Chapter 50 #2
“If I shut up, how am I going to tell you that I love you?” he wonders.
In an instance, it feels like my heart drops to my knees then bounces back up to my chest.
“I love your kindness and your heart. I love your dedication and your stubbornness. I love your coffee addiction and the way you snore, even though you say you don’t.
I love watching you with Calida and Bits and Annemarie.
I love your fierceness and your resilience.
I love you, Casie. I loved you before I had a name for it and I’ll love you long after you remember. ”
“I love you, Flint.” My voice wavers, thick with the tears in my throat. “I love you so much.”
I pull away, just for the barest of a moment, wanting the space to wipe my eyes before I kiss him senseless.
And as Flint watches, a sharp pain rips through my head and I fall to my knees, screaming.
Then
I watch in horror and fascination as the Princess whips out power. At first, she wields a whip of flame, incinerating every being it comes into contact with. I watch as the bodies heat and then crumble from the intense heat she is producing.
The next instant, she is throwing spears of ice with deadly accuracy. Her eyes glow a molten gold as she reaches out to pluck the complicated strings of emotions from those around her. One particularly large adversary crumples as her ice punches through it’s chest.
She’s struggling, I realize. The princess can barely stand.
I can see, almost feel, her grit her teeth and lock her knees to keep herself upright against the pain, the failure, the hopelessness engulfing her.
The people around her - they don’t have any emotions left to give.
They’re dissociating. She’s been in battle for so long, too long.
Her own emotions are far too detached to be of any use.
This is the end. There’s nothing else to call on, to summon.
They’ve made sure the land around her is dead; she can’t even ground herself.
Ash- Then
The battlefield is made of screams.
I stand at the center, boots sinking into churned mud, my arms trembling with exhaustion.
My grief is locked away, behind a solid wall in my mind.
My cloak is torn, soaked in blood — mine, other’s, I don’t even know anymore.
The sky overhead is split with lightning, but there’s no rain. No. The storm rages inside me.
We are losing.
I can feel it. The fading sparks of my comrades, the thinning of the veil as magicks collapse under the weight of grief.
I can feel neighbors, friends, acquaintances burning out until they’re nothing but husks.
The air around me is thick with the electricity of so much magick being conjured, thrown.
The Hollow Order presses in from all sides, chanting their poisonous dogma as they battle.
I drop to one knee beside the body of my captain. My hands tremble, already stained, but it doesn’t stop me from reaching for him. Towards this touchstone from my childhood.
His eyes are open wide, shocked and unseeing, already dull with death.
He had been laughing earlier. Before the battle, he had offered me a piece of candy from his pocket. The same candy he had been sneaking me since I was a child. I hadn’t taken it.
Why didn’t I take it?
I swallow the tears in my throat, adding another brick to the wall holding back my grief. There isn’t time now. All around me, the air is buzzing, alive with pain. Not just mine. Everyone’s.
A young soldier sobs into the shoulder of her dead twin.
A Fae woman holding pieces of her broken staff, whispering prayers in a language that I don’t know, but can feel.
A line of archers are vaporized in one blast.
A dragon curled in on itself, howling because his one has gone silent.
The battlefield is bleeding grief.
And that’s when I feel it.
The Wound.
A pulsing tear in the fabric of the realm - raw, collective pain made manifest by too many deaths, too much suffering, too fast. It’s ancient and bottomless. It’s not meant to be touched.
But it’s there.
It’s listening.
My breath catches. The glow in my hands flickers, pulsing like a second heartbeat. My magick is weak, nearly spent, but the Wound hums just beneath me, under the dirt, bones and broken dreams. Under the bodies of those I’ve loved — those I’ve known and grown with.
And I can reach it.
I know there will be a cost. A steep one. But what could be steeper than what’s already been paid?
The Wound isn’t just pain – it’s despair. Untempered. Unfiltered. Infinite. Its grief and loss; trauma and heartbreak; rage and loneliness.
It doesn’t empower you. It consumes you.
I lower my hands, hovering over the blood soaked Earth. Even without the physical connection, I can feel the land’s grief.
“Don’t.”
It’s Flint. His voice, ragged, pleading. He’s dragging himself toward me, half-crushed beneath a broken siege shield. “Ash. If you do this, you won’t come back.” His face is streaked with soot, his eyes dull with loss. I meet those eyes.
We are losing. The Order is winning, gaining more ground every second. If I do nothing, they will take everything. There will be no one left.
So I make the choice that was never a choice.
“I love you.” I whisper, pressing my palm flat to the ground.
And I let it in.
The Wound rises to meet me like a tidal wave, howling through my bones, cracking my ribs wide to make space for every scream, every orphan’s sob, every dying breath, every helpless moment I had tried not to feel.
And I feel it all.
It pours through me, incandescent agony, sorrow turned to fire. I feel my eyes blaze white-hot. My scream shatters the air.
The Hollow Order doesn't stand a chance.
I raze them.
With every step I take, the ground burns.
Every motion of my body sends despair outward, turning them into shockwaves.
The strength the Order is so fond of, turns on them — because I give voice to their pain too; their regrets, their shame, their fear.
And in the end, when the battlefield is silent and the storm is gone—
I look down at my hands. They’re glowing.
They’re cracked.
Everything inside me is shattering, sharp edges that no longer fit together the way they’re meant to. Like my soul is cracked.
There’s Flint, dragging himself to my side, catching me as I collapse to my knees, stopping me from falling. His arms wrap around me, but I can tell it hurts him.
It only takes a blink.
I look up at this filthy man with piercing eyes, his arms holding me to him.
“Who are you?” I whisper.
And everything goes black.
Now
I come back to my body, struggling for breath. Flint is on his knees next to me, cradling my head in his lap.
I remember.
“Casie?” he asks, cautiously. “Are you okay?”
I remember it all. The princess Flint had referred to, all those weeks ago… that was me. Not Casie, not really. Not the Princess Aisling in my dreams. But me.
“No.” I croak.
“What hurts?” He’s so concerned.
“Not Casie.”
He blinks in shock.
Never Casie.
But Ember, Princess of the Fae.
Ember, who Flint has called Ash since we were children. Ash because, that’s what’s left after an Ember. That’s who I got to be, with him. Only ever with him. Ash, after Ember’s royal duties were done. Not Princess Ember, not royalty. Just Ash. His Ash.
Holy.
Fuck.