Chapter 46
forty-six
When the dragons landed, the ground shook like an earthquake. So did the vast, crimson pool. The blood shuddered. My blood.
My pact itched. I felt him before I saw him. My shadow stretched and grew, trembling with anger and anxiousness.
“Lorelana!” His voice cut into me like a knife. “For god’s sake, heal yourself.”
“I can’t,” was all I could muster. My mind had a clouded mist hanging over it. Finding the correct words was a monumental task.
“Yes, you can,” he bellowed.
I whispered words. A song. The rune formed as Mourn shifted, but no healing came. Nothing did, only sadness.
Blue swam up me, but it didn’t shred me like Ovatar’s thorns. It eased the pain. It spread across me, tugging the mist from my mind. Enough that I could sit up and think—and know.
And remember how I’d betrayed him. And was about to do so again.
“Child,” Ovatar mused, his icy gaze flicking across Aelen. “I’ve given you everything, and yet look at how you’ve crossed me. We could have ruled together.”
Aelen narrowed his eyes with a blinding rage. “You consumed my people!”
“My people! How quickly you forget the I’phri were mine to rule. You shunned me and threw me out of my kingdom and my lands.”
A blaze flashed in Aelen’s palms; the sapphire flames so hot they twisted the air. “You were eating their souls!”
Ovatar shuddered forward. “They were mine to take. To eat. To consume. They were mine!” He drifted another step toward Aelen, but he didn’t retreat. He stood tall with his chin held high. “And now I’ve been brought one more. Come, offer yourself, and I’ll be gentle. My teeth will gnash lightly.”
“Enough,” Aelen snapped. “Let her go and we’ll sort this.” In the background, the remaining armada landed, still shaking the ground beneath our feet. Their clash with the guards shattered the air. Ovatar’s soldiers scattered to deal with the chaos raging across Ilyatria.
He thought he’d come to save me.
Another gash in my crumbling armor.
Ovatar laughed again. “Let her go? Perhaps, when she’s been kind enough to ensnare you into my trap, dear child.
” In a roar, he separated himself from my father, jaw unhinging to vomiting his true form onto the ground.
In the pool of sickening sapphire, Ovatar writhed.
What stood in the putrid spew ran my blood cold.
He had the form, the idea of Aelen—or it must have been that Aelen looked similar to Ovatar.
The same chiseled cheeks and sculpted features, like a marble bust created from the thought of perfection.
But beneath those blazing cobalt orbs, there was a wide, sick grin filled with far too many monstrous teeth.
His hair was like a shade of the night, a veil that fell behind him and licked the stone.
Perfect. Gorgeous. Terrible. Terrifying.
His skin wasn’t pallid, ashen, or pale as the snow, like Aelen. It was the shining white of stars, and I struggled to focus on it as it shifted.
A god in the flesh, if he had any flesh at all. Now, he appeared almost formless, becoming what he desperately tried to be, to hold onto.
At his back, my father thrashed, trying to come to terms with no longer being infected by a god.
Ovatar lunged forward in a flash of cerulean.
Aelen threw up a hand and met him with a wave of searing lumen.
Sudden blinding light filled the square, throwing back pieces of guards and many bodies.
Yet both stood unbothered and unchanged, with outstretched hands and vitriol settled across their faces.
Far behind Ovatar, my father shambled to his feet, terrified.
He darted away, and my heart dropped. I tried to scramble up after him but faltered, lacking the strength.
So I shoved my magic through myself, forcing it to heal and give me a flush of stamina.
It worked enough, and I screamed at Mourn behind me, singing a sonnet of spring fireworks, and flayed bodies.
A rune swirled into existence right at Arthvur’s feet, and he jumped back just in time to miss it exploding up in his face.
So I switched to a sonnet of ice. Of when Aelen surrounded me with razor sharp pillars and my death hung a breath away.
The violent crystals burst from the ground, imprisoning my father. Blue lumen shot from his fingers, but my frozen pillars strengthened as Mourn roared.
I tightened my grip around the dagger as I closed the distance between us.
He tried to struggle out a few words, some apologies that were months—no, years—too late.
Had he not slaughtered what remained of my family, we wouldn’t be here, but now we were, and I could grapple with the vile reality of his actions. The weight he would bear in death.
“Please,” he begged as I lorded over him, raising the dagger. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
“You killed my mother, my brother, and the I’phri.
This is for them, but most of all, this is for Deldren,” I screamed as I lunged, and plunged the dagger through his heart.
I cracked through his sternum and produced screams, the likes of which I’d never heard before.
But he wilted into a puddle of crimson on the ground, to which I grabbed his head and severed it.
Brutal, gruesome work, but the knife parted him like butter.
When I slid it across the last stretch of flesh, the pact shattered. It broke like a million shards of Aelen’s mirrors and slipped away into nothing, leaving a wake of agony.
I’d despised the pact for so long, but without it felt a sudden, knocking loneliness. I ignored it, and in the depths of my battle haze, I raised the severed head to Aelen before dropping it to my feet.
Aelen crashed to his knees, the bitter anguish marred into his features. He must have been overtaken by the same agony I suffered. “Go,” he screamed. “Get on Mourn and leave.”
Ovatar laughed and threw a brutal wave of lumen at Aelen.
He protested, throwing up a shield but too late. It left the skin of his arm hanging as he tried to force himself to a stand.
“You brought him to his knees and weakened him just as promised. You’re just as cruel as your father,” Ovatar cackled.
My heart shattered.
Aelen’s head snapped toward me. “What does he speak of Lorelana?”
“Stand up,” I screamed running toward him, but Ovatar threw out a brutal blast, halting me.
“Did she not mention how she sold you away for her own life and safety? How droll. Now get down and hand yourself to me, meek, powerless spawn.” He threw another wave at Aelen, but Aelen shattered it with a wave of his own, his movements languishing.
“I’m so sorry, I had to!” I cried.
“How could you?”
Wounded.
Laced with pain.
I did that.
Ovatar sent a blast from both hands at us, and I barely managed to spit out a sonnet. Mourn formed an ice shield that disintegrated from the force, throwing smoking chunks of ice to our feet.
I met Aelen’s eyes, despite the tears running rivulets down my cheeks, and the incessant urge to flee. This was it. We had to seal him, or lose. Bind him, or die. The seconds were flitting away from us faster than I could count them.
“I’m so sorry Aelen, when this is over you can curse my name. You can look me in the eye, take my head or mark me with a worse pact for all I care, but right now I need you to sing.”
“You want me to help you after you handed me to that monster?”
“No, stop him goddamnit!” Another brutal attack by Ovatar stole my voice. I didn’t sing in time and I threw out the lumen before me, but Ovatar’s magic seared into my fingertips. I just barely missed being shredded, my movements languid from the remaining pain of my wound.
It hurt. Oh it hurt. My hands shook like they’d been flayed.
So I wrapped myself in the lament from Aelen’s walls, the words I could remember. Aelen’s eyes found mine, and his voice joined me. But his tone was weak, and he had to dodge Ovatar again.
Small sapphire threads spread between us, too weak and looking for a proper target. It had no wall to climb over and to invade like ivy, no trellis to support it, yet they met anyway.
But the end to the elegy came rapidly. With each sung sonnet, I reached closer and closer to the edge.
But Ovatar just laughed. He cackled, the sound overtaking him.
“You think you can bind me from these words uttered centuries ago? You think yourself greater than a god?”
The words slipped and dipped. Yet I could count how many stanzas I had left on a single hand. For every word sung I searched deep in Aelen’s lumen and prayed it would tell me the ones that remained. Aelen’s gaze never left mine, even as Ovatar nearly wiped him off his feet.
“You still love the useless mortal.” Ovatar’s voice cracked into us.
I thought Aelen would argue, but he didn’t. He sang each and every word, as the weak threads seethed on the ground. Our magic needed to strengthen. To grow, but with every word, it slipped further from us.
Ovatar’s lips raised into a sick grin and I cringed. “So I will torture you in the way I could not centuries ago.” His gaze fell on me. “You are the chink in his armor that will break him.”
“No!” Aelen screamed. The sapphire threads dropped away. They dissipated into the freezing air and flurries. As if they never were.
“I’ll give her the fate that will wound you deeper than any knife, spawn. Killing her would be too easy. No, I’ll seal you both to a fate worse than death.”
A knowing look crossed Aelen’s features before they contorted with horror. His gaze found mine and his voidlike orbs shook. Every part of him shook. “Anything but that! Take my soul, take any part of me—”
Ovatar’s lips curled. “Too late. She’ll never know you again.”
Then he twisted his fingers, and something in my mind writhed with blinding pain.
Searing. Unending. Agony.