23. Delphine
I was still reelingfrom the god’s words, words that echoed over and over in my ears, when I lifted my pale face to meet the eyes of the man who sat on the Alderian throne.
Every muscle, every fiber of my being, sparked with new life.
It was as if, in the instant that the god pulled me from The Endless, I’d not just stepped between the realms, but I’d been remade between them. And I was not alone.
Seren and Armene stepped through by my side, their faces as shocked as my own, their brows beaded with sweat and their foreheads creased with confusion as they followed the line of my own gaze up to look at Lord Gayge and the army of truth-bringers surrounding him on all sides.
“We’ve been waiting for this day,” Lord Gayge said, chin jutted forward, jaw set. “We’re ready for you.”
I looked around at the surrounding guard, the familiar crest of an encircled flame glinting on their armor.
I was not prepared for this. I couldn’t do this. Not now. Not after that last battle drained me.
So, with one last look around the room, I called on the demon to save me again.
I called on Waylan, and I waited.
Only this time, Waylan didn’t answer.
I waited, the whole court looking on in silence, their weapons gleaming as bright as the armor that clad them—untouched and unused for thousands of years, since Mordrigal first made the deal to protect them. I waited, but was met with only that.
Silence.
The seconds dragged on, and with it, fear should have grown within me. I’d just been defeated by one army, and here I was, already facing another.
But even when Waylan didn’t answer, even when I looked around at the soldiers surrounding me, I felt no fear at the sight of them, however, only pity.
Compared to the armies of Mordrigal and Deimos, this human guard was nothing. Over a thousand years, many more thousand than the myths remembered, really, to prepare, and this was what they had summoned. I knew what it was to be human, but more importantly now, I knew what it was to be fae.
I didn’t need Waylan anymore.
Even if every human in this realm had gathered in plated armor, armed not just with blades but weapons made from the fiends that even the fae feared, it would not have taken a fae army to face them. There was a reason that old king had been so eager to make a deal with the fae, and I doubted it had anything to do with the peace that Alderia had enjoyed because of it.
It was because the last time a high king of faerie walked these halls, they saw what he was capable of. Mordrigal had chosen to make a deal because that was what the fae did, because he wanted to take Avarath first, before the faerie realms realized how far his ambitions reached. Mordrigal could have taken the human realm then, if he’d wanted to. He could have taken it then just as I was about to—without a war, without a battle, without so much as a fight.
There were many things uncertain about my path forward, but this was not.
A high king was meant to sit on this throne, and a high king would. It was meant to be Mordrigal, fated to be Mordrigal, but perhaps if I could make it me, instead, then I’d have faith that I could fight against the rest of what fate had in store for me, too.
I didn’t like what the god had spoken over me. I didn’t like the price she told me fate wanted me to pay.
I didn’t yet know what it meant for me in the end, but I knew what I needed to do next.
I had Seren and Armene at my side, but I didn’t need them. I only needed the power within me, power that had been restored with the rest of me, that great glamour once again within my grasp more powerful than ever.
I’d lost Avarath for now, but there was one thing still I could take before the other high kings could make their advances. One thing I could protect, still.
I didn’t waste words with the lord sitting on the throne. Perhaps, if the king himself sat there, I’d do him the honor. But the man that sat before me now, his face smug as he sat amidst the useless warriors that gave him such false confidence, didn’t deserve that. I couldn’t fault him for standing up to the fae, in fact, I gave him credit for his bravery—however disillusioned it was. He too stood for a noble, albeit futile, cause.
I was just about to show him how futile it truly was.
Armene started to draw his sword, but I held out a hand to stop him.
“No,” I said, eyes fixated on the man still seated before us, “this battle is mine, and mine alone.”
Both he and Seren shot me a look, their own glamour drained, still. But still, they did nothing to defy me.
There was nothing like the rush of reaching for my shadows and feeling them respond to my call. I relished in the feeling of the shadows curling through me, twisting through my veins, mingling with my blood until it sparked within me.
Direction was not the only thing the god had gifted me with.
Words were not all she carried to me.
My glamour was back. All of it. And it was ready to answer to me.
I had no intention of sending Lord Gayge or any of his guard anywhere, but they didn’t need to know that. They didn’t have to experience the full destruction of my power, they only had to feel it.
They were only human, after all.
This time, when I made a show of my powers, it wasn’t to make them look less impressive. When I called forth my shadows, I knew exactly what I wanted the humans to see. What I wanted them to feel.
Darkness exploded from me with such force, it felt for a moment that my soul went with it. It poured out in an overwhelming blackness, filling every inch of the courtroom, wrapping around every pillar, every armored body, pressing into every void of space until it smothered even me. I pushed further until the shadows spilled into noses, mouths, between the plates of armor so that my shadows crawled across bare skin.
I felt their fear, felt it overwhelm them and drown them even as I stole the very breath from their lungs.
All they knew of the fae were stories. I knew better than any of them that experiencing their power was another thing entirely—and what I gave them was what I too feared the most. I could not send them all to The Endless from whence I’d come, but I brought it here. I brought it to them. I made them forget themselves, forget what it was to feel anything but the smothering darkness, wrapped them in the very essence of loss, of ending, until they were trapped in a living death.
The shadows poured from me endlessly until there was nowhere left to go. And then I poured forth more. They broke down the doors out of the throne room, spilling out into the palace halls. They shattered the windows, escaping in great black billowing tendrils that filled the sky like smoke from an inferno. Even through the suffocating blackness, the screams of the townspeople rang out in the distance as they spotted the infernal sight.
I pressed and squeezed until I felt the choking blackness begin to leach the life from the humans present, felt them reach the very brink of death, felt the glamour meant to send fae from the realm of the living tingle with its purpose, and only then did I pull back. I drew the shadows back into myself, sucked them back into my veins until I rattled with the power that had been returned to me, until I felt my blood surge with too much power once again.
The look on Lord Gayge’s face had changed when I saw him again, no longer sprawled smugly across the throne that was not his, but fallen to his knees, coughing and spluttering with the rest of the guard that was so-called ready to face us. To my side, even Seren and Armene looked on at me with a sort of awe I’d never witnessed from them, even in the height of our own battle with Mordrigal and Deimos. I’d spared them the worst of the smothering blackness, as best as I could, but the looks on their faces told me they’d felt its power all the same.
The hall echoed with the jarring noise of hundreds of men so barely pulled back from the brink of death. I should have felt bad, should have felt guilt for doing this to my own kind. I was born human, after all, even if I was fae now, and had been human not so very long ago. But something about the glint of the crest on their armor, the reminder of the truth-bringers that had tormented me all of my life for merely looking like the memory of the fae, made only pride swell in my chest as Lord Gayge finally lifted his head to meet my gaze again.
His own pride, his own determination, had died in the blackness. Spittle dripped from his lips, his skin flushed and pale, eyes wide with horror as he looked from me to the two fae at my side, knowing I alone had brought his army to their knees in an instant, and yet I was only one of us. He didn’t know that Seren and Armene were nearly as powerless as he was now, but that didn’t matter. All he saw was what I’d witnessed for myself—the reason the deal was made with the fae in the first place, and the reason fighting with them was so truly futile.
From the doorways, shouting broke out and the sound of feet thundering filled the hall. More guards and courtiers stumbled into the arches, only for their footsteps to grind to a halt at the sight of me, Seren, and Armene standing in the middle of the hall. The guard was still struggling to get to their feet, their swords left forgotten on the stone floors as they tried to remember how to breathe, instead.
On the raised platform where the throne now sat, abandoned, Lord Gayge finally managed to half rise up to his knees. His chest heaved with exertion, his brow beaded with sweat and furrowed in fear.
“What do you want with us?” he croaked at last, with that first breath that allowed him to speak.
“Nothing other than what we’re owed,” I said, head held high.
I wore no fine gown, had bathed in no fine perfumes or incense to prepare for a coronation. But still, I felt regal as I stepped forward, the guards before me scattering to clear a path as I approached the throne.
Seren and Armene remained where they stood as I strode up to Lord Gayge. For all his talk, for all his aggression, for all the pompous power he’d used to usurp the old advisor’s place beside the throne and then wheedle his way onto it, he now cowered before me as little more than the snake he truly was. He’d used fear to build false hope, but even for that, even as I stood above him looking down at him with disgust, I couldn’t truly blame him.
The fae were formidable.
They were dangerous.
And if it were the high king that had made the deal with the throne that stood before him now, he’d have every reason to fear the future I had in store. He had every reason to fear me now, and something about seeing it in his eyes pleased me.
I was no longer the poor, weak human girl that his kind had tormented.
I had left the human realm as that girl, but I’d come back as so much more.
Not just a fae. Not just with strength. Not just as a king.
I’d come back as a high king, one of three fae in all the realms with the right to sit on the throne behind him.
Still, I said nothing to the scrabbling human before me. I strode ahead, making him crawl out of my way as I approached that throne, turned, and sat upon the cushioned seat. I looked out at the guard, at the gathered courtiers in the doorways, at Seren and Armene as they looked back up at me, and I made my fist command as its new ruler.
“Bring me the man you used to call king.”