Bonus Chapter 5 – Sølas
S?LAS
Her hand reaches out towards me, an irresistible tether, tugging me like a thread across the seams of the very universe.
My heart crumples beneath a distance too heavy to bear.
I weave through voids of darkness, faster and faster, until time and space bleed together, my soul starving for her, sundering the heavens in pursuit of her.
Her eyes, shimmering pools of gilded obsidian, glinting above cheeks flecked in gold. My guiding constellation through the night sky. My north star, guiding me home, to her. Always her.
Golden threads weave around my heart, curling tighter. A lover’s embrace. Warmth, light, love, creation—she is every page of my story, her heartbeat the hum of eternity echoing between my lines.
She is everything to me, and yet… all we have ever had is the moment between the stars. Forever dancing in my dreams.
Her stardust aura gleams into view, her power threading with all the vibrant colors of the universe. A serrated wail lacerates my throat. Tar dips down her neck, swallowed whole in endless pitch. No light ever escapes. Not even hers.
I’m always too late.
Her starlit face cracks at the sight of me, golden eyes wide as a silent, heart-wrenching scream echoes through my chest, shattering my ribs into shrapnel, mangling my bleeding heart to a bloody pulp.
Her scream, always a warning. To stay away, and that’s exactly why it guts me. Rips me to ribbons. Leaving me bleeding, lanced on her warning cries, while my very soul wails to collide with her.
I fracture under the weight of her plea, tangled up with longing in her eyes, the promise of a love to reforge the universe.
You’re sacrificing yourself to save me. And that… that crushes me, gutting me into nothingness.
My shadows dissolve away, and I am nothing other than the gaps where light cannot touch as I race for you.
I do not exist without you.
We are together, or we are nothing at all. Together, we are everything.
No.
No. No. No.
I am never fast enough.
Always too late. Only ever arriving to see the gluttonous pitch consume your last ray of light. Emptiness is all that is left. An emptiness I clot with my bellowing agony as my soul shreds apart, my heart blazing away into ash.
I am nothing without you.
There is no universe within which I am willing to exist where there is not a me and a you. You are love and light.
You are everything that is beautiful and bright. Your stardust, the woven threads that string me together, making me whole. Giving me my corporeal form.
Existing without you is an Emberhell all its own, a cruel joke even for the Fates.
A dark cackle gloats in the distance, slithering around the ashes that are left of me, yanking me back from joining her in the Ever After.
“You were never meant for her. You have always been mine.”
“No!” A rasp claws up my raw throat, tossing me from the haunting dream. Cold sweat slicks down my body as I clasp my hand over my chest.
It’s still there. Still beats.
But it feels different.
An unfamiliar… radiance. Spooling inside me. A ray of starlight, weaving its way between my ribs, lassoed around my heart, tugging at my chest.
Well, that’s new.
The beautiful female with iridescent hair has haunted my dreams for years now. But this… I have never felt this. The tether from my dream blooming to life.
For years, she has nicked herself into my very marrow, strung herself into my sinew. We are made of the same stardust. Always trying to find our way back home to each other.
Seraph thinks I’ve lost my mind, thinks all the poetry I feed my soul has muddled my brain.
Some days, I wonder if she’s right. Once, I even convinced Eko to use his spectral form to sneak deep within the catacombs.
He scoured the well-kept birth records, but no one has ever been recorded with translucent hair that glimmers like liquid starlight.
Some days, I wonder if I’ve gone mad. What a surreal feeling.
To miss someone you haven’t even met yet.
Yet everything in my dream is too visceral, too real, leaving echoes of her in every part of my very being. No other dream or nightmare has stitched itself so deeply into my essence.
She is real. I know it.
And this new radiance in my chest is more than just an echo—it's tangible; it’s gravity.
It’s proof. The pastel rainbow light curls around my heart, tugging at my chest. I let her lead the way. Let her guide me home, to her. Maybe this time I can find her before it’s too late.
Celestials, it better not be too late. I shake my head, flinging that thought from my mind. I choose hope. Daring to dream of beautiful endings, just like my adopted mother and father taught me.
I stretch my muscles, sore from training with Maiden Zenna yesterday, adjusting myself as I stand.
“Alright, light, I’m listening,” I say aloud, hoping to summon this new force in my chest. It beckons me, and I follow, heading to my balcony on the north bay of the golden arched windows. I fling the doors open. Late spring air inflates my lungs, sunrays sprinkling my skin in warmth.
The radiance snags on my ribs, dragging my attention to the Dragon Spine Mountains. The skies are so clear today, you can just make out the glinting, icy tip of Eldoria, a frozen star, glittering with guiding light.
Could she really be tucked away, deep within the Highlands, all this time? The string slung around my heart hums in acknowledgement, sending starlight skittering through my veins. My soul soars on wings of unbridled hope, gliding through clouds of possibility.
I will find her.
I will find you.
I spin around, drunk on optimism as I head to my dresser to get ready for a new day, a new dawning.
I’ve spent years flying with Scáil, scouring the continent, searching for any sign of her, while Calais hisses cryptic Ritherin-shit about me needing to be patient.
At least they always believed me when I told them it was more than a dream.
“I felt it too, through you. Let’s find her.
I am ready to fly when you are.” Scáil’s ancient voice has a subtle mirth to it as it glides across my mind.
Our connection grounds me. I wouldn’t have survived that day I lost everything without him.
His training, his words of wisdom taught me that my power is not the curse I believed it to be.
My powers do not define me; they are not inherently evil, like so many Fae here think.
I used to wish on the stars I could’ve just stayed with Scáil.
Wishing he didn’t bring me to the Maidens, where the other Faelings feared my shadows, convinced I’d grind up their bones and eat them just because the most recent Shadowmancer was Wuvon and my bloodline is unknown.
Gildora was a Shadowmancer, too, and she defeated Vyzon with her powers, wielding alongside Rayea.
Even if I am related to the last Wuvon, it’s about how I choose to use my magic.
I have more power than I know what to do with.
A power I have trained endlessly to control, even when it threatens to rip me apart, craving release.
I persist. I define it. I can’t fathom the desire to add black magic to the torrent of shadows and pitch that already hurricanes beneath my seams of control.
My adopted parents filled me with so much love and light, and yet, I was their ruin. Their ending. I was just as terrified of my magic as the other Faelings were. I hated myself, hated that they’d never accept me because of my shadows, but now I realize individuals who fear me aren’t worth my time.
I am worthy of more than their expectations of me. I am worthy of all the love and light my parents gifted me. But I have learned not everyone is worthy of the real me. So, I hide behind masks, only a select few knowing the breadth of color and radiance beneath an exterior shrouded in shadows.
Footsteps shuffling across the white marble floor snatch me from my thoughts. Dishes clang against the silver tray as Maiden Hera’s time-shaken hands set it down on the table.
She’s draped in her typical golden robe with modifications to cover the lower half of her face.
Typical attire for Maidens, their form hidden.
Their only focus is to prepare us to be the best we can be for the Golden Legion.
Almost all Faelings raised by the Maidens make it into a Wing assignment.
Slabs of young clay, slowly molded over time until we’re old enough to be fired in glaze, hardened into the perfect weapons.
“Always with your head in the clouds, so full of daydreams, it’s a wonder you haven’t floated away on them,” Maiden Hera tuts as I bend down to press a gentle kiss to her head, bowed with the posture of old age.
I was a terrified ghost of a child when they assigned her to raise me when I was eight years old.
She never feared me. Even when my shadows lashed out with lack of control, lost in my grief of losing my family, frozen in fear from my own magic.
She’d just sit in the room with me and read from my favorite poetry books until I exhausted my powers.
Then she’d hobble over with cookies and tea, letting me know it was okay to feel everything I was feeling.
She told me all that mattered is what I chose to do with those feelings.
To let them break me, or let them remake me.
Hera was the one who brought me and Seraph together. Two broken souls, who understood each other, and in our own way, figuring out how to heal together.
Fingers crooked with wisdom pat my face.
“Out of the clouds with you! Eat your breakfast, S?las, then you’ll meet Maiden Zenna for combat training.”
Her craggy hands lift the silver cloche, revealing a balanced breakfast of protein and vegetables. I run my hands through my hair, unsettled energy suffocating my hunger as the tug within my chest grows restless.
She clicks her tongue, knowing me all too well.