Chapter 48 #2
He stands beside me, trembling. His fangs bared, biting down on his lip so hard his mouth drips blood as his chest heaves with breath. Then, with a roar that shakes the pillars, Daed loses control.
Tentacles of smoke and shadow lash from his back, cracking against the walls, splintering the ancient stone as if it were nothing. Columns shatter. Statues crumble. His grief is ruin given form.
Then, whether by fury or fate, one strike hits the cradle and it explodes into shards of bone, scattering Estra’s ashes into the air.
Daed catches me as I fall, pulling me against his chest. He doesn’t weep, but I feel his body quake beneath my hands, the ragged shudder of a warrior who cannot bear to stand and in that moment, I realize it is me holding him up, my hands, my body, keeping him from falling apart entirely.
Then a howl rips through our mourning. From the dark, the demon warrior who escaped us on the stairs steps into the candlelight, blade raised high and angled over its shoulder.
Daed shoves me aside, lifting his arm just as the sword comes down. The blade slams into his gauntlet, metal screaming, and though his armor takes most of the blow, a bright line of blood opens along his forearm.
Daed growls, clamps onto the creature’s wrist and boots it in the gut until it folds.
It spits and scrambles, refusing to be finished.
Grief hollows me out, and rage fills the space.
I want… no, I need to tear this thing apart for what it took.
The thought is a small, terrible pleasure that steels my hands.
I curl my fingers. Green flame coils in my palm, hot with promise.
The demon lunges again, but no void-beast can stand against parents who have lost their child.
Daed drives it back, again and again, pounding it down, forcing it up, his movements almost cruel with restraint.
I have no patience for restraint. I want it burned.
I want it to feel the same emptiness it left in me.
Daed takes the advantage once more, landing another hard blow that sends the demon reeling backwards.
Its sword drops, clanging across the ground.
The creature reaches blindly for its blade, but Daed’s foot pins it.
He yanks the weapon free, spins it, and levels the point, but before he can strike, I cry out.
“Husband.”
The sword halts mid-arc. Daed’s arms lock, then slacken.
“Look.” I point. There’s a smear of blood across the stone, a thin line that leaks from the demon.
But it is not black. This blood is red. Bright. Ordinary.
Daed blinks. His arms lower and the sword tip scrapes the stone.
I step forward, and the demon drags itself on blood-slick elbows, desperate to get away. I don’t let it. I seize its arm, fingers digging in. It cries out, but the sound is wrong. Not the guttural, hollow snarl from before, but something thinner, frayed.
It fights, and so do I. I wrench hard, refusing to release, until a gauntlet slips free. A ribbon lies beneath, worn and frayed, its color nearly lost to time and filth, but my heart knows it instantly.
Once, it was red.
“Where did you get this?” I breathe, and the room narrows to those words.
The demon does not answer. It still tries to crawl away. It lashes out, boots my abdomen, and I stagger back, breath punched from me, enough time for it to scramble upright and make its escape.
“Daed, stop it!” I scream.
He does. Smoke explodes from him in a shockwave that knocks the creature flat onto its belly, a black tendril lashes out and tangles its leg, dragging it back.
It thrashes, fists battering stone, feet kicking blindly, but the magic holds.
The howl cuts the air like a knife, but it changes now.
Less a triumphant roar than the panic of something caught.
“Hold it,” I tell him. Daed does as I ask, gripping the thing by the shoulders and holding so I can see.
Up close, it is smaller, no longer the hulking nightmare we fought on the temple stairs, its edges blunted as if its terror is being peeled away.
The smoke that once cloaked it is gone, whatever ferocity fed it has dwindled.
It stands barely taller than me, not much broader.
The thing that frightened me two breaths ago is nowhere to be seen.
My hand trembles when I reach for its helm. Behind that hideous mask lie the answers I have been searching for. How my daughter died. What hands took her. What shape her end wore.
I need that truth even if it will splinter the last of me.
I pull.
The mask comes away with a wet, soft sound. I lose my grip, and it falls from my fingers and rolls across the stone, the echo like a bell tolling inside my chest.
This is not a demon. Not at all.
Soft brown skin. Dark curls escaping a careless braid. Pointed ears. Eyes of the storm… just like her father.
“Estra…” The name slips out of me before reason can catch it. The sound is lost to the temple, but it lands in the air between us. “It…it can’t be…”
Daed goes still at the look on my face, at the way bewilderment and a terrible hope war there.
“What is it?” he asks, because he hasn’t seen what I have.
“How?” I murmur. “You were only a baby. It’s been weeks, weeks for us, not years…” My voice fractures. I look to Daed and know he reads every question on my face.
She screams. “Let me go, human! I will cut you down! In his name!”
Daed spins her, his hands clamping onto her shoulders, harder than they should.
I reach to soften his grip, but he is stone beneath my touch, unmovable.
He holds her there, breath shaking, staring into her face as though sheer will might rewrite what he sees…
as if, by looking long enough, he can force the truth to change.
He exhales, a sound that carries more grief than I can bear. “Time moves strangely in the void. For us, it has been weeks. For Estra…her entire childhood has passed here.”
I swallow hard, my throat raw. Daed cannot truly measure human years. Fae time passes differently, though not as severe as in the void. But I can, and looking at her now, at the young woman before me, I know. She can be no older than nineteen.
Then she spits in her father’s face and before I can move, she drives her knee into Daed’s groin.
He hisses, teeth bared, pain flashing across his face, but he does not let go.
“Filthy Fae,” she snarls. “My father was right. You’re a traitor and a coward. How dare you refuse the gifts he so graciously gave you! I’ll carve his name into your flesh so he’s with you forever!”
Her voice is pure venom, but beneath it trembles conviction, the kind taught, not born.
“Why is she saying these things?” My voice breaks as tears sting my eyes.
Daed’s jaw tightens. “She doesn’t know who we are,” he says through gritted teeth. “Don’t you see, Amara? She’s been here too long. Under Gygarth’s thrall. He’s raised her as his own.” His voice fractures, low and bitter. “She doesn’t remember us.”
No. No, that cannot be.
We came to An’kel to bring our child home, not to find a grown woman who calls our enemy father.
Who looks at us and sees monsters.
She doesn’t remember. Souls, she doesn’t remember.
How could she not know me? Her mother? How could she not see him? Her father? How could she not feel, even now, that we love her enough to face the dark and defy death itself to reach her?
Remember.
The word burns through me, cutting through the fog of grief. My spine straightens, my tears dry to salt on my skin.
“Hold her,” I say quietly.
Daed’s brow creases, but he obeys without question. He turns her in his arms to face me, even as she thrashes and kicks, a feral cry tearing from her throat. I would expect nothing less from my daughter. But I will not lose her again.
I reach for her face. She snaps at my hand, snarling, but I catch her anyway, threading my fingers through her dark curls, cradling the head that once fit in my palm. She fights me still, even when I press my thumbs gently against her temples.
Then she jolts. A shudder runs through her body, and she gasps.
I open my mind and I pour everything into her. Every memory. Every heartbeat. The moment her father and I stood as enemies. The moment we became something else. The battles. The loss. The rebuilding. The first flutter in my belly. Her tiny hands. Her laugh.
Every joy. Every heartbreak. Every shred of the love that forged her.
Light flickers behind her eyes, and a single tear slips free.
When the last thread of memory passes, I drop my hands, trembling with what might come next. We wait for another strike, another insult, another scream.
But none comes.
Instead, she looks at me. Really looks and in that moment, I see my child.
“Mother?” she whispers.
My heart fractures.
Slowly, she turns to Daed. He releases her, his hands shaking as if afraid to believe.
Her lips part, trembling on the word that unravels us both.
“Father?”
Then he breaks, sweeping her into his arms.
“Estra,” he breathes, voice cracking on her name. “My daughter.”
The words unravel me.
I watch as she hesitates, then her hands lift until they find his waist, and when she finally clings to him, something inside me shatters. I fall into them both, arms encircling them, holding tight, as if my body alone could keep the world from taking her again.
We weep together—father, mother, daughter—our tears mingling, our breaths uneven. I do not know how long we stand like that. In the void, time has no meaning.
But even if eternity were ours, it would not be long enough.
When there are no more tears left to cry, when our arms ache from holding one another, when the weight of what we’ve survived finally settles into our bones, the silence after the storm feels almost unbearable.
My body trembles, every wound screaming now that the battle’s fever has burned away.
Still, I lift my hand and open a portal.
The air parts like a sigh, and through the tear, the Grove unfurls. The scent of earth and sunlight drifts through, and beyond it stand our friends, waiting.
Estra stands between Daed and me, our hands clasped around hers, a bond of flesh and blood and steel, forged in grief and fire. Our baby may be gone, but our daughter lives. The warmth of her skin, the steady beat of her heart, it’s everything. Proof that we did not fight in vain.
Together, we step through the portal.
Into a world broken, but ours.
A world our blood has scarred, but our love will mend. A world where a cursed Fae prince and his Awakened bride can teach shadow and light to coexist, where our child can grow without fear, and the wounds of gods and mortals alike might finally heal.
The world we bargained for.
A world bound by shadows and souls and a love eternal, born of smoke and vine.