams that had finally returned, but they weren’t clear enough for me to get any real answers. Since we were trapped for gods know how long, what better way to find out the truth than to confront the source of all this mess himself?
Unir sighed and looked away. “She was crafted to end wars, all of them. She wasn’t meant to start them.”
“Well, that was an epic failure.”
“Yes, in your words, it was a grand one.” He cleared his throat.
“While the Primordials were not the strongest in the realms past ours, they were strong enough to cross the distance. Their very nature pushed them to conquer, and they came here looking to claim these realms and declare themselves sovereign of it all. They invaded the outermost reaches of our realms, quietly building their armies. They succeeded in decimating more than one planet before word reached us. The gods roused, and I led our forces out to meet them. We defeated the strongest, and on the brink of defeat, they approached us, hoping to broker peace.”
He paused and ran a hand over his face. His eyes were distant, obviously lost deep in his memories.
The fates had gone quiet, and when I glanced back at them, I saw they were watching Unir as intently as I was.
I shifted just a bit, trying to ease the constant ache that had settled into my muscles.
The soft scrape against stone seemed to pull him from the past, and his silver eyes focused on me again.
“War is a terrible thing, especially wars between gods. The treaty held for a time, but the Primordials, like all beings, could not deny their natures. Then my dreams started, and I saw true destruction. I saw worlds breaking, time itself ripping apart, and a dark figure surrounded by beasts ruling it all as it burned. It wasn’t clear who or what it was, but I feared the end of everything.
I had seen what we were going to have to face, and I knew we would need an army capable of facing it.
So I went in search of Gathrriel’s blood, knowing the magic in it could create more of his kind. ”
“Nismera,” I said. “She was the first you made.”
Unir nodded. “I shouldn’t have mixed the godly blood as I did with his.
It was too much power, and it created an unending hunger in her for more.
It’s what feeds her and all she wants. So then I tried again to make something that could stop her, or at least something that could rival her, but she turned them against me while they were still children. Even the gods pay for their hubris.”
I swallowed, not saying anything as he went on.
“You are all aware of how well that all went, but with Samkiel, I saw hope. Finally, perhaps lasting peace could be achieved. He was someone who could match her in strength and power, but he, too, struggled to contain and control his darkness.”
“You mean Oblivion?”
“Yes,” Unir said. “Oblivion has been with Samkiel since he was a child.”
My brows furrowed. “What? I thought it showed up after his mother’s death.”
“Oh, it showed then, but it has been his since birth. Zasyn and I saw it the first time he opened his eyes. They were solid pits of black with purple swirling in their depths before they turned the deep argent they are now.”
My heart thundered in my chest. Unir, even dead, heard it and gave a half smile. But it was not out of fear of my husband, but out of anger. I knew Oblivion lived under my husband’s skin. I had witnessed it, but I assumed it woke after his ascension. Once more, Samkiel had been deceived and misled.
“Why didn’t you tell him?” All humor had drained from my voice.
“I thought it was nothing, and I had nothing to compare it to. He was my first child born. Eventually, Zasyn and I just ignored it, thinking it was nothing but a newly born god coming into his own. But then we started seeing signs we couldn’t ignore.
When he was six, we were in the garden I’d had made for Zasyn.
It was just a normal afternoon that we had set aside for the three of us.
Samkiel was playing near one of the shrubs.
His ankle got tangled in one of the roots, and he tripped, hitting his face.
He wailed, and Oblivion reacted. Dark tendrils snapped out, attacking what hurt him.
Everything within a two-foot area of him was reduced to ash.
Zasyn and I ran to him, and it stopped when she reached for him.
” Unir shrugged. “I suppose it would never willingly hurt anyone that he loved. I never felt it, nor did she. It did not make an appearance again until puberty. That was when it grew out of control. A rise in his emotions caused a rise in it.”
“He never said anything about that.” My voice was nearly a whisper. I’d never seen any of this in his past after feeding on him.
“He would not remember.”
I felt like I had been slapped. Even the pain in my body couldn’t stop the pain I felt at those words. Not only had he been lied to, but his memories had also been manipulated.
“What did you do to him?” I almost sneered.
“What I had to.” Remorse suffused Unir’s face. “I knew a great, powerful witch.”
I shook my head, disgust coating my tongue. “I can’t believe you. So what? It worried you, so you did what you always do? You hid it, didn’t you?”
“It was for his protection!” Unir snapped back at me. “Sometimes darkness isn’t created. It is born.”
“That’s why you pushed him so hard, trying to shove righteousness down his throat.
You tried to thrust a crown on him because you feared what lived beneath his skin.
For as old as you are, you are dumb. You cannot cage or tame a beast. In trying, you only make it more feral, and now he has no idea how to control it because you denied him the ability to even know it. ”
Unir lunged to his feet, his voice booming. “You speak to me as if I’d ever hurt my children, but I protected him, all of them, the best I could.”
“Best for who?” I snapped back. It didn’t matter if he was a god or a ghost. I didn’t care. I’d fight him the second I got out of these chains.
Unir pointed an accusing finger at me, as if I were a child who needed reprimanding.
“You do not know the gods. What they cannot control, they fear, and what they fear most is their own annihilation. They crave one thing more than power, and that’s perseverance.
Had they known, they would have slaughtered him as a babe. ”
His words knocked the air from my lungs. How would I tell Samkiel this? How could I show him and not create another wound on his already battered and bruised heart? I shook my head at Unir. “So you forged a ring of lies to trap that power inside him and never told him?”
Unir was quiet.
“Am I right?”
Unir said nothing.
“Admit it. Out loud,” I snapped. “Am I right?”
Unir’s temper flared, the godly part of him reacting to being spoken to in such a way. “I do not answer to you.”
“You answer to no one now because you’re dead. You’re dead, and you can’t rest because of this. Tell me I’m wrong about that.”
For the first time since I met him, he turned away from me. “You do not understand.”
“You’re wrong. I do. You’re a coward,” I said, meaning every word.
Unir spun toward me, looking as if I’d slapped him. It was then that I realized just how like his sons he was. He had never been spoken to like that, and he wasn’t sure how to process it.
“I—”
“A coward,” I enunciated. The chains bit into my worn flesh, and my bones ached, but I struggled to my feet.
My anger and the firmness of my belief gave me just enough momentum to stand.
“You have no idea the damage you’ve done to these men.
Damage I have witnessed, and in some cases, borne the brunt of.
Damage I have soothed and tried to heal.
There is love in all of them. Gods, even Kaden.
I saw it in the beginning, felt it before the pain, trauma, and rage creeped back in.
You are just like the other gods. You didn’t understand them, and so you feared them.
Instead of nurturing them and the love inside of them, you shaped it into something ugly.
Instead of protecting the beings you created, you allowed your fear to dictate your actions, and you abandoned them.
The other gods threatened you? Fine, threaten them back.
You are their father! You have the universe’s strongest children bleeding all over the realms because of a pain that could have been avoided. ”
Unir blinked at me, and his head reared back as if I had struck him. Good. I had meant to use my words as weapons, and maybe the only way to get through to him was to force him to face what he had done.
“I did nothing to Kaden or Isaiah,” Unir said defiantly. “They abandoned me.”
“Is that what you tell yourself?” I said.
“After you locked them up in Yejedin and left them to rot for hundreds of years. How did you expect them to react? Did you think they would return to a place they had called home, to a family who had forgotten them and moved on? You may scream and yell about monsters, but you molded two of the deadliest, and the blood of innocents, of my sister, is as much on your hands as theirs.”
Unir’s nostrils flared. “I never locked them up. They left after slaughtering their grand sire, leaving with barely a note. So whatever lies they have fed you, make sure you tell them how I searched for them for centuries. We cried and ached over their loss, following every whisper of a lead, but always came up empty.”
I blinked at his raw confession, not because I didn’t believe him, but because I did. If he could still breathe, his chest would have been heaving. We stared at each other as realization struck both of us. Neither of us was wrong because she’d deceived all of us.
A slow clap came from the doorway.
“Wow,” Nismera said.
I swallowed and settled against my chains as she walked into the room, her heels clicking against the stone.
She was no longer dressed in battle gear and armor, but in a beautiful red and gold silk dress.
Even her makeup was perfect, down to the gold eyeshadow and lipstick.
For some reason, this elegant perfection was more terrifying than her geared up for war.
“Bravo. I don’t think anyone has ever stood up to my father like that.
It’s about time someone put the old geezer in his place,” she said, her silver eyes glowing like a beast’s in the gloom as she stalked toward me.
I eyed the spear she carried, but it was the fragments of the medallion embedded where the sharp tip of the spear met the hilt that gave me true pause.