27. Delphine
I never intendedto show the humans who had wronged me the kind of mercy that I did that day. I never intended to forgive my brother or Lord Otto, let alone to give them positions of power beneath me.
But there were few I could trust in the human realm.
Lord Otto, I knew, would show me loyalty for what I offered him. He would serve as an example for the kind of mercy I was willing to show. He served as contrast to the power that gripped the rest of the lords like a fist of steel.
My brother, step-brother, on the other hand, served another purpose.
He alone had defied me; he alone had stood up to me.
When I had Draigh come before me, made him swear his fealty to me, it was not done out of kindness. It was the final knife in his back, the final blow to his armor.
I made sure that he knew what I would do to him if he betrayed me, made sure that when I looked him in the eyes and called him my brother, that he would never be a brother to me. But he was stubborn, and I needed that. And more than that, I needed the only person who had been willing to stand against my power to fall at my feet.
Which he did—if only to take the position of power he’d always dreamt of. He would be the head of my guard. He would be my right-hand man amongst the humans, human himself. He would think he had power, though he’d really have none—it would be enough to keep him in line. He, too, had ambitions and desires. He too, like all the humans I saw gathered around the dinner table with me that night, was simply looking out for how to best position himself in this new world.
Armene and Seren were more than agitated when we found ourselves alone again, after. I knew that both of them thought I’d been too soft on the lords, on Draigh, even on the old companions I’d never so much as mentioned to them. They itched to tell me their thoughts, but to their credit, neither of them whispered in my ear, attempting to control my court as their own.
They fell, instead, into bickering amongst themselves.
Seren had found a map of pools around the castle, and had been trying to use them to meet Tarrack, still. And still, after all, he found nothing but that same clouded mist that I had the day I tried to look into the crystal.
Armene, meanwhile, hadn’t heard from a single one of his spies. He was starting to worry that his own whispering sands were not making it through, that even the smallest grain-sized cracks between the realms had been sealed up.
I, in turn, was not thinking about Lord Otto or Draigh or pools or portals or whispers or sands.
I was thinking only of Sol.
And, more importantly, of the news I’d just received of him.
I’d been given no time to relish my victory over the throne, over the truth-bringers and lords. I’d not even had the chance to ask my true companions, Seren and Armene, if they thought I’d done the right thing, making Draigh head of my guard, or rewarding the lord that had first betrayed me for doing just that.
I had no time to wonder if I’d set the tone of my reign right, if fear and mercy and respect were in balance, or even truly all in play, because I’d received word, at last.
Not from Avarath or Elysia, as Seren and Armene were so determined.
But from here. From Luxia. From Icarus.
And it was not the news I expected.
I’d counted too heavily on the companionship that Icarus and I had formed those months together, counted that all that time surviving together had solidified that sort of bond between us that only surviving like that could. But I’d forgotten that Icarus was not a friend. Not a companion. He was as cruel, vicious, and power hungry as the high kings I worked to defeat.
He had my brother, and he was going to use him.
Icarus did not offer me a deal this time. He offered me an ultimatum…not out of hatred, but because somehow, somehow after everything, Nyx had somehow found a way to betray me again.
Nyx had freed Mordrigal’s heir, stolen her from him, and in return, now, Icarus demanded I end Mordrigal, or he’d end Sol.
A life for a life.
A soul for a soul.
No magic deals or twisted words. No catches. Just a choice to make.
It was the same one I’d been forced to make from the very beginning, the same one I’d found myself making countless times, over and over, overriding everything and everyone else.
It was my life, or Sol’s.
Again.
Icarus didn’t know this, or perhaps he did. Perhaps only I knew this, and perhaps it was only because of what the god had spoken to me in The Endless, that thing that had been on my mind ever since, the truth I so desperately wanted to avoid but knew I’d never be able to.
This was always the price to be paid.
But how to pay it, I didn’t know.
Seren and Armene began to pace through the study, not the one behind the throne that we’d grown accustomed to during our last stay, but yet another old king’s quarters. These were far less sterile than the last, and somehow, that was worse. The old king seemed still to haunt the halls we now walked.
I, meanwhile, sat staring at the wall ahead of me, unseeing.
All of this had always been for Sol. When I’d been made high king, I found a new duty to my people, a blood-bound duty to protect them, to take care of them, not just to act as their Judge when my powers were required to send a wayward fae to the Afterworld. I was sure my duties stretched far beyond what even I could comprehend, had I had time to learn them. The same with my powers. Ever since I’d become high king, it had been easier for me to access the other lines’ powers. Reaching for the crystal had been too easy, that strand of glamour untrained but still ready to react to my touch.
There was a whole eternity stretching before me, if I took on my role the proper way.
But I didn’t have eternity.
I had, in fact, no time at all—not if I wanted to save my brother.
Icarus’ words had been straight and to the point.
End Mordrigal or I end Sol. I’ve recovered in the months since you left. I may not be a blood king of faerie, but do not underestimate me.
Seren didn’t need to open his portals to speak to Tarrack to discover just how long we’d spent passing between the realms. He and Armene might not have seen The Endless as I did, but even as I remembered the stretch and press of that place, Icarus’ words rang true. I believed he’d had time to recover, plenty of it. More than enough to not only know that I’d failed in my attempt to control Mordrigal, but to know that Mordrigal sought the now missing heir—one that had at least been under Icarus’ protection before Nyx freed her from that, too. I felt as if I’d spent months recovering myself, my glamour so itching to be freed from the confines of my body, to be used and tested, that there was no doubt in me that I had.
Time worked strangely between the realms, there was no question about that.
There was no question about what I must do.
Only how.
How would I end Mordrigal, when sending him down to Deimos would only strengthen the other king and allow him to either trap Mordrigal, or send him back up to Avarath to face me again? In order for me to end Mordrigal, I had to end Deimos, too.
Mordrigal would have had time, much less than Icarus, to recover by now, to build up his army within the Mountain Court and strengthen any allegiances with the other courts, too. If Nereus had spoken true, and whatever bastard princes and regents sat on the other thrones had truly decided to side with the high king of Avarath, then he would have become a far more formidable opponent than the one I’d already faced, once. And the goal then, there in the Sand Court, had not been to end him. Not to kill him. Just to defeat him, to force him into a place where he would make a deal that would protect faerie from himself.
We needed a high king of Avarath for the glamour to flow into the realms, but we had an heir. Wherever this heir was, she would take on his power once he was gone. We would not lose the glamour as long as she lived. I knew not whether Deimos had an heir, but the realms had survived for millennia without a Judge, perhaps they could survive without a master of the Afterworld, too.
A plan began to form in my mind, one that left me emptier by the second. Seren and Armene were arguing, but their words made little sense to my ears, anymore.
The god had told me it would come down to this. The god had told me there was a price to be paid, and whether or not I did it in pursuit of what fate wanted, it had to be paid.
That price, I knew from the beginning, was sacrifice. My own.
The only way out of this, the only way forward, was to embrace that.
I’d always been prepared to sacrifice myself for my brother. I’d avoided it thus far, but the time, it seemed, had come at last.
There was only one way I could think to end Mordrigal, to end this war once and for all, but it required me going to the one place from which, once my work was finished, I’d never be able to return.
If only I could get to Avarath, first.
Something in my gut told me not to trust the portals, not the ones that Seren had made, not the ones that I might be able to conjure myself. I didn’t know the inner dynamics of fate and the gods that seemed to be working against it, but I did know that the god that had spoken to me had not told me to make a portal to go back to Avarath. She’d told me to seek her, when the time came.
But how?
How did I seek one of the old gods when I didn’t so much as know her name?
Seren and Armene’s words faded in and out of my mind. I knew what they were arguing about, what they worried about. They hadn’t seen Icarus’ letter, didn’t know even that I had written to him, but they were worried about the same things as me. They thought only of their own courts, their own kingdoms, of faerie and the realms and how to keep them safe from the clutches of the high kings that would not only control them, but hold all those beneath them in a vice-like grip.
More than that, though, I heard the loss in their voices.
The betrayal.
They’d lost their own courts, their own kin, the fae they’d trusted in the moments that faerie turned on us. Seren had started to suspect that Elysia had turned, and that was why his portals didn’t work, why Tarrack didn’t answer any of our calls. He didn’t say it outright, but I saw it on his face, I heard it in his voice, I felt it in the way his hold of the glamour had begun to slip. He was losing faith in himself, losing faith, even, I worried, in me.
There was a sound in both of their voices that I’d never heard before. Not fear. They didn’t fear Mordrigal, nor Deimos, nor the death that those kings could bring. They feared, instead, that they had bet on the wrong side of fate.
I didn’t have it in my heart to tell them that they were right.
One after the other, their voices dulled.
A strange silence settled over me. I felt the world fade, felt the edges of the room blur, and with it so did everything else. Everything but them.
What was left of them.
Seren. Armene.
Two of the five. Since when had we dwindled down to so few?
From the very beginning, this was broken. What we had was broken. We were fated to be together, but fate was cruel.
Fate had brought us together with the sole intention of breaking us apart.
I’d already lost three of them.
Now, I was about to lose the rest...
As I stared ahead, my face fixated on the far wall, I began to hear it again. It started out the same way as it had in The Endless, a quiet noise like the gurgle of a distant brook. It was soft, melodic, rhythmic in its flow. This time, however, it didn’t swell into a voice that told me what step to take next. It simply grew, that gurgling, trickling sound, until it was not just a distant undefined noise. It took me a long moment before I truly heard it, and a moment more to see where it came from.
At the far end of the hall, a fountain set into the wall spouted forth a small trickle of water. It was a roughly hewn piece of work, fine for the humans, nothing compared to the masterwork of the fae that had ruined the work of all human hands for me. It depicted a maiden with a soft, contemplative face. Something about her seemed otherworldly, not just because her features were roughly hewn, made by fumbling human hands, but it was something in her expression. It was timeless, endless.
It was a quiet trickle, but as I listened, as I focused in on the sound and let everything else fade, it grew deafening.
I knew the sound.
But more than that, I knew the face of the maiden, knew that look on her face though I’d never seen it before.
There was a crack in the fountain, a trickle of water that ran down the side of the basin at the bottom, a darkened rivulet that marred the grey stone in a line that ran down the wall and along the floor, leading away from the old king’s all-too-recently abandoned rooms.
When the time comes, seek me, and you will find your way past fate yet again.
Fate had determined that I die on that altar in Avarath two weeks after I arrived. Fate had determined that I die so many times in between. It had chosen my brother when I failed to follow its call, choosing instead to work through a fae who seemed so determined to listen when it whispered. I couldn’t fault Nyx for that, not even now that I was boxed in yet again by one of his decisions. They were well intentioned, always, but also just as always, the intention wasn’t the same as mine.
I was never supposed to fall for the fae princes, for Caldamir, for Tethys, for Armene, and Nyx. I was certainly never supposed to fall for the once king whose crown I stole. Seren was never meant to be mine. None of them were.
I was always destined to lose them, because I was never meant to have them.
I’d felt it for a long time now.
I’d fought it for a long time now.
But there was no fighting this. I was going to die one way or the other. I was going to lose them one way or another. I’d already made them lose enough for me. Too much.
One I’d made lose five hundred years. One his own mind. One his court. One his realm. One his life.
Too much, they’d sacrificed for me so I didn’t have to sacrifice myself, and yet here I was. In the end, right back at the beginning.
I was always going to have to sacrifice myself for Avarath’s fate.
I couldn’t run from it any longer, couldn’t make the fae I loved lose every last bit of what they were to protect me—because they would. They wouldn’t stop until they’d all lost their lives, all lost their courts, all lost their minds, their very will to live. They wouldn’t stop until Avarath and Alderia and Elysia and every other realm was rent in twain, just to keep me from facing the fate I never would be able to avoid.
I loved them too much to let that happen.
I didn’t feel the moment I stood, didn’t feel the moment my legs somehow found the strength to lift me from where I sat to follow that trickle of water. I didn’t feel the moment my feet lifted, my footsteps carrying me softly to the door at the side of the room. I didn’t see it. Didn’t feel it. Didn’t see anything but them, the image of the two of them I left behind, standing before me, equally unseeing as I left them. Unseeing the way my heart shattered, the way the cracks that had been forming from the moment I saw the five of them together, finally deepened, crumbled, and broke.
I felt, instead, only the thing that drew me closer to the heartbreak, the thing that drew me closer to fate—and even closer to defying it. The thing that drew me towards what I’d always known I had to face.
I didn’t know there was a dark pool in the human palace. I didn’t know if there ever had been before. But I knew it when I saw it.
The trickle of water led me down a path so dark and narrow, I wasn’t entirely sure I didn’t walk through the walls themselves to find it.
I knew, as I approached, the familiar feeling. I’d felt it as a human even, back when I first found one of the gifts my own kind had left behind in Avarath. The Pool of Indecision had been more than a pool, more than a portal, it was something ancient and full of a different kind of magic, just like the one I found now.
I recognized the kind of darkness that pooled in it like tar, broken only by the distant sparkle of starlight. I was deep below the human castle, though I had no idea how I’d found my way here. I had no idea if Seren and Armene had noticed I was gone yet, or worse, if they had followed.
I needed to do this on my own. I needed to protect them the only way that I could, by protecting them from myself. Tears had blurred my vision, but they didn’t stop me from looking into the pool and seeing not my own reflection, but theirs. Not just the two of them, anymore. Not just Seren and Armene, the last of them left by my side.
I saw all of them.
I saw Caldamir, his head tilted up to the night sky as he all but professed his love for me despite himself. I saw the way his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat, the silver moonlight illuminating him like something otherworldly in the moment before he tried to kiss me the first time.
I saw Tethys, his face swimming into view between blurry tears and the gasping breaths of lungs brought back from the brink of drowning. I saw his golden eyes in the dark, felt the firm grip of his hands as they dug into my shoulders, into my arm, into the tender skin of my thighs, the smile on his face hiding the fact that even then, even so shortly after we met, he feared losing me.
Me.
Not a sacrifice. Not a shadow of a fae meant to save his realm. Me. It was me he already feared losing.
I saw Nyx knelt before me, saw his face as bliss settled over his sorrow as I smiled down at him as he’d begged. I saw the golden honey glittering in his palm, the long waves of the red hair that framed a face so beautiful, even in memory, it stole my breath away.
I saw Armene, his hand cradling me as I slipped close to the brink of death, nothing but tenderness from the Prince of Sands even when he was supposed to be my enemy.
And Seren.
Seren.
I saw Seren holding out his hand to me as he had that day, deep beneath the mountain court when the realms collided so he could rescue me. And I reached for him again.
And then I fell, and I saw nothing at all.
All that was left was the feeling.
In my blindness, there was no escaping it.
A pain like nothing else consumed me. It dug its claws into me and buried inside. This pain didn’t do the decency of cutting me open, of letting me bleed out, it forced its way inside and curled up between my very bones, it flooded my veins, ensnared that cruel, wicked organ that still insisted to beat.
I needed no tether. I needed nothing to guide me but the same thread of fate that had guided me all this time. As soon as I found that cruel, barbed thread, I took hold of it and traveled in the opposite direction. I fought it, swam through The Endless as it dug into me, wrapped around me, and tried to drag me, bleeding, away.
But I fought back. I focused on Seren’s hand in mine, and then Armene, Nyx, Tethys, and Caldamir’s. Together, hand in hand we broke free, tumbling headfirst towards the one thing that would finally separate us all.
They were not the ones to let go. They were not the ones to stumble forth alone, broken, and simmering with the defiance of fate on the other side.
I was.