34. Chapter 34 #2
“The truth would’ve shattered you,” Solara says. “Freeing the Mother of Chaos was the only way to unravel all of your memories safely. Augustine knew that. The Harvest Queens knew that too.”
“They all knew?” I breathe deeply.
Solara blinks at me.
“I need—” I sniffle into my sleeve. “I need to get the hell out of here. I need to find my friends.” I pause by the door, my emotions running wild. “How exactly does one exit this place?”
Solara slants her head and studies me. “It should not come as a surprise to you that the only way out is through,” she says, her voice hardly audible against the trickle of rain that begins pitter-pattering against the window.
I open the door and storm outside, only for the rain to become a voracious downpour that soaks me to the bone.
“Would you like a flower for the road?” Solara calls from the doorway.
“No, I don’t want a fucking flower.” I spin around to face her. “I just want to know how the hell to get out of here.”
She materializes before me and gives me a soft smile, saying, “It’s easy. All you must do is let my memories flow freely through you.” She sets the flower in my hand, and everything goes black.
A woman is born beneath a violet storm with eyes as soft as twilight.
Her gown is a ripe shade of elderberry plum which flows softly around her dips and curves, the same curves that helped create and nurture the child she’s cradling in her arms. Somewhere in the depths of my soul, I know that child is me.
The daughter of a dragon queen named Absinthe Fireheart, a woman so breathtaking that all the birds fall silent to appreciate her beauty whenever she strolls through the courtyard.
Absinthe stands inside a castle born of ivory arches and whistling towers, just on the outskirts of Cinderrise, the Skaldrathian capital.
Rolling glades glitter in the backdrop of a bay window, and the sun multiplies in the sky.
I watch her for a long moment as she sings me—the baby—to sleep, tears slipping down my cheeks as I relish in her memory.
Mom?
I reach out to touch her, but she slips from my grasp like tepid water in my hands, suddenly replaced by a man with a peppered black and silver mustache.
He’s dressed in sleek military attire. His jaw is covered in a full beard which he uses to tickle my rosy baby cheeks.
I blink, and he’s swinging me into the air and grinning, his smile so broad and wide that it makes all the mountain peaks pale in comparison.
If I listen close enough, I can even hear the whisper of his name echoing around me.
King Hadziel, Lord of the Shadow Halls, Master of the Wraiths, and the King of Hell.
The same king who betrayed his people by falling in love with my mother, or so the whispers around me say.
I try to scoop both of them into my arms, wishing desperately that I could keep them forever.
That I could freeze time. But their bodies leak between my fingers and puddle at my feet like paint, shifting into something more sinister.
An image rips through my heart. It impales my lungs.
My heart damn near stops beating. Time has surged forward, and my mother is back again.
This time, her hair is gray. She’s standing in a glistening glass throne room…
crying. I reach out to touch her, only for her to collapse into herself.
Oh gods. She’s lying in a puddle of her own golden blood.
“Mom!” I cry out. But it’s too late. The pesky wound gorging her chest cavity refuses to close shut.
Someone stabbed her to death.
My mother fades away. And as she does, something sharp is placed in my hands. No, shoved into my grasp. A crown that is far too heavy. A duty to my country that is far too overwhelming, a marriage that I must endure for the sake of the realm. “You are the queen now, Raven. You must wed.”
You must.
No, I won’t. I give the crown to my father instead, expecting that he’ll carry it for me, only to watch him be dragged away in chains.
I can sense that he’s been wrongly accused of my mother’s murder, deemed a traitor to the Skaldrathian people and ordered to be put to death.
I can even feel the heat of the fires licking at my legs as he’s burned at the stake.
Before I can scream, the scene changes. This time, the walls around me melt away, only to be replaced by a castle as dark as it is dreary, which is surrounded by a fire-filled moat and a landslide of charred bodies.
War.
A War of the Wraiths.
The very war depicted in the history books, which unfolded over a century ago.
This must be the memories Solara was referring to.
The ones from my previous lifetime.
“You must marry him,” comes a strange voice next.
It belongs to a small man buried beneath thick robes with a giant tome tucked under his armpit.
He’s someone’s royal advisor, I imagine, considering how he’s encouraging me to marry a man twice my age.
“It’s the only way to protect the realm and strengthen our borders.
You are his twinflame. Your love will strengthen his. Plus, he is a Skornborn.”
Skornborn.
Something tells me the man I'm being directed to marry is Sylas's grandfather.
“I don’t want to,” I say with my full chest.
“It is Skaldrathian tradition. If you do not marry him, all will perish…”
No. No. NO.
A whirlwind of responsibilities is shoved into my arms that I wish so desperately to drop through the floor.
The scene shifts once more, unraveling like an unbound diary in my grasp.
This time, it depicts light amidst the darkness, draped in darkness himself.
A forbidden tryst of the heart. A man who’d tear the entire fucking universe apart if I asked it of him, even if that meant betraying his own blood on the battlefield.
A man who’d hide me with the Harvest Queens, despite his own better interests.
My heart catches in my throat.
It was all real.
He’d asked the Harvest Queens to protect me from his sister, and they had. Without question. Sunshine, Snow, and Amber. They aren’t just the Harvest Queens, they’re my friends, from this lifetime… and the last.
I should’ve remained hidden like they’d asked. But I couldn’t. Not when my heart was yearning for his. Instead, I’d raced to the surface to find him, disobeying their direct orders to stay in Valenoria where it was safe. Where I was protected. I had to find him.
And find him I did.
“You’re supposed to be hiding, Little Bird,” he’d said, his calm hands and strong arms slowing down the frantic beating of my heart. I’d found him on a castle balcony in the middle of the night, where his eyes had set my entire world on fire, his lips emblazoning me in kisses and stars.
“I don’t want to hide anymore,” I whispered, handing the Sentinel Key out to him. “Here. Take this. It’s what your sister wants, isn’t it? It’s the reason for the war? Give it to her. I surrender.”
He sighed, then he gently closed my hand over the key, forcing me to take it back. “I’m so sorry, Raven. But your mother gifted you this key for a reason. It’s not mine to take.”
Tears slipped down my cheeks as I clutched the little key tightly against my chest. I whispered out a string of words then, inadvertently summoning down the Mother of Chaos from the skies.
With Hell’s fury and Heaven’s lightning at her disposal, the Great Mother stepped out of the clouds and unleashed chaos down upon the world, casting a spell so powerful that it’d sent the dragons to Purgatory, the wraiths to Hell, and damned the gods to a Curse of Love.
Holy fuck.
The Curse of Love is all my fault.