Epilogue
P ain.
I’ve endured the worst forms of it over the centuries, the sort that would make most others beg for the relief of death. But as I blink up at a cloudless sky, streaks of a foreign sun burning against my skin, I can no longer bear it.
It feels as if my bones have all shattered; like the shards of my ribs have dug into my lungs and with every short breath I manage, they slice me open wider. It feels like emptiness, like the blurred lines of something missing—an erased memory. I burn with it—all singed nerves and phantom limbs—the unrelenting scorch of everything I’ve lost.
I squeeze my eyes shut, determined not to open them again. Because if I do, my tenuous hold on Letum will slip entirely from my grasp. My world with Willa will fade into the oblivion of dreams and memories, and this world will become ever more tangible. That’s what happens when you step out of the land of dreams and immerse yourself once more in the river of time—existence shifts from the ethereal to the concrete.
Despair stuffs itself into my lungs. Clogs my throat and presses against my skull.
I only ever wanted you.
I could live another thousand years, and it won’t be enough to erase the agony on her face—agony I caused. With my own arrogance. With my weakness. With my love.
Death. Decay. Rot.
The eternal Carrion King.
“I’d like to say the years have been kind to you,” a horribly familiar voice croons from somewhere above me. “But only naughty boys tell lies, little brother. You look terrible.”
Dawson’s voice is so unexpected in this new world that despite the pain, I lurch to my feet, pulling my revolver from its place at my belt. My brother gives me an amused smirk from where he leans against a decrepit brick wall, arms crossed over his chest. He looks exactly as he always has—carelessly messy black hair tumbling over his forehead, sun-kissed skin, mischievous blue eyes.
His trousers are frayed mid-calf, his bare feet and chest incongruous to the crumbling industrial facades surrounding us, the contrast highlighted even more so by the array of weapons hung in the various belts and scabbards decorating his lean body.
“Your pallor is absolutely ghastly, Nikolas.” Dawson squints up at the sun. “Perhaps you’ll finally be able to get a tan.” His mischievous grin turns vicious. “Now that you have no more power to leech the life from you.”
He tilts his head, and my skin prickles with awareness though he makes no move toward me. “I will say, it is nice to see the natural color of your eyes once more. Such a lovely shade of cerulean…some might say the color of the sea itself.”
I adjust my grip on the revolver, aligning the sights with my brother’s chest. I’ve never needed magic to kill, and the thought of spilling his blood—of punishing him for every terrible thing he’s done—is highly tempting. To make him hurt the way I do, to inundate myself in his mistakes rather than my own.
To ignore the unbearable hollow in my chest, the raw wounds that seep, even now, like everything I’d once been filled with has been brutally scraped out, leaving behind a flimsy shell. Willa. My magic. Sam. Marina. Tiernan. Their absence aches with a fierceness that has me gripping my sternum in an attempt to ease it.
But it only grows as I glance around, realizing with dread where Willa has exiled me. Morose and colorless. Utilitarian and ugly.
Her world. The world I was born to.
Entirely alone, except for my brother.
For a horrified moment, I wonder if Willa sent Dawson here to torment me. She can be a vicious creature when she’s wounded, and I’ve done plenty to earn such a punishment.
To keep myself from dwelling any further, I draw my sword, and leap forward with precision, to press the blade to the hollow of my brother’s throat. He only laughs, the emptiness of it crawling beneath my skin.
The Strayed became the monsters they were because of Pan siphoning their natural magic, but Dawson is different—he was born the way he is. Empty. Conniving. Terrifying.
“What do you want, brother ?” I snarl, digging the tip of the sword into his skin. Crimson blood beads on the edge of the blade, and the urge to spill it all rages through me. Why should a monster like him be allowed to live with human blood, while I’ve been cursed with rotted sludge?
“Can't a chap simply want to enjoy the company of family?”
“You’ve had centuries to gather enough courage to show your face to me. Instead, you’ve kept hidden in the shadows like the coward you are, always sending everyone else to do your dirty work.”
He shrugs. “Not all of us can be martyrs, Niko.”
I don’t like the sound of my name in his voice—it slides over my skin like viscous slime, an echo of all the times he’s said it. When he’d been manipulating me or torturing me. When he’d watch me lose everything, over and over, with a greedy glint in his eyes.
They glint like that now, as he drinks in the way his words spear through me. A stark reminder of everything my martyrdom has cost me.
“Have you acquired a sudden taste for it, then?” I ask, my voice deathly quiet. “Because I can think of no other reason you’d be stupid enough to come this close. In this world or ours, I need no power to end you, Dawson. I will gut you just like I gutted your king, and I will enjoy every minute of your suffering, just as you’ve always enjoyed mine.”
Dawson grins, and for a brief moment, I consider making his death quick. Slitting his throat and then turning away from him, if only to give myself a moment’s reprieve. A place to breathe through the pain of everything I’ve lost, to lie down and wait for the death this world will eventually grant me.
“Don’t you want to know the cost?”
The words drag me from my thoughts as cold fury surges up my throat. It doesn’t matter how exhausted I am. A quick death won’t do.
“I already know the cost,” I snarl back, baring my teeth. “Far better than someone like you ever will.”
Dawson’s eyes spark, as he drinks in my rage. “Losing Willa forever was a consequence, Niko. It wasn’t the cost,” he says in a sing-song voice.
My breath catches, and my eyes narrow. “What do you mean?”
“The centuries have dulled your mind. Made you sloppy,” Dawson crows with relish. “Did you not wonder why I didn’t fight harder to keep Willa from anchoring herself to the island? Why I brought my kin to your ridiculous palace, rather than into the belly of the Croc?”
Every part of me goes cold, as I stare at my brother. I’d already been on the verge of death when the battle began. Far too gone to examine the motivations of a man who rarely needed a reason for violence.
“The Strayed were merely a distraction. I needed to make it convincing, you see. Enough so that you never guessed my true motivations.” His smile is sharp and humorless. “You and Willa were too tied up in your own game to ever truly examine mine.”
My words are a grit of teeth, a slash of violence. “ Tell me .”
Dawson obliges. Not out of the kindness of his heart, but out of his need to drink in more of my pain. To grind salt into the lethal wounds already sliced through me. “Now that she’s tied to the island, every time your little darling uses her magic, she’ll be giving up a little piece of her humanity.”
My blood goes cold in my veins. “That’s a lie,” I snap. “I’ve anchored the island for two hundred years, and I’m just as human now as I was then.”
“That’s because you had nothing to offer, brother. You were only filled with death, and so the island could not drink. But Willa…” Dawson grins, devouring every bit of my reaction. “Willa is so full. So alive.”
Shock loosens my grip on the sword hilt. Dawson swats the blade from my hand, and it flies to the ground with a clatter.
“You know better than anyone this world gives you nothing for free. It took centuries for Pan to lose his humanity entirely, but something tells me Willa’s descent will be far quicker.”
He licks his lips with fervor. “She toyed with the sacred things of the universe. She reimagined time itself and stole from fate. You know well the possession of death. The theft will not go unanswered.”
Guilt crashes against me, and my lungs refuse to expand and suddenly, I’m drowning on dry land. No matter how I gasp or writhe, there is not enough air. Not enough anything to erase Dawson’s words.
He sighs with relish. “I’ll bide my time, provoking her just enough to use her magic. Over and over, piece by piece, until your woman is just as empty as the Aeternalis. And if you’re ever brave enough to show your face in Letum, I promise…you won’t even recognize the twisted thing Willa has become.”
I think of gutting my brother where he stands, from throat to belly, and watching his organs spill out on the dingy sidewalk for daring to threaten what’s mine. But all I manage is, “Why?”
It isn’t Dawson who replies.
“Because I’ve always wanted someone to rule by my side,” a voice says from behind me, one that haunts both my nightmares and daydreams. One I never thought I’d hear again.
I whirl in time to see the Aeternalis step out from behind the brick building. The Everlasting nearly glows in the harsh sunlight. Blonde locks curled in a messy halo around his head, piercing eyes the color of new grass. Young, unblemished skin colored by hours of adventure. Pan’s face is ageless, his features pointed and delicate in the manner of pixies.
He looks the same as he does in every memory—playfully cruel, violently beautiful—but for a large, scabbed wound running from his throat to his groin. The wound I gave him. Willa’s meddling may have brought him back from the dead, but it hadn’t been able to make him entirely whole. His organs are visible through the wound, as is the blood pumping through his veins and the magic glowing behind his heart.
Power that would be flowing through his entire body if we weren’t currently standing in a world with no magic.
“I’ve never liked to be alone, as you well know, Nikolas,” he says, stepping toward me.
Instinctively, I reach for my death. But I find only emptiness, a gaping hole where my power used to reside. How had I never noticed the scraping emptiness of it the last time I’d left the island? Looming beneath the absence of pain?
The Aeternalis laughs, a tinkling melody that slices through the air. “And I think Willa will make the most excellent of playmates.”