10. Tethys
Five hundred yearsof service to the old gods.
Not just to any god, but to the god of the sea, the god of the realm I’d once had the gall to consider myself the lord of.
Prince of the Sea, I’d called myself.
I’d ruled my realm for over a thousand years as prince, taken the throne from my father when he chose to give it up. I was not an heir of war or plague or death or betrayal. My court alone had ruled always by the same rules as the sea. We ruled with the same ebb and flow of the tides. We took power when it was given to us, and we gave it away when it was no longer ours to keep. We Sea Fae knew the order of things; we knew not to hold on to what was not ours. Like the sea gave up its treasure, it was its right to take it away as well.
I’d become arrogant, overconfident, and prideful in my role as prince. I’d taken for granted that my role was unchanging, that the ebb and flow that ruled my kingdom somehow no longer ruled me. I grew cocky, comfortable as prince, so self-assured of my throne and the power it gave me that I forgot the most important rule of all. That power was given, and it could be taken away. That was my downfall.
Now I knew what I truly was. What we all were. What all of fae and humankind were.
We were nothing.
And yet, despite that, the gods somehow deigned to intervene.
I did not call on the sea god. The sea god called on me.
He could have demanded an eternity, and I would have taken it.
My pride might have been my own downfall, but if the gods had their way, it might just save us all. Not just faerie, not just the realm of Avarath, all of the realms combined.
But that all depended on whether or not the gods themselves were powerful enough to contend with fate. Because fate … fate had other ideas. Fate had ideas that made me shudder to think of. Fate had a plan so dark and devious that it had awakened the sleeping giants of old, these gods that rarely stooped to show form, and they were reaching out their hands of power into our world in a way they hadn’t since the beginning of time.
The realm of the gods was a place unlike any other. It wasn’t a realm in the sense of the others, of Avarath, of Alderia, of Elysia or the Afterworld—amongst the countless others that filled the spaces between time. I’d heard of the other kinds of realms before, but never had I seen any beyond the demon realm, a place so foreign from the physical realm of Avarath where I’d been born, where I’d ruled. Even that was nothing like the god’s realm.
They had no physical place. They were one with the realms themselves. The moment I stepped into the sea god’s power, let it consume me, the realm consumed me, too. I was no longer fae. I was something more. I was, in essence, a god.
A god with less power than a prince, because I was not my own.
I had a new power, a new magic, a glamour so potent and so pure that my fae body would never have been able to handle it. I was no longer the Prince of the Sea, I was the sea.
But still, I was not my own.
None of us were.
I was just the only one that knew it.
Delphine sat at the head of the table, her face stony, stoic in a way that shouldn’t have suited her, but somehow looked more natural than any other expression I’d memorized as they’d flitted across her face. From the moment I laid eyes on her, I’d become infatuated. I was a rake, a devil at times, and still, by the time she pulled me into her by that pool in Nyx’s court, I was more hers than I’d ever been anyone’s. I was all hers.
Now I was not even my own.
I’d changed too much in the single Avarath day that passed since I last saw her, in the mere hours that had already stretched on in my new realm as if it was an eternity. In just those few hours, nearly all of me had been consumed, replaced, transformed into something that barely resembled what I once was. Who I once was.
One thing, however, had not changed. I was not my own, no, but somehow, I was still hers. Delphine’s. I was more hers than I was master of myself, because the love I’d once felt for her was now so much greater. I’d felt a love for her as great as any fae could possess. It had consumed me, first, but I was no longer just me. I was the realm itself. I was the sea. I was the gods. And now she consumed all of that, too.
She was high king now, powerful in her own right, her title giving her access to the kind of power that most fae could only dream of.
If only she knew how powerful she truly was.
If only I could tell her.
But I was not my own.
I was not given orders by the sea god. The sea god was me. And I was him. I was myself, but I was not in control anymore. I felt my grasp on my physical shift from moment to moment. Just like the sea, just like the tides, I was guided by a current that ebbed and flowed, constantly shifting my own grip on reality.
I didn’t know the gods’ full intentions. Didn’t have a way to put it into words, even in my own mind. I just knewthe core, the essence of what was unfolding. And I knew as I moved to sit beside Delphine at the head of the table, that I was about to once again push against the tide of fate as I had when I stepped back into my throne room to face the brother that had so quickly betrayed me.
Delphine watched me, her eyes fixed on mine, looking for something inside of me as I took my place beside her. I knew she felt the wave of the power that possessed me, I saw it on all of their faces. On Armene’s. On Caldamir’s. Even on Seren’s. Only Nyx seemed either unaware or unbothered, or perhaps was still too self-absorbed to care about something so trivial as another’s power while his own flitted like fallen leaves between the muscle and sinew that shrouded his veins. I felt Delphine’s own power too, felt it intertwining with mine, bonded to me more than she knew. Bonded more to the realm, to the gods, to the glamour than she could know. I felt, too, the weight of responsibility that now weighed her down. She was high king. She was burdened with the fate—or however much of it she might believe she actually had control over—of her kingdom, of her world.
I’d always been drawn to her strength, to her determination, to how she fought for herself and for her brother from before we ever found her in the human realm, and then harder still once we brought her to Avarath. Her strength, her determination, but more than that, her willingness to forgive.
She didn’t have to forgive me for what I’d done, for what I’d tried to do. I’d planned to sacrifice her. To kill her.
And instead, I’d fallen for her.
But somehow, she’d found it in herself to fall for me, too.
For all of us.
I took a second to look at the rest of them.
Armene.
Caldamir.
Nyx.
We’d been brothers in all but blood, but now we were bonded more than ever. And now, with Seren, too.
We’d brought Delphine into faerie to save it. We thought she had to die to secure our future, to mend the broken world we’d been trying to piece together for too long. I knew the moment I saw that silver hair and the darkness of her eyes that she was the one to do it. I just never imagined it would be her life, not her death, that would do the mending.
I never imagined that the small, skinny, malnourished girl we’d dragged through the realms would one day sit at the head of all the other rulers of Avarath, ruling over us as high king.
“We’ve been given two deals, two offers,” she started now, the opening words of her first council already bearing more than their fair weight. “Two choices that will mold faerie and the human realms in the coming days.”
Days. Months. Years. Decades.
Even longer.
We all knew this; we also knew that it was just the next few days that mattered. The next few days would forever decide what course fate took.
I knew the path it took now, knew the way it flowed, where it dragged us to without our conscious consent. But I couldn’t tell Delphine that. I think she knew, though, from the way her gaze lingered on mine more often than the others. As she continued, as she laid out her options, her thoughts, her consideration for the deals that had been offered to her, her eyes rarely strayed far from my own.
“Deimos has given us a choice. We can defeat Mordrigal together, side by side, but then I have to remain in the human realm indefinitely.”
“Forever,” Caldamir growled across from her. His head was bowed slightly, a grimace on his face as he said, “You’d have to remain in the human realm forever. And that would doubtless be whether or not you defeated Mordrigal. Even together, there’s no guarantee you’d win.”
“Yes, still,” Delphine continued, “one of us high kings has to sit on that throne. If not me, if Mordrigal is defeated, then who? Surely not Deimos. Even if we somehow managed to counter his deal with another that didn’t force me to sit on that throne, I’d still have to—for the glamour’s sake. We’ve read the deal. Unless we want to lose the glamour entirely again, isn’t it kind of inevitable?”
“Sitting on that throne and having to remain in the human realm are two very different things,” Armene cut in, next. He glanced at me, then, before adding, “Regents can rule in your stead. You would have to take the throne, but you wouldn’t be bound to Alderia for all of your life. For a forever life, Delphine.”
“I know.”
For a fae who was so recently not only human but mortal, Delphine spoke with far too much certainty. She had no concept of what it was like to live a whole human lifetime, let alone hundreds of years or thousands. Tens of thousands. Seren here, amongst us, had lived the longest. He’d lived so many thousands of years in Elysia, so many thousands and thousands more in Avarath. The number he had lived in Alderia, in Luxia, were too many to count.
That was the forever Delphine contended with. It might not sound like a sentencing now, but in the hundreds and thousands of years that would come to pass, it would become like a prison to her—and that was all if Deimos didn’t find a way to word the deal that made it even worse. That made her lose herself.
As I had.
And I’d only lost five hundred years. Deimos was asking Delphine to bet far more.
If only that was the very least of our concerns, the very least of what we were worried Deimos might do.
“I think we’re focusing on the wrong thing here,” Seren said. “Deimos might very well trap Delphine or Mordrigal in the human realm so he can better start to pick off the rest of us one by one, but we’d be fools to think he’d stop there. Delphine wouldn’t have to face an eternity in the human realm, because Deimos is going to come for that realm—for this realm—too.”
“And now we know why,” Armene said next. He sat forward on the table, his hands tented together in a little triangle before him. His head was bowed slightly, his eyes trained on an unseen speck on the meticulously clean table. “The glamour of this court is nothing compared to the one in Avarath. But Icarus …”
I felt my lips purse in displeasure as something inside me stirred, a discomfort, as if even the god inside me felt that twisted nature of the dark fae’s power, too.
“Even so, that brings me to the reason I’m still truly considering Icarus’ offer in the first place,” Delphine said, drawing eyes back up to her at the head of the table. She remained unchanged, uninfluenced, stoic. Her role had already begun to take root. This was the role she was born for, and the longer she dug her nails into it, sunk her teeth into it, immersed herself in it, the more beautiful she was for it. “Like the dark fae said, Deimos has the power to call fae up from the Afterworld. We defeat Mordrigal, Deimos simply calls him back up.”
Armene’s face hardened in thought. “He wouldn’t be high king anymore.”
“But would be lose his powers?” Delphine asked.
Caldamir’s jaw set before he spoke. “The more important question,” he posed, “Is do we lose ours?”
All eyes turned to him for a moment at the table.
“The glamour flows through Mordrigal,” he said, “or do I need to remind you all what happened when he simply slept? When the deals he made could not be fulfilled?”
He, more than any at this table, should want Mordrigal defeated—but his question couldn’t be ignored.
I felt a stirring of something inside me, an answer to his question that I couldn’t give. I felt the desire to answer, to form the words, crawl and claw its way up the back of my throat, but couldn’t force them out. I could only wait. Only watch.
I’d done my part, so far, interfered as much as the god of the sea would let me. I was here, now, to make sure that his will—and the will of all those ancients—was fulfilled. I didn’t know if they would interfere again. I didn’t know if they would use me.
“The truth is,” Armene said, leaning forward to rest his elbows on the table, “we don’t know what happens if we kill a high king, especially not Mordrigal. We don’t know what happens to the glamour without him…because he was here from the moment the glamour chose him, from the moment the glamour flowed into faerie.”
“We lost one line for an age, and Avarath and the faerie realms have suffered for it,” I said, at last, able to speak. “But we’ve no idea what would happen if we lost another.”
“All we know is that faerie would be freer for it,” Caldamir said. “We can agree on that at least, can’t we?”
The other fae at the table hesitated to answer.
No one wanted to defy Caldamir. We all keenly felt his plight, but only he knew the true pain of it.
“Mordrigal’s power lies in his hold over my court,” Caldamir continued. “But it also lies in the fact that Avarath needs him. It can’t be rid of him without facing a different kind of destruction. Mordrigal might be powerless now, but he’ll be confident in knowing faerie won’t be keen to be rid of him. Not now, not after we’ve felt what it was to lose the glamour once. I doubt any fae will be so willing to lose it again—especially for good, not just the slow leaching that came with his slumber.”
“And even if he sits on the human throne, if one of us high kings does, that won’t solve the problem?” Delphine asked, though from the look on her face, she already knew the answer.
“There’s really no way to know,” Armene said. “Completing a deal like that might be enough to sustain Avarath for some time, even without Mordrigal on the throne, but it would run out, eventually.”
A heaviness settled over all of us.
“Let’s focus on what we know for sure,” Delphine said at last, leaning forward now, too, eyes shining. “We side with Deimos, and he helps us defeat Mordrigal. Maybe we don’t kill him, maybe we find a way to subdue him, to deny him access to his own powers while still allowing us to keep ours.”
“I sit on the human throne, I finish the deal, but I have to stay there. I have to stay in the human realm. Maybe I get stuck in the human realm after, maybe Deimos has plans to eventually come for me, but that all comes after Mordrigal is defeated. That end of the deal only has to be upheld if we subdue Mordrigal, together. Together.”
Her eyes dulled a little as she sat back.
“We deny Deimos, and he sides with Mordrigal. It’s one thing to face one high king, but to face two?”
Delphine’s skin grew slightly ashen at the thought. Unlike the rest of us, she’d not lived—and fought—through the last war. She hadn’t seen its horrors, hadn’t witnessed its bloodshed, nor how it had changed the face of Avarath forevermore. But that look on her face told me that the same power that now guided her into her role was guiding the weight with which she carried it. She might not have seen that war, but she felt the same fear at the thought of another. As we all did.
Even I, god-twisted as I was, felt that fear.
I wasn’t sure if it was my own, or the gods, or both.
“Mordrigal isn’t going to fall for Deimos’ deal,” Caldamir cut in. “We’re fools to even consider it. Mordrigal would never dream of trading this realm for the human one. He didn’t make a deal with the old human king so he could give up Avarath in favor of Alderia.Mordrigal wants all the realms, as he always has. He certainly wouldn’t give up a faerie realm he already possesses in favor of a human one he already has a right to.”
All at once, I heard the collective breaths drawn by all seated at the table as each one of us prepared to answer, and I knew right away that the night was nowhere near drawing to a close. We were no closer to making a decision. This was just the beginning.
This was why we’d come here looking for just a little more time—because we needed every second of it.
And yet, here we were, unable to keep from wasting it. It was inevitable.
Caldamir had a point. So did Armene. So did Seren and Nyx and Delphine. So, even, did I. The problem that faced us was too much, too complicated, too much rode on this decision Delphine had to make for it to be made without this inevitable wasting of time.
Except, something changed.
Something took the inevitable and made it irrelevant.
No, not something. Someone.