Chapter 44
Chapter Forty-Four
The world feels like it’s shrinking, my grief folding in on itself, closing me off from everything outside of my own wrecked, broken mind.
I try to keep my eyes on the opening of the cave, to remind myself that this isn't an ending.
Not yet. There's still life outside of the miserable ball I've curled into, if I can just stay focused on it—the smell of pine and cold air drifting in from the darkness; hints of whispered conversations; flickers of light from campfires and the occasional ember caught in the wind, carried across the mouth of the cave.
Somewhere out there, Mal is walking around, breathing and scheming and carrying on as he apparently always has.
Alive.
I still can't believe he's alive.
An hour passes. Then another. He doesn't come back. I don't know if I want him to come back. All these years, I would have given anything—absolutely anything—to see him again, but now I realize what a fool I was for hoping for that.
The greatest fool who ever lived, because I actually thought he loved me.
And as I sit with this realization, a second, even darker one creeps into my mind: If Malachi was able to fool me so thoroughly, then who's to say the rest of the world hasn't been doing the same thing?
It's really just the same fear I've been fighting for years, with new life breathed into it: the fear that everyone is only waiting to abandon me once they take what they need and realize the rest of me isn't worth keeping.
The fear that I'm too much for anyone to fully know and accept.
That I was never meant to be anything more than a tool, a weapon, and certainly not made to be loved the way a normal person could be loved.
Ruined, Mal said.
It’s hard not to believe him when I look back and see how I’ve brought war to Mouren’s doorstep.
When I admit to myself that I can’t heal Reave or his brother or anything else I love.
I’m too dangerous, too weak to carry divine power and wield it for good—what other proof of this do I need, aside from the way I left Briar lying in a pool of blood before running away from her?
I burn and ruin everything I touch, in the end.
Alone in the dark, with nothing for company but the weight of all these things, I begin to wonder what it might take to become someone else.
Not for the first time, but with more desperation than ever before, I ache to rid myself of the bonds I carry.
Not just the mark that ties me to Malachi, but the invisible threads that tether me to Sesca, too.
The problem is that I don't know who I would be without these bonds.
So maybe it would be better if I just found a way to erase every possible version of myself.
Mere moments after this thought crosses my mind, a surge of furious heat burns through me. My head pounds, and I know it's Sesca trying to force her way in. Likely trying to tell me I'm a fool for having these desperate, human feelings.
I go on having them anyway.
I pull back from her warmth like I’m closing a door, curling tighter into my misery and shutting my eyes until sleep finally takes me.
Some time later, a boot nudges me in the side.
“Get up, Owyn.”
I recognize the voice as Mal's, and all the pain of the last few hours returns, all at once.
I shut my eyes tighter.
“Up.”
“Why?” I whisper.
“Because your dragon is raging and making a mess of my camp. And it's time you proved yourself to my doubting soldiers, anyhow.”
I still don't move.
I hear him take a step back, but I can feel him continuing to stare down at me. The frustration that rolls off him is palpable.
“The woman I knew wouldn't spend so much time wallowing in self-pity.”
“I'm not the woman you knew,” I hiss.
He seems to consider this for a long moment. Then he kneels beside me, setting down the lantern he carried in, shining light over the chains binding me, which he begins to undo—or reconfigure, at least.
I want to growl at him to not touch me. To spit in his face. To kick my one unbound leg at him with whatever strength I can summon.
But I'm a weak, stupid fool, because I don't do any of these things. Because all I can focus on is how carefully his hands are working against me, and how impossible it still seems to be feeling his touch again after all this time.
When he's finished, my hands are still bound to each other—behind my back, now—but not to the weighted block that was holding me in place. He moves to unhook my ankle from the other weight that was holding me down, too.
I could stand and walk out into the night on my own two legs, if I chose to. He doesn't say this. Doesn't say anything at all, just gives me a final, pointed look before leaving again.
As if whatever happens next is up to me.
But like everything else about him—every choice he seemingly made or offered where I'm concerned—it's an illusion.
I can hear Sesca hissing and snarling in the distance.
Can feel her anguish twisting through me, impossible to ignore no matter how desperately I might want to.
And there are enough voices outside to tell me it's no small army holding the two of us captive, so it's not as if I could simply slip away and not look back.
My only real choices are to confront the dragon as Malachi asked, or to find some way to reach a cliff edge and hurl myself off it.
I spend a very long time debating between these two options.
With grueling effort, I uncurl my aching body, make myself stand, and slowly walk outside.
I don't know how much time has passed since I was brought here, but it seems to be the dead of night now. It's not storming any longer. There are still plenty of clouds, no stars that I can see, and the rocky ground glistens with pockets of ice that make every step treacherous.
After I nearly slip for the third time, I feel the telltale tingling around my eye—Sesca trying to lend her vision to me.
I stop and shut her out, shaking my head to fend her off.
Stubborn and foolish, maybe, but I need this reminder that I’m capable of walking down a path on my own, no matter how slippery it might be.
I don't have to go far before I come to the place where they're keeping her—a relatively large, sunken area of smooth stone surrounded by clusters of scraggly pine trees. Dozens of soldiers stand watch around her, weapons drawn and bodies tense.
Sesca’s tail is raised, prepared to whip toward a soldier who is attempting to adjust one of the many chains binding her, but she lowers it at the sight of me and goes perfectly still.
We stare at one another for what feels like an age.
It’s as though we're strangers again, and I’m brought back to the moment we first truly locked eyes with one another, deep in the forest after I freed her from the Mouren camp—back to the sight of her bleeding into the water, her wings broken, sides heaving.
The sword shaking in my hand. The fire burning in my chest.
I consider turning and running now, just as I did then.
But I keep still.
Leave us, comes a voice. Her voice, though I've never heard it sound like this before. Like a command from the heavens themselves, absolute and ancient, and I can tell by the reactions around me that she's spoken it for everyone present to hear.
Some of the soldiers run for the cover of the sparse trees. Some back away slowly, awe and fear warring across their faces. A few linger, either out of shock or ignorance.
A strange mist rises from the ground, curling around us, thickening until the camp beyond disappears entirely.
It’s like we’ve entered another realm—a divine plane filled with pale light, quiet and soft at the edges, and the ground beneath my feet is neither solid nor absent, but just present enough to hold me.
Only the two of us are here, and for a moment I don’t care where we are; I’m simply relieved to be free of the weight of being watched.
Then I remember all the things that have brought us to this place, and the anger that rises in me is so fierce and sudden that it forces the words out of me before I can think: “You knew he was alive.”
Sesca’s golden eyes regard me without blinking for a long moment. Steady. Unapologetic.
“You kept it from me. Why?”
You would have sought him out if you knew.
Somewhere deep beneath my fury, I understand her unspoken meaning: that she was trying to protect me from him.
But I don't care. I never asked to be protected. I wouldn't have asked for it, if I'd known that protecting me just meant I would be lied to, manipulated, left in the dark.
“I am so incredibly tired of the gods and their dragons and their games,” I say, voice strained and on the verge of breaking. “I never wanted any part of this.”
I know.
“So why did you come to me?”
Because you called.
I shake my head. “No. I didn't.”
An image of Emberfall flashes through my mind once more. Everything burning. Collapsing. My body lying in the flames, writhing in pain—but not a physical pain.
Because something protected me.
“You saved me that night, didn't you?” The question comes out like an accusation, soft and bitter.
She dips her great head, slow and deliberate.
“Well, you came too late,” I say quietly. “You saved me but let thousands of others die.” I struggle uselessly against the chains behind my back. “You should have let me die with them!”
She goes still for a long moment.
The air darkens and the mist thickens, clinging to my body like a damp blanket. My eyelids grow heavy, forcing me to blink. One, two, three blinks, and then I'm in Halvgate again, watching the flames climb higher and higher.
But I'm not lying on the ground this time.
Instead, I'm watching the fire from someplace above while grief and helplessness claw through me.
I want to descend, to search for my body among the ruins, but I find that I can't, no matter how hard I try.
I twist and tumble in the dark, weightless one moment and awkwardly heavy the next.
No balance or center. No beginning or end. It's a terrifying sensation.
This is what it was like for me.
Another heavy blink, and I return to the present, gasping for clearer air.
Trembling, I ask, “How did you reach me?”
You finally cried out, and so I was born.
I don't remember crying out for her at all.
But something in the shine of her eyes tells me she isn't lying.
I protected you from the flames, she says. Then I found you among the embers. It was all I could do. And I would have stayed at your side as you walked through the ashes of after—but you turned me away.
I don't remember turning her away, either.
Then again, I don't remember much of the immediate aftermath of that night; trauma has a way of deciding for itself what stays, what goes, and then burying the things it can’t make sense of.
My throat tightens. “Why did you save me? Even after I denied you?”
Hope.
I recoil at the word. With the chains at my wrists and the blood on my hands and the wreckage of everything pressing in from every side, it feels like she's mocking me.
“Hope? What hope could I possibly carry?” I take a furious step toward her. “Look at me. Look at what I am. Just like you did that night in the arena, when I asked you what you saw when you read my soul—do you remember looking at me then? Do you remember what you said?”
The mist swirls and contracts toward us. We’re still insulated, the world wrapped in eerie silence, but the edges of the camp are beginning to reemerge from the fog.
No clear flames, she recites, staring down at me with those ancient, unreadable eyes. Only embers.
“Exactly.” I can barely get my words out, my pulse hammering in my throat. “And has it changed?”
A long silence.
No.
I laugh once, hollow and short. “Then it is pointless. We are pointless.”
She says nothing.
“Tell me we aren't.”
She doesn't say anything to this, either.
“We're finished, then. The gods, the divine fires, the bonding, all of it. I want nothing more to do with any of it.” My voice cracks, and I hate myself for the show of weakness. “Nothing more to do with you.”
The mist disperses all at once, like a candle being snuffed out. As it does, it reveals the crowd of soldiers pressing in, murmuring and exchanging uncertain glances, a few of them reaching for their swords.
Sesca ignores them all, her gaze fixed on me and nothing else.
She looks as though she's going to speak, and my entire body tenses at the memory of that divine voice she used earlier.
The world seems to be tensing with me, every horse in the camp going silent and still; the wind dropping away to nothing; the campfires drawing in and burning lower in a way that makes no natural sense.
But whatever the dragon has to say, I’m no longer interested in listening.
I turn and trudge back up to the cave without looking back.