Chapter 41
Daed
What a fool I am to have underestimated the Legion.To have forgotten that even the great Fae Houses, eternal, unbending, ancient as the stars, fell to these humans in the blink of an eye.
How easily I dismissed them, believing time itself had made me wiser.
As if age alone could make me clever. As if centuries of watching the sun rise and set could teach me more than the desperation of a mortal soul.
My arrogance will cost me everything I swore to protect.
I thought I knew speed. Thought I’d felt the limit of my wings, the ache of air turned to fire against my face. But not until now. The wind lashes my skin, sharp as needles. My wings blaze through the night, and the sky screams around me.
Orios, Zyphoro, and the Blades are at my back, voices carried thin on the wind, shouting for me to slow, to wait.
But I cannot. Every heartbeat, every mile between me and the Grove is another life lost to the Legion and if it’s true, if Anethesis has returned, if he commands them now, then his hunger for Amara must be endless.
Does he know she sleeps beneath the earth? Does he understand what he’s meddling with? Or will his impatience drive him to drag her from the soil before she is whole? Before magic can anchor her to life again?
And if he does… if his blasphemous presence defiles that sacred ground, if he provokes the faeries, the Souls who guard her, will they abandon their work and leave her to fade?
What if Mirael and Erania, and the Tenders who remain, are swallowed into that same darkness? What if the Grove dies with them?
The forest rises on the horizon. The haze parts, and the silence I once called sacred is gone.
Now the night is alive with screams and the wind carries the stench of blood.
We break through the treeline into a cacophony of chaos, and it takes me a moment to be sure my eyes are not deceiving me.
A golem of living stone towers above, its granite fists slamming through ranks of Legion soldiers.
Each strike sends men flying, armor crumpling like paper.
Their screams echo through the Grove, drowned by the thunder of the creature’s roar.
At its feet, mauling bears, beasts of vine and fur, hold the line.
Their stone claws tear through human steel, powerful jaws rip flesh from bone.
I dive low, wings slicing the air. Legion soldiers scatter below me like startled insects.
“Hold the line!” one screams before a bear swats him into a tree so hard the bark splits.
The Blades fan out behind me, their armor singing with motion. I signal for some to break formation, dropping to join the defense alongside the forces of the Grove. The rest stay tight on my trail as I streak deeper into the forest.
The vine wall comes into view, and beyond it, I can see smoke rising from the village. My gut twists.
They’ve made it through.
Beside me, Orios’s eyes widen, his face hard as stone.
“Solena,” he breathes. Even through the noise, I hear her name on his lips.
I meet his gaze and nod once. That’s all he needs. He banks left, wings flaring wide as he dives toward the village.
I force my eyes forward, toward the lavender blossoms in the distance. Toward the clearing where Amara sleeps. That is where I should be. Where I need to be.
But the screams rip through me. Fear. Terror. Pain. Each cry cleaving me down the middle.
I grit my teeth, then growl, turning sharply, wings pinned back as I spear towards the village with Zyphoro at my side.
The vine wall burns, flames devouring it whole as smoke billows skyward, smothering the village in a choking charcoal haze. Light dies beneath it.
Bodies lie everywhere. Too many to count, the ground slick with blood, rivers spilling past the benches where we once sat to eat, pooling beneath an overturned pot by the hearth.
Some Tenders still fight, swinging weapons with shaking hands. Others flee into the trees, praying the forest will shelter them.
I have seen war. I have seen carnage.
But this scene. This massacre, will haunt me forever.
So much hate.
So much death.
So much blood.
Orios tears through Legion soldiers, hurling them aside, cleaving bone and flesh without slowing.
He hunts for Solena, every unfortunate fool who crosses his path cut down before they even scream. But the black, stinging smoke blinds everything.
It rises from an inferno at the center of the village, a conflagration that roars, spitting flame in every direction, tossing sparks that leap and catch and spread.
I land hard, shielding my eyes as heat lashes my face. Zyphoro drops beside me, and her hushed gasp cuts through the mayhem.
“Gods,” she breathes, hand flying to her mouth. I have never seen her look so horrified.
“It’s Ronin.”
There he stands, bound to a pyre in the center of the flames. Engulfed. Burning.
He does not scream.
His silence is worse.
For a heartbeat, I think him already dead, but his eyes are open, jaw clenched, and when they meet mine I move.
Wings snap wide, blasting wind that smothers the flames. Then I hurl clouds of smoke, choking what remains of the fire. Zyphoro does the same, dousing burning beams as sparks hiss and die beneath our magic.
I rush to Ronin’s side, tearing him from the pyre, hauling his charred weight over my shoulder. His skin, gods, his skin, but there is no time to think, no time to feel.
The healer’s cottage still stands. Somehow untouched.
I slam my boot into the door, shattering it inward.
A scream pierces the room. Solena stands before Reon’s bed, sword raised, eyes wild. When she sees me, she nearly collapses with relief.
I glance back over my shoulder.
“Orios!” I roar. “She is in here!”
It takes less than a breath for Orios to come barreling through the door, tossing his sword aside as he scoops her into his arms.
I carry Ronin onto the nearest cot while Reon fights and groans nearby, desperate to haul himself up.
“Stay there,” I snap over my shoulder.
“Fuck you,” Reon spits. “If I’m going to die, I’m doing it on my feet, not my fucking back.”
I turn back to Ronin. His chest heaves in ragged stutters. There’s almost nothing left of him, burned hollow like Amara when I found her in Baev’kalath. I know it’s him only by scent, that stubborn human trace under the char.
“Ronin,” I say. He gurgles. “Where is Anethesis?”
He convulses on the cot, limbs buckled and twitching, smoke curling off blackened skin. “Amara,” he rasps.
That’s all I need. I spin on my heel and storm past Orios, Solena still in his arms. I grip his shoulder as I pass. He looks up, eyes raw.
“Stay here,” I command. “Bring these bastards to their knees. Every fucking one of them. Do you understand, Reaper?”
He nods. I don’t wait.
Zyphoro steps aside when she arrives at the threshold. “Where are you going?”
I don’t slow. I don’t look back.
No more mercy. No more surrender.
“To kill Anethesis,” I say, and take to the air.
I am a bolt of smoke and shadow as I tear past the vine wall toward the clearing.
Even as I become a blur through night and wind, it is not fast enough.
I rend open the void and spear through darkness in a plume of smoke, reemerging in the clearing to find Anethesis standing on the soil that holds Amara, Mirael on her knees before him, her hair wrapped in his fist. I hit the ground with a heavy thud.
“Anethesis! Stop!”
The hunched figure freezes. When he turns and the moonlight spills across his face, the creature that looks back at me is no longer the jade-eyed Fae I hunted across the Untold Sea.
His features are a map of crevices and ridges carved deep into his once porcelain skin.
One eye is fused shut by a thick scar, the other pale as fog.
Half his mouth droops, slack and trembling, unable to close.
What remains of his golden hair clings in uneven tufts to a ravaged scalp.
“My prince,” he spits, his words slippery. A sound like something dying. “It is… so good to see you again.”
“Let her go,” I command, my voice sharp as steel, eyes flicking to Mirael. She thrashes in his grip, her breath short, defiant even through her pain.
Anethesis only tightens his hold, winding his fingers deeper into her hair until she hisses through her teeth.
“I think not,” he replies, that calm, precise tone still intact.
“She has told me some interesting things, this one. That Amara is buried, but not dead.” He glances around the clearing.
“She will not tell me where though, and I see no disturbed earth.”
I fight not to, but I cannot stop my gaze from flicking to the patch of blossoms at his feet. The place where the earth breathes and Amara sleeps. He notices. Of course he does, and when he stomps his boot on the soil, I hiss under my breath.
“She’s down there, isn’t she?” His voice slides into a purr, and he yanks Mirael’s head back until she gasps.
“At first, I thought the little Tender was lying. Why bury something that isn’t dead?
But it makes sense now. The Jewel of the Tenders, hidden beneath the earth like treasure.
But it is time for her to come back to the light.
” He pulls harder on Mirael’s hair, and she sobs.
“I want to leave, Daedalus. Gods, how I want to leave. But I need sweet Amara to do it.”
“She cannot open a portal, Anethesis,” I say, forcing calm into my voice. “She doesn’t know how.”
He laughs, a broken, gurgling sound that dies in his throat.
“No, perhaps not. But her blood remembers. Her Awakened blood. Once it’s spilled, once she speaks the words I taught her, even if she doesn’t understand them, the gate will open.
Meranor will call me home.” He meets my gaze, and for the briefest moment, there’s a flicker of the Fae he once was.
“And then, at last, I will be… at peace.”
The irony stings.