Chapter 74
OPHIUCAE
She’d surprised me.
Not many had ever claimed that honor, and all the others were dead.
I might not have known, had my excitement not gotten the better of me. I’d come to teach my errant child a lesson, and when I saw her army near, I couldn’t resist sending my message earlier than planned.
But when I pushed into her soldiers’ feeble minds to show her how easily what was hers could be made mine . . . something pushed back.
She’d found a way to keep me out.
Clever, clever girl.
Pride, not anger, filled my chest. What a force she could be. My salvation and my weakness, my only worthy opponent and my only treasured heir.
How deeply it would grieve me to kill her.
Did she know that I could? Could she feel how easy it would be for me to extinguish her spark and all the others’? Did she see that every life I spared, I spared for her?
But there was no use in sparing a body that was already dead. The people of Emarion were beyond redemption. To save this world, I would bury its corpse and let new life grow in its place.
If she joined me, I would do it as a father’s gift to his daughter. If she didn’t, I would do it to honor her memory.
She believed she’d already made her choice.
But I was a patient man.
And I still had a lesson I’d come to teach.