CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I could have agreed to the deal Duscharne offered, but I refused for three reasons.
Firstly, there would be no safety in the realms for us to live out our lives under the ruling of the Royal Vanguard or Thal’Maruun.
Secondly, I fumed for vengeance, and my first surge of revenge came from denying the treaty for whatever reason they wanted it. Thirdly, fuck that guy’s wry smirk.
The Varaxis wasn’t happy to have failed in his persuasion, but he left the lanterns blazing when he stormed out. I searched for any signs of life in my sister until dawn’s light streaked through the guarded room.
Evelyn’s chest barely rose and fell, but her body swirled in the water chamber, so I could only monitor her breathing when she faced me.
Her skin wrinkled as if aged decades in the hands of the Royal Vanguard.
The creases that marred her face took the place of the lines around her lips that showed years of laughs and smiles.
Bones wrapped with only thin, translucent skin, protruded from Evelyn’s frail body. She was so thin and sick.
Shadows flooded the vast room, and I startled.
Two beings stormed toward my chamber. A woman dressed in a pristine, tanned militant uniform rounded the glass cylinder ahead of me first. Her black hair was slicked back in a bun exposing her rounded, pale forehead.
A man quickly trailed her, his own onyx hair plastered backwards.
Each bore a look of disgust as they looked upon me.
Great. If only they knew how much I agreed with them.
I was a failure. I couldn’t save Evelyn.
Couldn’t save myself, the realm… Noctis…
They halted in sync before my glass cell.
I held myself up in the water, paddling my arms to stay upright.
I tilted my nose as high as the ivory bone helm would allow, feigning confidence, but the manner at which the beings assessed me made my skin crawl.
Their eyes lingered over the skull helm, trailing down to the mangled hands lacking fingernails, then to each scale of my tail.
Assessing my weak spots. Hells, I was weak all over.
“We will start easy on you,” the young woman said in disgust. “You’ll give Commander Raoku what he wants, or it will get ugly for you quickly.”
“Were you sent here to pry my submission?”
“We were sent here to either make you accept or kill you off,” she responded without hesitation.
I froze. I couldn’t comprehend why Raoku fought for my allegiance so badly, but I refused to give in. It sounded like I was needed, and I’d go to the grave making sure I wasn’t used.
“Korvik,” the lady said without breaking the slither of eye contact with me through the helm.
The man extracted a dagger from his side sheath, and it materialized at my face within the tank.
I fumbled, trying to snatch the blade before they used it, but he puppeteered it.
It dove for my arm, slicing a gash to the bone.
I tried to scream, but the helm wouldn’t allow the noise, digging deeper into flesh.
The blade attacked again, cutting a long slice from the start of my tail up to my ribs.
Agony sliced her jagged fingers through me.
I couldn’t see the weapon enough to grab it. It moved too quickly. The blade carved into my shoulder, and the water around me darkened, slowly bleeding into an inky blue that spread like something alive and slithering.
“Try a different blade now,” Raoku’s firm voice cut through my agonizing, screaming mind.
Why was he back?
The next cut was brutal, as if the flesh of my chest was torn with a serrated knife. It ripped slowly, pulling at each bit of skin, pinching nerves as they ruptured.
I stayed firmly upright, my mind growing faint with every agonizing slice.
“Next.” Raoku stared at me through scrunched eyes, scrutinizing and calculating.
“Korvik,” the woman ordered, and the militant man stormed away.
“I have to admit,” Raoku drawled, “you’re putting up more of a fight than I anticipated.”
“Why do you care?” I seethed, but the words escaped winded, especially through the water.
“Reasons you do not deserve to know of.”
Did they actually need me? If they didn’t, I would have been killed already; however, they were intently adamant about forcing me to their side.
“You won’t win,” I breathed, “against her.”
Raoku chuckled, but I couldn’t find the strength to let it anger me further.
A shock ripped through my already torn body, sending me into convulsions that betrayed my strength, showing the agony.
“You think we haven’t been preparing? Do you really think anything the Ocean Mother marches with is enough to stop us?”
I couldn’t get words out. They formed at my tongue, my mind screaming ‘yes’, but my mouth betrayed me. They had no idea how powerful Thal’Maruun truly was, how she could twist creatures under her will with a lift of her finger.
“Our forces are thousands larger and marching toward the shores of Brigg Isle where your aunt is preparing to demolish us. Do you have no empathy for our Bound? Or has she brainwashed you into thinking all humans on land deserve to die?” Raoku tried to use my heart to persuade me.
It would have worked if I believed he cared at all about his own people.
The Terraguard Bound was walking into the Ocean Mother’s game, and I didn’t know if I would survive long enough to jump in between.
I floated in a cobalt bath inside the glass cell. My blood mixed with the water, slightly diluting its color. It was impossible to see Evelyn through.
I fought to stay awake while Raoku and his sidekicks cut into my flesh, shocked my worn body, and laughed as the bone helm around my head sent me reeling.
I couldn’t hold myself upright anymore. Instead, I relaxed my muscles and hoped death would take me soon.
Nothing mattered to me in that moment. I only wished the agony would end.
The small slit in the ivory helm only allowed me to witness parts of my torment…
only the parts Raoku permitted. He held the power over me, sliding the blade and shocking me unexpectedly.
Then, he laughed. At first, it set me on fire.
But after hours of the agony, I would have followed the light to the gates of Aetheron if only to cease the pain.
My eyes drifted closed, body falling to the dark while Raoku and the militant woman discussed something in privacy. He fumed, his stance rigid and finger pointing into her chest, but she looked as if she were reassuring him.
Everything went dark.
“You don’t have to think that hard, Miss Caelyn.”
I knew that voice. It was young and riddled with grief, yet lively like he knew his life would improve.
Torvryn.
Vast emptiness enveloped me, black void stretching for miles. The young mer approached, swimming—gliding—through the darkness.
“You’ll know what to do when it happens. It’s time.” He spoke as if he knew my fate, but had to speak in riddles to ensure it kept trudging in the right direction.
“I—I can’t, Torvryn,” I croaked, warm blood pooling in my mouth in the icy water.
“I told you that I’m not a seer like my mother,” he continued, voice so comforting even at his young age, “because my powers are so much greater than that. I’m a dream walker.”
He told me he would return to me when the time was right.
“Are you real?”
“I am.”
“I’m dying.”
“I wouldn’t be here right now if you were dead.”
But I would be dead soon.
He came face to face with me and smiled. It was so radiant as if he saw victory in my mutilated body and soul. But my heart broke at the pain the child endured in his short life. I’d live this all over if it meant he could stay free.
“When you brought me to my aunt, you told me to be strong. Now I’m asking you to do the same. It’s going to be the hardest thing you’ve ever done, but my mother told me you’d save us all, remember?”
I reached for the boy's hands, but they fell right through him.
“Yeah, it doesn’t work like that,” he chuckled sadly, looking away. “I’ve tried it so many times with my mother.”
“How do I survive this?”
If he could speak to his seer mother, then maybe she knew—
“I cannot say, or it will change. But you will remember,” Torvryn said. His eyes shot to the side. “I have to go. Auntie is calling.”
The young mer disappeared.
Footsteps approached, halting and uneven. Something dragged behind them, but it didn’t sound like it wanted to be moved. A soft, wet rasp followed each step, lingering a moment too long after the movement stopped.
It took everything I had just to turn my head. But my eyes sharpened, and somewhere beneath the pain, the will to survive flickered back to life.
The male dragged Evelyn, unconscious and barely alive.
“Pl… please…” The plea escaped my lips in a whisper, but I hoped they heard me through the glass.
The uniformed man dropped my sister’s body onto the ground with a dull thump that hollowed something out inside me. It was supposed to be me. I was the one that should have been sacrificed, not her.
“She loses an appendage every time you refuse to fight on our side. Your sister will stay with us until we are triumphant. Once it’s all done, you will both be set free,” Raoku offered, anger lacing his words.
The cursed veins down my face burned, searing agony through my head under the bone helm.
I hesitated, every instinct clawing against the words before I could speak them. I couldn’t let them hurt her. She deserved to live. This wasn’t hers to pay for. It had never been. It was my fault. All of it.
“I’ll do it,” I whispered, the words tasting sour like surrender. The moment they left my mouth, the water began to drain from the tank. Relief should have followed, but it didn’t. There was only a hollow, sickening certainty that I had just chosen the shape of the realms’ loss.
I collapsed into the metal grates in an exhausted heap, my body trembling as the silence rushed in, too late to save what I’d already given away.
“I knew that’s all it would take,” Raoku chided through a grin. No matter the cost, I wouldn’t let them hurt her again. I just couldn’t.
The sealed door creaked open slowly in the glass chamber, and a rolled parchment shoved into my face.
“You’ll sign, and it will magically bind you to the contract. Disobey, and it kills you and your sister on the spot,” the uniformed woman explained.
She placed the paper before me. I tried to rise, but my arms buckled, strength slipping through me before I could hold myself up. A quill flitted through the air and placed itself in between my fingers.
I weakly gripped it and brought it down toward the parchment. Traitor. The second the ink blotched the paper, I’d become one of them.
The anger started as a quiet heat beneath my skin, but it didn’t stay that way.
It grew, fast and unforgiving, fed by every thought I couldn’t escape.
And beneath it, coiling tighter with every second, was guilt—sharp, unrelenting, impossible to ignore.
Together, they swallowed me whole. My body shook under it, like I couldn’t contain it, like something inside me was about to snap.
The chamber convulsed as an explosion tore through it, the force slamming into everything in its path.
Orders flew from the commander's mouth, guards taking off to investigate the attack.
The building shook, the foundation and walls cracking and crumbling.
It bellowed again, closer, cracking the glass around us.
“Sign it!” Raoku yelled in my ear, but I shook too violently.
“You. Can. Rot.”
Stone hurled itself across the room, carving through pillars that held the roof in place before obliterating a glass cylinder with a deafening crash.
“What—who is that?” Raoku sputtered, frantically checking his surroundings as the wall behind us crashed to the ground.
I knew. His emotions flitted through me in a ravenous storm. Torvryn chose his name deliberately to remind me. To echo the one I was supposed to remember. The true name of the one who was meant to save us all.
“Rhak’torvain. My Blood Tie.”