Chapter 23
Daed
Before her. I storm the stone arteries of Baev’kalath, fury in my wake. Each footfall lands with the weight of judgment, louder than the thunder that shudders against the cliffs, more relentless than the sea battering the fortress walls. The very rock beneath my boots seem to flinch.
The Blades stationed in the halls lower their gazes, not from protocol, but fear. They sense it, the storm in my chest, the wrath thickening the air around me like smoke before the fire.
The doors to the throne room loom before me.
I don’t slow. Magic spills from my palms, dark and furious, curling like ribbons of night.
With a thought, I loose it, smoke surging like a tide, slamming into the doors and blasting them from their hinges.
They crash to the floor with a final, echoing thud.
At the end of the grand hall, my father rises to his feet and steps in front of her. Queen Lanneth. As if his flesh and bone could shield her from the fire he lit in me.
My lip curls. My vision narrows. Then I step into the void.
The shadows part for me, welcome me. I vanish from the ruined threshold and reappear in a burst of smoke and shadow at the base of the dais. The air cracks as the void closes behind me, and still they flinch. They gasp, startled by the violence I wear like a second skin.
“Daedalus,” my father booms, though I hear the uncertainty beneath his voice. “What is the meaning of this?”
I lift a trembling hand, pointing straight at his chest. “You know why I’m here. Don’t pretend you don’t.”
He straightens. “This day was always fated. Zema could not…”
“Do not say her name,” I snarl. The sound that tears from my throat is strained. “How could you? And to give the task to Modok…”
“I asked you to do it,” he says, calm as ever. “More than once. You could have ended her quickly. You refused.”
Pain slices through me. I stagger back a step, breath catching. “She could have lived,” I whisper. “She wasn’t hurting anyone.”
“She would have,” Lanneth interjects, her voice like silk soaked in poison. Her hands curl around the throne’s arms as she stands. “It was only a matter of time. The houses would have used her, twisted her. Or worse, she would have awakened on her own. And then…”
“You don’t know that,” I breathe, shaking my head. My voice cracks. “You don’t know.”
“We knew it was a risk we couldn’t allow,” she replies coolly.
My rage burns white. My lip trembles. “We. Who is we?” My eyes snap to her, and I spit the words like venom. “You are not my queen. You’re just the body that keeps my father’s bed warm. You wear my mother’s crown like it was made for you, but you command nothing.”
“Careful, Daedalus,” my father warns. “You speak out of turn.”
I look at him. Truly look. At the male who raised me, loved me once. At what he has become beneath her spell. A shadow of himself. A Fae undone by lust and lies.
“You were once a king,” I say quietly. “Now you’re just her puppet. She told you to do this, didn’t she? She told you to have Zema killed.”
“She was a distraction, Daedalus,” Lanneth cuts in and there it is. Confirmation. The rot beneath the crown.
My fists curl at my sides, the bones aching with restraint.
“Now you can stop wasting time on that forsaken island,” she continues, as though offering a kindness. “Focus on your future. A wife. A child. Your duty as the favored son of the Father Below.”
I tear my gaze from her poisoned poise and lock eyes with the one I once called father. My jaw is clenched so tightly it aches.
“Do you make any decisions yourself, King Kaelus?” I snarl. “Or does she pull all your strings? What other betrayals have you swallowed to earn your reward between the legs of this poor imitation of my mother?”
“Daedalus! Enough!” Father roars, his voice shaking the stonework, and at that same instant, lightning splits the sky beyond the windows. The throne room is bathed in a sudden white light and in that breathless flash, I see it.
Not the queen.
Not the female.
But the thing beneath.
Where Lanneth should be is a corpse in silk. Sagging flesh over brittle bone, a mouth unhinged in a silent scream, hollow eyes like pits of night.
The light dies.
So do I.
I vanish into the void.
In a blink, I reappear before her, the shadow-slick magic still clinging to my skin. She looks the same, composed, porcelain, cruel, but I know. I see her now.
I seize her by the shoulders. My fingers bite into her flesh.
“What are you?” I roar. “What have you done to my family?”
It’s the first time I’ve seen her break. Her mask fractures. She quivers in my grasp, lips parted, but no sound escapes. And then something cracks in me.
A vision floods my mind, spreading like oil across water. I stagger, disoriented, the world blotted out by what I see.
Endless stairs spiraling into nothing.
A room that shouldn’t exist.
And within it, an enchanted cage.
Inside sits a Fae female. Around her neck hangs the other half of the moonstone that rests against my own chest.
A haze settles over me. My stomach lurches. I stumble again, trying to shake the image, to blink it away, but it remains.
She rises from a worn chair, a book in her hands. Then she sees me. She’s looking directly at me.
Her hair is black as midnight. Her eyes, gray as the storm.
It's like looking into a mirror.
She steps forward, fingers curling around the bars of her prison. Her lips part, trembling with a single word.
“Brother?”
Then, darkness comes.
Not like sleep.
Like drowning.
It starts in my feet. Shadow coiling, climbing, threading into my veins until every drop of blood feels like smoke. I choke on it as it reaches my throat, my eyes, until the world blinks out in black.
She vanishes.
And with every heartbeat, I lose her. Her face. Her name. The stone. The voice that called me brother.
Gone.
Erased.
Like she never was.
All that remains now is the Father Below, his hand heavy on my shoulder, anchoring me in the dark.
My fingers slip from Lanneth’s arms. My hands fall limp at my sides as she gasps for breath, trying to compose herself.
“Can you hear me, Daedalus?” she pants.
“Yes,” I murmur, hollow. The world around me is distant, meaningless. There is no more defiance, no more resistance. I want neither.All I want is to serve the void.
She brushes a hand through my hair. I feel nothing.
“Good,” she says softly, a cruel smile blooming on her lips.
“You won’t hold him like this forever,” my father says from somewhere far away, his voice echoing like a ghost in a cavern. “He’ll break free. One day, he’ll remember.”
Lanneth’s smile does not fade. She turns her gaze toward him, calm and cold.
“Not while our blessed Father Below holds him,” she replies. “They are bound. One cannot live without the other.”
***
After her. I stand at the prow of the ship, the sea stretching endlessly before me, cloaked in midnight’s embrace. The wind stings my face, the salt clings to my skin, but for those small reminders, it could be the void itself, vast and unknowable.
I close my eyes and listen.
The wind sings, thin and high, carrying voices like echoes from another world.
“Lady Ilyra,” I murmur. “Can you hear me?”
It doesn’t take long. A whisper weaves through the air, a note of music no louder than a breath. Then moonlight and stardust scatter beside me, coalescing into the shape of a female. She bows low, her form flickering at the edges.
“My Prince,” Ilyra says. “Are you well? Have you found her?”
“Yes.” Just saying it aloud fills my chest with something close to peace.
Amara is here. She's safe. For now.
“That is wonderful news. Will you return to the Sundered Kingdoms?”
“We sail for the Untold Sea now. If all goes well, we’ll reach you before the hunter’s moon.” My voice lowers. “Lady Ilyra... do we still hold our territories?”
“Yes, Prince Daedalus,” she replies, her voice a shiver in the wind. “But we await your return. The days grow darker.”
I nod. “Hold fast. I’m coming.”
The wind rises, and her form dissolves, scattering like petals on a breeze until nothing remains.
I descend quietly to the cabin below. The room is dim, lit only by the warm orange flicker of a lone candle near the bed. Amara sits with our daughter in her arms, nursing her with tender focus. She looks up when she hears me enter.
“She’s hungry again,” she says softly.
I nod, letting the warmth of the moment ground me. “Good. She’ll grow strong.”
I move to sit at the edge of the bed, but before I can, Ashen hops up, small as an armful tonight, circling once before curling into a ball exactly where I would have sat.
He doesn’t spare me so much as a glance. Still sulking, no doubt, over being banished back to the void. But as soon as Amara asked, I bought him right back. That doesn’t seem to have changed anything.
I frown. “No room for me, then?”
It’s almost a joke. Almost. But Amara doesn’t laugh. Her gaze drops to the baby at her breast.
“There’s a cot,” she says, nodding toward the corner where a lonely hammock sways gently with the motion of the ship.
I wait for her to smirk, to glance at me sideways with teasing eyes. But there’s no smile. No softness.
“You want me to sleep there?” I ask.
Still, she doesn’t look at me. She watches our daughter instead, her fingers brushing a dark curl from the infant’s brow while Ashen snores quietly at her feet.
“For tonight. If that’s alright.”
A dozen responses catch in my throat, none of them right. If my wife wants space, she shall have it. But I’ve faced war and monsters and the void itself, and nothing has ever cut as deep as this: knowing she doesn’t want me beside her.
“Of course,” I say, forcing the words past the sharp ache in my chest. “If that is what you wish.”
Finally, her eyes lift to meet mine. For a moment, I think this is it, where she says she was joking, where she smiles and beckons me back to bed.
But instead, she just says, “Thank you,” and looks down again at our daughter.