Chapter 59
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
LYRA
When I eventually find my room—a lovely thin trail of obsidian left behind to guide me—I immediately stride for the double glass doors leading to the room’s balcony.
My fingers dig into the smooth stone of the ledge, an endless collection of thoughts swarming my mind.
I buckle forward, the weight of so many things pressing down on me.
Breathe, I remind myself. Just breathe.
I steady my attention to the sun as it falls, the sky morphing into the legendary scarlet rumored to fill the world’s ceiling as the comets pass.
It can’t be long now until they appear, if the books I’ve read on the festival are correct about the timeline.
Which means the viewing party is now well on its way.
Yet I have no intentions of joining. Not tonight.
Not after everything I’ve heard and with all these loaded thoughts swirling around in my mind.
I catch the faint sound of quiet footsteps just moments before I feel fingertips grazing the hair from my neck. Gentle lips press against my shoulder, up my neck, and along the length of my jaw. I turn my chin just enough to see Draven studying me through low-lidded eyes.
I smirk at him from over my shoulder, some of the frenzy I felt already melting away. “You know, I should lace your food with something for the stunt you pulled earlier.”
He reaches out and brackets my hips, his large hands swallowing them as he drags me backward against his chest. “And here I thought I should be rewarded for the self-restraint I showed.”
“You call that self-control?” I ask with mocking pointedness, mindlessly wrapping my hands around his wrists.
His fingertips press deeper into my hipbones. “I do. If you knew even a fraction of the thoughts running through my mind—all the many deplorable things I was thinking of doing to you in that room—then you’d call it that, too.”
“Down boy,” I tease through a laugh. “We still have to make it to the comet show.”
A low growl rattles in the back of his throat.
“Mmm, pesky things, those comets.” He leans forward, pressing feather-light kisses down the length of my neck.
“In case you haven’t noticed, there is an entire lavish bedchamber behind us.
One that we get all to ourselves tonight.
I’m not sure about you, but I’ve already thought about six different ways I’d like to put it to use. ”
“Six?”
“Mhm.”
I laugh, dropping my head back against the firm panes of his chest. “Someone has quite the imagination.”
“Oh,” he breathes like a promise, “when it comes to you, my creativity knows no end.”
My chuckle deepens before fading in tune to the descending sun.
Draven drops his chin to the top of my head, his arms extending to envelope me entirely.
We remain like that for a blissful time, together and comfortably silent.
When he holds me like this, all the world feels quiet.
My mind becomes a placid thing, smooth and glistening like a stream beneath a morning’s gilded sun.
It is those feelings of security which allow me to voice the words that have been turning on repeat in my mind.
“And when they awaken—chosen by the Cycle to harbor the greatest power of all—the ashes of one great war will stir, giving way to another, and the Chosen will decide the fate of kingdoms, just as the raven himself had.”
“The words from the prophecy.”
I nod, my eyes remaining glued to the darkening sky.
“It’s all happening just as the prophecy said it would.
” A pause carrying the weight of mountains presses against the cooling breeze.
“I am not what they need,” I murmur. “I shouldn’t be the one to decide the fate of kingdoms. I mean, how is it even possible for someone like me to hold such responsibility? ”
“Someone like you?” he whispers.
I shake my head, sighing. “You know what I mean. I’m not strong enough for this. Not someone capable of deciding the fates of kingdoms for the gods’ sakes. Who am I to decide the futures of so many people?”
With gentle force, Draven spins me around by my hips so I can meet his eyes. “You truly still don’t see how special you are, do you? Still don’t understand the immeasurable worth you hold both to others and this world?”
My eyes drop to my feet. “I really wish people would stop saying that. I am no one special; just a bastard orphan who—only a few solstices ago—was caged in a tiny world by a cruel king.”
Draven grips my chin between his thumb and index finger, tugging it up so my eyes are forced to look at him once more.
“You are also the brave girl who escaped that king by outwitting him. Are the courageous wielder who took on Bathara’s famed entrance exams without proper training and passed through your own resilience and cunning.
You are the person who has stood against the largest threat these kingdoms might ever know.
Were abducted by him, only to get him to agree to search for a better way before massacring an entire class of people.
” He dips his chin to catch my eyes. “And all of that is aside from the fact that you are the bearer of the most powerful magic in all of Solaya. No one, not even me, could stand against you if you chose to wield your full power.” A pause.
“Do you truly still not see all that you are?”
My lips swish side to side in tune to my swaying emotions. “No,” I murmur, the answer painfully raw but honest.
I wish I did, my mind whispers. Yet I just…don’t.
His resulting smile is framed by the lines of melancholy. “Then I will continue being the mirror that attempts to show you.”
“That’s quite the mirror I have.”
“The reflection’s better.”
A tiny grin blooms on my lips, and I again drop my eyes, this time to Draven’s hand, where my fingers toy with this.
Draven watches me, smiling a tilted sort of smile. “You know, I am still very eager to see the results of all that training you’ve told me about.”
I blow out a quiet laugh. I appreciate his attempt to move my mind past my worries, but my amusement sobers within an instant, giving way to more weariness and crippling uncertainty as my head remains stuck elsewhere. “Draven?”
“Yes?”
“What could I possibly offer the people of Solaya by getting involved in a brewing war? I do not understand the poor. I do not understand the rich. I–I was in limbo, never belonging to one side, feeling the powerlessness of one and living with the privileges of the other. How can I actually aid them?” I don’t voice the echo to my question.
How can I help them when I couldn’t even help the people of Halfaria?
“Lyra, not belonging solely to one side makes you the perfect person to harbor the power you do.”
“I don’t want it,” I rasp. The weight of the vomited confession presses against my chest. “And I know that makes me the most selfish person in the entire Three Kingdoms, but even now, I can’t bring myself to want such power.
To know with utter certainty that answering King Yarum’s plea for aid is the right thing for me to do.
All I want is freedom, Draven. To run away from these games of power and never look back.
I never wanted to be caught between greed and schemes.
Politics and tyranny. I’m tired of being other people’s pawns. ”
He observes me, remaining silent. Until he eventually sweeps his thumb along my jaw and whispers, “Wherever you go, I follow. I will not ask you to bleed for these kingdoms any more than you already have.” His mouth hooks up at the corner. “But” —a pause— “I will ask you to turn around.”
With a crease in my brow, I do as he asks—
And am met with the most beautiful sight I have ever seen.
Against the unfurling bounds of a black-and-reddened sky, where clouds have dispersed and the sun has retreated, a million glowing comets stream like ribbons of blue fire one after the other, transforming the horizon into a canvas of blazing trails of light.
I tilt my chin up to marvel at the sight, my jaw open and my eyes wide.
“It’s so beautiful,” I murmur, gripping my fingers more tightly on the balcony’s ledge while I lean forward.
“It is. It’s the single most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”
When I turn my chin over my shoulder, I find his eyes on me, and I nudge my shoulder into his chest. “I was talking about the comets.”
“And I was talking about you.”
With a helpless grin now wedged permanently into my lips, I turn back to the seemingly infinite spheres of glittering dust and fire, battling this splitting feeling in my chest. Like my heart is threatening to claw free from its cage of bones just so it may be able to stretch out and combine itself entirely to the man standing next to me.
And gods, it leaves me in such a mess of feelings.
Because I am at once carrying the weight of pressure I have no idea how to navigate.
Expectations I don’t believe I will ever meet.
But then I am also holding the lightness of a girl who is being stared at adoringly by a man she holds the deepest affections for.
When he looks at me, I feel seen. I feel capable, like maybe—just maybe—I could be all the things I never thought possible.
That I am more than the things I am not.
It is a complicated mix of emotions, certainly.
Yet through my journey of no longer running and hiding from that which makes me feel—not stunting the progression of grief, love, sadness, and so many other things—I think I finally understand that this life is not so simple to allow us to feel only one thing at a time.
I can at once feel happy while feeling sad.
I can be at the peak of love’s mountain while also carrying the weeds of pain in the gardens of my belly.
I can be starlight and darkness. Feel nothing and everything.
It does not make me broken to feel so many complicated, messy things simultaneously.
It makes me human.