31. Delphine
I’d known darkness before,but it was nothing like the one I faced now.
It was not the kind of darkness that blinded, for I could see the realm that spread before me. It was the kind of darkness that seeped inside, that corrupted, the kind of darkness that poisoned a soul the very moment it brushed its bony fingers across its surface.
The moment I felt my body and soul flicker between the realms, I knew there was no coming back from this place.
Not when it wasn’t just Mordrigal’s glamour that we’d left behind.
I’d used the last dredges of my own to drag us down, but now that we were here, that glamour was gone. Whatever barrier lay between these realms, the flow of the glamour could not cross it.
Silence reigned in the Afterworld.
It was a deep kind of silence. Like the darkness, there was something wrong with the silence, with the emptiness, kind of like the strained pause that stretches when a breath is held too long. The Afterworld was never meant to be emptied, was never meant to become the void that we now faced.
Mordrigal broke that silence with a roar, one that shamed all the rest he’d caused to echo in my ears. It was a heart-wrenching sound, the kind of sound that threatened to wring tears from my eyes, even when I had no reason to let my heart feel anything for the high king. But I felt it too, that strangling squeeze and equally suffocating emptiness. Deimos was with us, but we were alone in his realm in a way no three high kings of faerie ever had been. The fabric of what made us fae, of what separated us from the humans and other creatures of our realms, had abandoned us, had been abandoned by us, by me.
The throne room of the Afterworld was exactly what I expected it to be, but even in that, something about it seemed—like everything else in this realm—not quite right. It was as if I was looking at the skeleton of what had once been, the mere bones of the Afterworld.
We stood atop a mountain that overlooked a shadowy landscape both eerily familiar and hauntingly strange at the same time. I recognized the shape of the horizon, of the plains that stretched off towards something like a dark sea in the distance, but it was like a picture book made of lines that had not been colored in between. Even the shadows that made up the shapes seemed empty, drawn thin, as if they were fading, too.
The Afterworld was not the mirror image of Avarath so much as it was a portrait of it—and a poor one at that. It was a replica without any of the life. Any of the glamour. Anything that made faerie truly…faerie.
Deimos’ court here was in the center of the mountain, but instead of being carved into its heart, the heart of it had been carved out—completely removed aside from towering columns that arched into a half-open ceiling overhead. Even the air itself tasted empty, as if there was nothing left in this world, not even the dust and ash that made it up. The throne room stretched out to the edge of the mountain and overlooked all the plains of this outline of Avarath. As far out as I could see, the empty plains stretched, only a hint of wind to stir that emptiness.
And in its center, at the very heart of that emptiness, was Deimos.
The silence persisted, broken only by the shuffling of our feet against the cold stone floor. I watched Deimos as he slowly walked the perimeter of his hollowed-out throne room, running his fingers along the columns that supported what remained of the ceiling. His face was expressionless, but even without the telltale crease in his brow or downturn of his lips, I could sense his unease. This was not the Afterworld as he knew it, either.
Mordrigal’s roar had quieted to a low rumble in his chest, but he continued to prowl the open space like a caged beast. Our powers were gone in this place, but that did not make the fallen high king any less dangerous. I kept my distance as I took in our surroundings. The sky overhead was a swirl of blacks and grays, starless and sunless. All I could see in every direction were the barren plains, broken only by shadowy ridges that may have been mountains. There was no life here, little sound and even less movement. Just an endless, different sort of void.
“So, you’ve gotten what you wanted in the end,” Deimos’ voice was low, but it broke the heavy silence sharply. He had paused in his circuit, one hand resting on a column, his thumb running over the surface too smooth, not even a speck of dust to stain his finger when he pulled it away.
He looked up, not at Mordrigal and his seething form, but at me.
“Are you proud of yourself, Delphine?” he asked. “Proud to look on what you’ve accomplished?”
He held out his arms, spread wide, motioning to the landscape that could hardly be called more than a sketch of reality behind him.
“This place, this final realm of faerie, it used to be magnificent. It used to be a dreamland of sorts, a place where all the final fragments of glamour came together with the fae that dragged it down with them. Now that the fae are gone, stolen from this place by trickery of the most deviant kind, this place has become less than a shadow of what it was made to be.”
His hand tightened into a fist.
“Never since the inception of time has the Afterworld been empty. This place is dying, fading away without the glamour, turning into less than nothing.”
I couldn’t argue with him, not when I saw the evidence of it before me.
Even Mordrigal seemed to quiet as we looked out together beyond the pillars and arches, beyond the crags of the nearest mountain peaks and the first valleys that dipped down in between. There was too much parallel between the beginning of my time in faerie and what was so surely now the end. I felt myself drawn towards the edge of the room, towards the place where the arches reached the edge of that paper sky.
Down below, as faded as this version of the realm had become, I saw still the places that had forged a new life within me these past months.
I saw, in the distance, the smudged form of trees that mirrored those of Nyx’s Woodland Court. I remembered in them, my first moments in faerie, the memories of Caldamir tying me to my horse so I wouldn’t fall and perish at the jolt of glamour—however faded it was then, in Avarath—through the brush of my skin. I remembered the crystal-clear Pool of Indecision, the place where Seren had reached me and offered me an escape from the fate the princes had fetched me to face. I remembered so much more, so many memories came flooding in as I looked out at this soured version of the world above.
Saving Nyx from Betula, the dryad.
Fighting fiends with Armene, trapped and alone in a cave deep within the canyon wastelands of the plains.
Tallulah’s betrayal of her own prince, her sword the one that saved me long enough for Seren to reach out his hand between the realms.
I saw the sea god rising from the shore before Tethys’ court. Saw his salt-stained hallways, felt, even, the way the brine collected on the wooden posts of the Sea Prince’s bed.
I saw the dunes of Armene’s court shifting in the distance, saw his head bent low as his hand took the life of the brother that had defied him.
I felt my eyes compelled to lift until my head tilted back. Far up above, in the empty sky, I remembered a silver moon that had once illuminated Caldamir as he stood before me, declaring for the first time the first inkling that he would one day defy fate alongside me.
Deimos was right. This was my doing. This undoing, this end of a realm, this all unfurled before us because of that one thing.
Fate. I had defied it—but it was not yet done defying me.
I was always destined for this. For the end.
The end of me, at least.
And if I was going to have to meet my end, then I was going to make sure that the fae I loved were protected in my wake. Sol would be safe. Seren, Caldamir, Armene, Tethys, and Nyx—they’d be safe, clear to win back the thrones they’d lost for my sake.
I’d taken Mordrigal from Avarath, and I would make sure he never found his way back. I would make sure that the cruel, corrupt king of the Afterworld didn’t step in to take his place, either.
I couldn’t stop cruelty and corruption, but I could stop them.
There was more than one reason the gods had taken us to Icarus, the strange dark fae with the even stranger glamour. There was more than one magic I practiced deep in the dark realm those months we spent together.
I didn’t need the glamour I’d left behind when I was made up of glamour myself.
“You’re right, Deimos,” I said. “This is all my doing. And now I will be its undoing.”
I took one last look at this strange mirror of the place I’d once feared but had come to love, and stretched out my hand.
Pain, blinding and great, erupted throughout every vein in my body as I dragged out the very essence of what made me fae. Even as my body rejected the pain, even as my mind screamed for me to stop as that pain only deepened, I drew it out, anyway. I felt it leaching the life from me, felt it tearing me apart from the inside, and still I drew on it.
Shadows sprung from the tips of my fingers, darker than any I’d called before. They wrapped themselves around Deimos and Mordrigal’s surprised forms, their faces frozen in shock as their bodies were entwined in ropes of black smoke. The glamour found them, wrapped then, encased them in its power—the last dredges of power that formed me—and then tightened.
I saw the looks on their faces shift as they felt it, felt its strangeness, felt that foreign and yet familiar sensation of my power as it found them.
But it did not find them to send them anywhere. There was nowhere left to go. We were at the end of things, the other high kings and I. So, with nowhere else to go, the power that was tearing me apart to pull from my body, pulled them apart too.
There was no glamour left here to resist me.
I felt my shadows dig their tendrils into them like hooks, snake between the fabric that made them up, and slip inside. It writhed across and inside them, shredding the two high kings into bits so small that there was no blood, no viscera, no screams of pain—just two moments, one where they existed, and the next where they were nothing but blackened dust scattering across the emptied courtyard.
If their souls remained, there was nothing left in me to feel it.
I was shattered too.
I looked down at my hands, blackened and shriveled as Icarus’ once were when we met.
There was only one thing left to do.
There was no glamour here to heal me. No time to pass to regain my strength. No high king to send me back. I had two choices left—to stay in eternal pain, or to give fate what it had always wanted in the end.
Fate had always had one thing in mind for me.
I knew not the span of forever, but I knew I didn’t want to find out. Not like this. Not when every breath was a dagger, a symphony of knives plunging into every one of my cooling veins.
All around me, far in the distance, the realm faded further. It felt Mordrigal and Deimos’ destruction, felt the last of their glamour—that bit that had existed simply because they had, too, disappearing. The last bit of color faded. The edge of the sky and land blurred. It was as if a great brush painted back and forth across it, smudging the last of the realm slowly from existence.
It wasn’t just because the other high kings were gone, it was because I was fading, too.
I might have had enough strength left in me to carry on, but I’d been wrong about one thing.
I was not alone in the Afterworld.
A soft whimper broke that silence, freezing me to the spot. The broken sound drew my gaze to a figure hiding in the shadow of a broken column, his hunched body only daring to crawl out far enough to meet my gaze.
Lord Gayge.
I’d forgotten about him, but the look on his face made sure I wouldn’t forget him again.
The man I’d sent here was no longer human. He was barely a creature. His skin was sallow, pale, and thin as paper made of rice. His eyes had a sunken look challenged only by the skin pulled so tight around his cheeks that I could see the very shape of his skull beneath it. He opened his mouth in a plea, but nothing more than the parched whistle of lungs that couldn’t breathe the faerie air issued forth.
I’d sent him here as a mercy—not to him, but to myself. I hadn’t wanted to kill him, but instead, I’d sent him to a fate worse than death.
And in turn, had sealed my own.
Because I knew, as I looked down at the pathetic remnants of a man once bold enough to stand against me, against the fae, and I couldn’t help but feel pity.
This man had witnessed the destruction I wrought, seen the unmaking of the world, the downfall of the faerie kings. Now my shadowed gaze lingered on him, the last living being in this fading realm. Something about my gaze made his eyes widen with terror, sent him scrambling back on elbows so thin I could practically hear the splintering of his bones as he tried to escape me, only for him to find there was nowhere left to go. His mouth opened and closed, working in silence, nothing more than that sickening wheeze of his lungs begging for mercy.
Slowly, agonizingly, I forced my feet to move until I stood before him. Each step was torment, my body barely held together by the magic that made me up.
I couldn’t leave him here. Not like that.
So, in a final act of mercy he didn’t deserve, I gave him an end fitting for the station he’d so desired. I gave him an ending fit for a king.
In the moments that followed, every inch of me screamed for the end, screamed in my own silent pain. I was on the brink of falling apart, of turning into that same dust and ash as the other kings. All I had to do was push myself over the edge.
That was exactly what I planned to do.
This time, for myself.
There was nothing left for me. Not here. Not anywhere. This was what was always meant for me.
There was no more running from it. No more fighting it.
There was only giving in.
So, I dug in again, scraped that very last remnant of glamour that formed me. I took hold of it, tightened my grip on it, and prepared to let it wrap around me and inside of me, as well. This was it, the moment the gods and fate had destined for me. The end. The sacrifice. This time, I would be the one to make it, willingly.
But before I could do it, before that last spark could be extinguished, I heard it.
A deep, distant rumbling.
It started somewhere far off, so far it was almost as if it wasn’t in this realm at all. This low growl grew until the ground began to shake. Not just the ground, the sea, the distant mountains, the sky itself quaked as that sound grew into something more. A second note joined the first, this one lyrical, musical like water, a sound I was all too familiar with. It was not just a sound, it was a power, and together the roar and the music melded, grew, strengthened until it became corporeal. It shook and shook until the whole world was on the verge of shaking apart—and then it did.
The sky overhead broke, tearing from end to end, a long dark crack that widened as the sound loudened. Over me, over the throne, that fissure widened, great chunks of sky falling to crash all around me as it deepened, wrenching the realm apart.
That sound transformed as it did. It turned from a deep growl into a scream, heart wrenching and heart breaking, the sort of roar that only a fae on the verge of breaking himself could make.
I knew, before I saw the fae who made it, before the realm broke so completely in two that it looked up into another realm entirely, who had done it.
I stopped reaching for the last threads of that glamour that made me up, and with the last of my strength, I looked up instead at the fae whose anguish had grown so great that his own power had been able to span the realms to reach me.
The fae who had once been so determined to help fate had at long last completely defied it.
Caldamir had come for me.
If only he hadn’t come so late.