Chapter 1 #2
The woman—mother, something whispers, but I can't trust whispering things I don't remember learning—takes my translucent hands in her solid ones. The contact grounds me in ways I don't fully understand, the incantations calming their frantic pulsing to something slower, steadier.
"The Seven were but pawns," she begins, her voice taking on the cadence of prophecy, of ancient knowledge passed down through bloodlines, "placed in positions destined for the seven who will bond to the destined heir of wickedness."
Riddles.
The word surfaces with irritation that's almost genuine. She's speaking in riddles, beautiful phrases that mean nothing to someone who can't remember enough to decode them.
"One would be deemed worthy of two," she continues, eyes distant as if reading words carved into air only she can see, "woven on opposite spectrums. One destined to rule the surface, one destined to rule the underlying."
"I don't understand."
The admission comes out small, hollow, a ghost admitting ignorance about her own existence. It feels wrong to not understand, deeply and fundamentally wrong, as if understanding used to be something I was good at.
The woman's smile turns sad in ways that make my chest ache despite the void.
"I know, sweetheart."
Sweetheart.
The endearment cracks something I didn't know was frozen. The word is simple, common, the kind of thing parents say to children without thinking. But it lands in my hollow chest like a stone in still water, sending ripples through the void that make my incantations flare with desperate brilliance.
When was the last time someone called me sweetheart?
The question carries no answer, only the ache of absence, of something needed and never received.
She pulls me into her arms.
The embrace shouldn't be possible—I'm barely real, more suggestion than substance, a collection of glowing incantations and stubborn magic refusing to fade. But her arms wrap around me anyway, solid and warm and present in ways that make the void in my chest crack further.
Heat blooms where the cracks form.
Not fire, not pain—emotion. Raw and unfiltered and overwhelming after the numbness that came before. Tears form in eyes that shouldn't be able to produce them, pooling along lashes made of nothing, threatening to fall down cheeks that barely exist.
"M-Mom?"
The word escapes as a question because I can't remember if I have a mother, can't remember anything beyond the void and the flowers and this woman who looks like what I could have been if the world had been kind.
But it feels right.
The word settles into place like a key finding its lock, some fundamental truth clicking into position even if I can't access the memories that prove it.
I try to hold back the sob that builds in my throat.
I fail.
"It's hard up there," she murmurs against my hair, her voice carrying understanding that goes beyond empathy into shared experience.
"In the land of the living, where wickedness and betrayal lurk in every corner.
It's so hard for my sweet child who didn't ask to be brought into this world of power and hate. "
Her arms tighten around me, pulling me closer despite my translucence.
"It's been so hard," she continues, and now her voice cracks too, maternal pain bleeding through composed words. "Your heart wishes to shield you from it all."
Shield me.
The concept resonates even if the specifics don't. Someone—something—has been protecting me. Keeping memories locked away, emotions dampened, the full weight of whatever I've experienced held at bay to prevent... what? Breaking? Shattering? Becoming whatever I was before this void made me nothing?
"I don't understand."
The words come between sobs that rack my barely-there form. I cling to her with arms that are more light than flesh, incantations blazing where we touch, and I cry.
Gods, I cry.
Tears pour from eyes that shouldn't exist, grief and pain and loneliness that I can't specifically remember but feel with devastating clarity. Each sob tears something loose in my chest, emotion flooding the void like water filling a vessel cracked open after ages of drought.
I cry for things I can't name.
For people I can't remember.
For a life I might have had if circumstances I don't recall had been different.
I cry like I've been holding these tears for years—centuries—waiting for someone safe enough to release them to. And she holds me through it all, this woman who might be my mother, who definitely feels like the maternal comfort I'm only now realizing I've been starving for.
"It's okay, my sweet," she soothes, her hands stroking my translucent hair as if it were solid silk. "Cry all you want."
So I do.
I cry until the tears stop coming, until the void in my chest has been filled with something warm and aching, until the sobs quiet into hiccups and then into exhausted silence.
When I finally pull back, she seems to know the moment I'm ready—her arms loosening their hold at the exact instant I need space. Her hands find my face again, cradling my tear-stained cheeks with tenderness that makes fresh tears threaten.
She presses her forehead to mine.
The contact is electric, incantations flaring where we touch, and I feel something pass between us—not quite knowledge, not quite memory, but understanding. Ancient and maternal and impossibly comforting.
"Our world of wickedness is cruel to those on the surface," she whispers, her breath warm against my translucent skin. "But deep down, she yearns for love too. She's tired of the cruelty that occurs on her lands. She yearns for laughter and chaos, not misery and screams of death."
Her thumbs stroke my cheekbones, wiping away tears that are somehow still falling.
"She needs balance," the woman continues, "in a world that was carved to help build instead of simply deplete."
The words settle over me like a blessing, like a prophecy, like a mother's hopes for a child she had to send into battle alone.
She pulls back just enough to smile at me—and despite the tears making her eyes glassy, the expression is radiant. Pride and love and bittersweet joy mixed together into something that makes my chest ache with longing.
"The final piece is ready to claim their Queen."
Queen.
The word triggers nothing specific, but something in me responds anyway—something buried beneath the void, beneath the amnesia, beneath the protective barriers my heart apparently erected to shield me from my own existence. Whatever that something is, it recognizes the title.
Recognizes it as mine.
"I don't understand," I admit, because it seems important to be honest about my confusion even if she's not expecting comprehension.
She doesn't seem disappointed. If anything, her smile grows warmer, more tender, the expression of a mother who knows her child will understand when the time is right.
She leans forward, pressing a kiss to the top of my forehead.
The contact burns—not painfully, but with power that sears itself into my essence. Something shifts where her lips touch, reality restructuring around the blessing she's bestowing.
"Father and I are so proud of you," she whispers against my brow. "Both of you."
Both of us?
The phrase catches on something sharp in my memory—twin consciousness, shared existence, a brother who... who what? The fragment slips away before I can grasp it, leaving only the ache of incompletion.
When she pulls back, my confusion must be written across my translucent features because her smile gains an edge of knowing humor.
"Tell your brother," she says, "his sacrifice in protecting your heart and the chalice will be worth it."
Brother. Chalice. Sacrifice.
The words are keys without locks, important without context.
Then she grins—an expression so playful, so young, that for a moment I see not just who she is but who she must have been before whatever aged her eyes with wisdom and loss.
"Return to your bonded ones, sweet Gwenievere."
Gwenievere.
The name crashes through me like a wave breaking on shore. Suddenly the void is full again—not with memories, not yet, but with self. I am Gwenievere. I am someone. I am me, whoever that is, whatever that means.
"I'll love you from the afterlife."
Afterlife.
"The afterlife?" I whisper, horror beginning to claw through the peace of this place. If she's in the afterlife, that means she's—
My head pulses.
Not pain exactly, but pressure—something building behind my forehead, beneath my skull, gathering with the weight of storms about to break. I flinch, reaching up to touch the source of the sensation, and find nothing.
No—not nothing.
Something.
I can't see it, but I can feel it—a weight resting on my brow like a crown not visible to any eye. Heavy with power, warm with heritage, mine in ways that transcend simple ownership.
"The final chess piece has made their move," my mother declares, her voice taking on that prophetic weight again.
My gaze snaps back to her face, searching for explanation I know won't come in clear form.
"Be kind to him, Gwenievere."
Him.
"He's the oddest of them all," she continues, sympathy softening features that already seemed incapable of hardness. "But he yearns to love as much as you yearn to be loved."
"Wha—"
The word doesn't finish.
Something grabs me.
Not hands—force itself, invisible and overwhelming, seizing my barely-there form with violence that contradicts the gentle field of flowers.
I'm yanked backward with speed that should be impossible, the warm field blurring into streaks of impossible color as I'm torn away from the woman who might be my mother, from the peace I'd only just found.
One.
I crash through something—not a wall but a barrier, a membrane separating realities that parts around me with the sensation of breaking through ice on a frozen lake.
Two.
Another barrier. This one burns as I pass through, fire without heat, power without pain.
Three.
Cold this time. Frost that clings to my translucent form before shattering away as I continue my violent trajectory.
Four.
Shadow. Darkness so complete it has texture, wrapping around me like familiar arms before releasing me to the next barrier.
Five.
Blood. The taste of copper floods my awareness, crimson light surrounding me for an instant that feels like eternity.
Six.
Starlight and void intertwined, the sensation of existing in multiple places simultaneously before being forced to choose just one.
Seven.
This one is different.
This one feels new.
Power I don't recognize wraps around me as I pass through—something ancient and arrogant and so completely foreign that my fragmented self can't process it. It tastes of stone and silence, of patience stretched across millennia, of wanting so fierce it has become its own form of existence.
Then I'm through.
All seven barriers behind me.
Reality crashes back with the subtlety of a collapsing star.
I gasp.
Air floods lungs that remember they're supposed to breathe, the sensation so overwhelming after the void that I nearly choke on simple oxygen. My eyes fly open—when did they close?—and I shoot upright with the desperate energy of the recently resurrected.
My heart hammers against ribs that feel solid again, each beat a drumroll announcing my return to the living.
Power burns behind my eyes, incantations still pulsing across skin that's no longer translucent but flesh-and-blood real.
The invisible crown on my brow weighs heavier here, in whatever reality I've returned to, its presence impossible to ignore even if I can't see it.
Something is inches from my face.
No—someone.
My wild, power-burning gaze focuses on features that take a moment to process: sharp cheekbones, lips curved into something between a smirk and a pout, eyes that hold the particular arrogance of someone convinced of their own superiority.
He's beautiful in an irritating way—the kind of beauty that knows exactly how devastating it is and resents having to share space with anyone less aesthetically blessed.
His expression shifts from smug satisfaction to theatrical disappointment.
"Hmm," he drawls, voice carrying the boredom of someone who finds everyone around him tedious, "you have a pretty face, but could you come back to life more majestically?"
I stare at him.
My eye begins to twitch.
Memories flood back in fragments—crimson skies, shadow armies, a chalice raised high, fangs sinking into my wrist, darkness consuming everything.
The bonds that connect me to others snap back into place one by one: Cassius's shadow-warmth at my neck, Atticus's blood-hunger at my wrist, Nikolai’s Fae-shimmer at my chest, Mortimer's dragon-heat at my shoulder, Zeke's frost-devotion at my rib.
Six out of seven.
My mother's words echo through my reassembling consciousness.
There’s definitely a sixth one…new…But I can’t envision where that mark is…
And now there's another connection.
Foreign. New.
Emanating from somewhere on my stomach with the particular flavor of ancient power and absolute arrogance.
The seventh.
He made his move.
"You. Did. Not..."
The words come out as croaks, my voice rough from disuse or screaming or however long I've been dead—because I was definitely dead, or close enough that the distinction feels academic.
The stranger's smirk widens despite the clear disgust in his expression, as if he finds my fury entertaining in its futility.
"Apparently, can't let you die since those douches couldn't revive your ass," he continues, gesturing vaguely at something beyond my field of vision. "Bond mates? A bunch of clueless groveling shifters sobbing over a woman with a resting bitch face who probably couldn't hurt a fl—"
I don't let him finish.
Rage surges through me with the force of a wildfire finding dry kindling—rage at being bonded without consent, rage at being mocked while barely conscious, rage at this arrogant stranger who apparently saved my life and immediately started insulting me for needing saving.
My forehead connects with his face.
The impact is deeply satisfying—bone meeting bone with a crack that echoes through wherever we are. Pain blooms across my skull, sharp and immediate and totally worth it for the look of absolute shock that crosses his features before we both go down.
Darkness claims me again, but this time it's the simple darkness of unconsciousness rather than the void between life and death.
Yup...
The thought forms with vicious satisfaction as awareness fades.
...checkmate.