Chapter Fifty-One
W hen I return to my chamber, I’m surprised to find Draven sitting on my bed, Casimir’s journal next to him.
His night-dark hair is extra wavy and a tousled mess from the night’s events, sending butterflies fluttering in my stomach. A feeling that is inconveniently timed, considering the pivotal point I’m at in discovering so many answers.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, flicking my eyes between him and the journal.
Draven lifts a brow. “Not exactly the warm greeting I was hoping for.” He holds up a bundle of my clothes. “You left your clothes hanging on the tree. I thought I’d return them to you.”
I huff a laugh and sit down next to him. “Sorry,” I murmur. “I…” A sigh escapes my lips. “My mind is being pulled in a lot of directions right now.”
He watches me with tender eyes, his brows scrunching. In a comforting gesture, he glides his thumb across my cheek. “Have you been crying?”
I turn into his palm as it cups my face, and I press a kiss to the calloused skin. “Yes, but…it was a good cry. A necessary one, I think.”
Draven wraps an arm around me and tucks me into his side, resting his chin on my head. “Was it about your mother?” he asks, the question gentle.
“Sort of,” I answer. “I saw Nuha, and we talked about Meiji. But she said something that resonated with me.”
“Can I ask what she said?”
Nestled into his side, I inhale a breath filled with citrus and sandalwood, and my lips tug up with a wistful smile.
“That healing is not forgetting. That if we forget ourselves in our grief, we may as well bury ourselves besides those we’ve lost—an act that would bring them far greater sadness than anything else we could ever do. ”
Draven’s hold on me tightens, and he presses a kiss to the top of my head. “A lesson not easily learned,” he murmurs.
I pull back from his arms, finding his eyes. “But it’s one you’ve already learned, isn’t it?”
From the words he’s spoken to me, the way he consoled me that night in the greenhouse… I have no doubts he has experienced great loss and pain, and somehow, found a way to overcome it—to move on from it.
To heal.
His mouth curves with a weak smile. “A story for another day,” he whispers, the words becoming increasingly familiar.
Still, I accept his answer.
Though, I do arch a brow and mutter, “Seems one day you will have quite the epic to share.”
He chuckles softly. “So it would seem.” He tilts his head, studying me. “You said your mind was being pulled in many different directions. What else is tugging at you?”
I turn and glance at the journal. My eyes return to Draven, and I point at the old, worn thing. “You didn’t read that, did you?”
His brows lower. “Your journal? Of course not. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’d love to know every thought inside that beautiful head of yours, but I’d never invade your privacy to get it.”
I stare at him for a long moment, slightly awed. Then slowly, I press a gentle kiss to his lips, allowing myself to reap every bit of emotion he’s sewn in my chest.
“What was that for?” he asks through a lopsided grin.
“Just because.” I exhale loudly and pick up the journal from beside me. “I’m going to need you to give me a few minutes while I read the final entry in this thing.”
A wrinkle forms between Draven’s brows. “The final entry? Is that not your journal?”
I heave a sigh. “I think I’ll be far more qualified to answer questions in a few minutes.”
His face is scrunched with confusion. “Lyra, what is—”
I cut him off with a lifted hand. “I swear, I’ll explain everything to you. Just first…let me read, okay?”
Confusion scribbles itself in Draven’s features. Yet still he nods, respecting my request.
I offer him a tight smile, then scooch backwards and prop myself up against the wall.
I crack open the spine of the journal, find the final entry once more—my hands shaking slightly as they flip through the pages—and then I read, somehow knowing that in some capacity, I will not be the same once I’m finished.
I have not scribed these pages for a long, long time.
In a way, I suppose I was right to suspect I wouldn’t return from that temple.
I never did.
I am…different. Someone who, for a continuum of time, I thought would be better. A man charged with saving my kind and preserving the chances of peace for these Three Kingdoms.
I am no better.
I am no man.
There is no such thing as peace.
And I have never known relief and guilt to merge so painfully into one sensation.
Would you like to finally know the burden I carry?
Would you like to hear the words that have haunted me since they were spoken all those years ago?
Perhaps if I share them, my shoulders will feel a little lighter.
Perhaps the ache of loneliness will dull—if only for a moment—with the knowledge that someone else has finally heard them.
The prophecy once whispered to me went something like this:
“Beneath the gaze of a gripping white moon, where a lone, starry-eyed wolf waits, a raven will be made, forged in the weight of his sins.
Cursed by another and rejected by the threads sewn into his withering heart, the raven will no longer be shackled by the weight of time, but rather a servant to the whims of it—destined to forever fly, no matter how many times it clips its wings to fall.
But a promise, I can give: another shall come.
One who is defined by a name both two and one, born from the ashes of what the raven desired most, yet never found.
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.
Yet to all who hear these words, I beg—heed my warning. For it was whispered to me by the stars themselves.
Where one begins, the other must end, never meant to live beneath the same sky.
For the two cannot wield the same power without breaking the spine of this world, and should the Chosen fall as the raven fell, the Cycle shall not turn again, but instead collapse beneath the weight of its own creation.
And if such a fate unfolds, the skies shall fracture, the stars shall flicker and drown, and the gods, for the first time, shall know true fear. ”
For many hours, I sat with those words. Night after night, my eyes shut, but my mind conjured picture after picture.
I tried so hard to decipher their meaning.
Yet in every scenario, I saw myself as the hero—someone whose ultimate goal was to instill peace and preserve the sanctity of life through diplomacy.
I never imagined I would be the one who destroyed it.
Do you want to know why your history books lie to you, Chosen One?
It is because I—and I alone—committed such a brutal massacre, took so many lives, and robbed the world of so much hope and magic, that in order for Solaya to have even the faintest chance at prosperity—at peace—history had to be rewritten.
The tragedy of what I had done had to be forgotten.
And now, the power I wielded to commit those atrocities—the power that could instill fear into even the gods themselves—flows through your veins.
You are a Binder, second of your kind. Heir to my magic. Decider of Fate. A Wielder of All.
You will find, Chosen One, that the power in your veins is as peculiar as it is intoxicating. As boundless as it is constricting. Remember, with it, you are not like them.
Now that you know the truth of what you are, I shall leave you only with this:
My name is Casimir Vivaldri, Crown Prince of Rivara and son to King Isaphus, the first Rivarian King.
And I was denied love. I was denied peace.
I was denied civility. I reached, and they turned away.
I fractured, and nobody cared, only noticing when I could no longer carry their weight.
I was left to bleed on the altar of their indifference, hollowed out, left to rot beneath the mountain of all I was willing to give.
They forged me in their flames, yet blamed me for when they burned.
Yet within those bitter ashes, I learned a valuable truth—
We are not creatures of devotion, but of desperation. We know not how to love, but how to survive. We break. We rebuild. We break again. And if that is the root of humanity, tell me—
What is there worth saving?
My chest rises and falls with jagged breaths, my throat constricting around incoherent emotions stuck in my throat. I blink, staring absently at what I just read, my mind spinning with too many thoughts to process.
A considerable amount of time must pass with me like that—frozen, stunned, and locked in a hazy daze that doesn’t feel real. Because it isn’t until I hear genuine worry in Draven’s voice as he repeats my name again and again I snap back into my body.
“What?” I mutter while shaking my head.
His brows are pinched together as he studies me. “Whose journal is that, exactly? And what the hell did you just read? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost or communed with a god.”
In some twisted way, it almost feels like I have.
I swipe a hand down my face, trying to stabilize my dizzy mind. “We need to find Gray and Marcella.”