Chapter 53
Wolfe
“The Breath Between.”
The stone corridor stretched endlessly before me.
Shadows danced in the torchlight, blending with my own as I made my way to my room. My mage was supposed to be there waiting for me.
Through the tall windows, the night was deep and quiet, with the kind of stillness that made thoughts too loud, memories too vivid, and sleep impossible.
I was grateful the day had begun better than it ended.
The time I'd spent with Elariya in the quiet hours of the morning had been more precious to me than any crown. I'd bared my soul to her, claimed her as my queen, and spared her father's life, all in the span of a single conversation. Each decision had reshaped my entire world.
Speaking about her father was a blade to my tongue. But opening my soul to Elariya and declaring her my queen was one of the most difficult things I'd ever done in my life.
I'd never met anyone whom I'd ever desired to take as my queen. Honestly, I'd thought I'd fall into an arranged marriage like most of my relatives.
Of all of us over several millennia, my parents were the luckiest. They grew up together and were always in love. Although my mother had come from House Duskryn, a house that had never married into the Royal House, it was inevitable that they'd be together.
I'd be the first Nightblade in the royal line to be with a mage in five millennia.
Elariya was a wild card I never saw coming. An ace the gods held back to bewitch me just at the moment when I least expected it.
I'd gone from doing my best to resist her, to ravenous obsession.
Graceless gods, it hadn't even been a full month yet. Weeks. Mere weeks. And this was what she’d done to me.
I'd claimed her, but she never knew she had me at hello. Right from that moment she looked at me through my shield in the tavern.
From there, love dipped in lethal obsession claimed me. The perfect weapon to make a being like me lose his head. And maybe his crown.
My mage still didn't know the power she held over me. So much power, it swayed me into sparing her father and agreeing to send her back to her family if we weren’t successful tomorrow and her memory reset.
Only the gods knew how much I'd hated both ideas. One felt like an injustice to my family—I didn't even know what I was going to say to Alaric yet. The other idea risked exposing what I'd worked so damn hard to keep secret from Dreynthor.
I'd already spoken to Arielle about getting Elariya back to Stormfell unnoticed.
Now that she'd perfected her ethereal magic, she thought she could open a conduit on the ghost roads and portal us to Stormfell.
It would be tricky, and I'd never heard of anyone attempting such a thing before, but it was doable. The problem was Elariya's family.
I still needed to tell them something. Or every fucking thing.
But… I'd do it for her.
All that emotion, and I still hadn't shared my biggest secret with Elariya.
My curse.
I'd wanted to tell her. There was every reason to come clean, but the part of me that still wanted her to see something good in me held back.
How do you tell someone that you're Death incarnate? That your touch could drain the life from her if you lost control? That loving me meant loving something fundamentally opposed to everything she represented?
I was the absence of life. The absence of hope. The absence of dreams.
The absolute antithesis of her.
I couldn't bear to see that kind of fear replace the love in her eyes.
She wanted to stay in my darkness, but Elariya didn't know just how dark that darkness truly was. And that I was the darkness.
By the time I took her to see the dragons, I didn't have the heart to taint her any further.
Nothing compared to watching the joy on her face as she watched the dragons sing. We listened to them until the sun rose. Then I had to leave her, and the day went downhill quickly after that.
My hands clenched into fists as I recalled my futile efforts to uncover more information about the rebels. Then there was the fucking High Table meeting. The memory made my steps grow heavier, my boots striking the stone with increasing force.
Dreynthor announced I wouldn't be marrying Princess Seraphina, and that sparked an argument I had no patience for since it involved people who meant nothing to me.
King Paeulyn was in attendance as an honorary guest. He was predictably enraged by my decision, but not angry enough to get into an argument with me, or make any threats. No one was that foolish.
I apologized to him, only because of his years of allegiance to my father.
If he were anyone else, I wouldn't have said a word.
By the same token, he probably wouldn't have accepted my apology if I were someone else.
He certainly would have demanded more of an explanation for my refusal to marry his most-sought-after daughter.
I'd given him a half-truth—that my uncle had gotten ahead of himself and made arrangements without my consent, and Galaythia's future king couldn't be bound by treaties he'd never agreed to.
I didn't tell him or anyone else about Elariya.
I didn't want any of them picking her apart.
She was my choice, which meant I'd choose when they got to find out about her.
Though, I was sure Dreynthor had already leaked that information.
It didn't matter. None of that mattered when my fate rested on the spell's success. Whether that was tomorrow or... another time, or never.
Using the Heartflame crystals was an idea I came up with after Arielle and Bastian tested out some dragon magic in the dead realm to track an object similar to the ring. It was one of those rogue ideas we'd come up with, but it worked better than anything else we'd done so far.
I'd love to have faith that we could replicate the success to find the ring, but I didn't want to get my hopes up. If it worked, it worked, and it would only work if the ring allowed it to. As in, if it felt safe enough to allow us to see where it was.
Now that I'd openly defied my uncle by choosing Elariya over a political marriage, the stakes had risen.
I had to escalate my efforts to find the ring.
War was brewing with the rebellion. The rebels grew stronger with their mysterious benefactor while our options dwindled.
I was running out of time, but I had to be ready for whatever came next.
I reached my room. The moment I stepped inside and saw Elariya asleep in the armchair by the fireplace, the burdens on my shoulders loosened.
She was my peace in the storm. The only sense of calm that could reach me.
Every time I looked at her, I saw life. Not death or dying. I saw life and a future. A future I wanted with her.
I saw happiness in that future. Joy, love, compassion. All the things she’d spoken about on the night of the festival. She’d sold the idea to me, and I wanted it all.
I shrugged off my jacket and made my way over to her. She looked so comfortable curled up to the side with the blanket draped over her, I couldn't bring myself to wake her.
On the floor lay her journal, wide open. She must have dropped it. And like that night on the ship, it displayed the first two pages.
I would never purposely read her private thoughts, but like before, it was impossible to unsee the very same words taunting me.
She'd written:
"It all began one fateful night after I (you) met a Fae prince in the tavern at home. He tricked me with a cruel, damning kiss then took me captive.
Beware of the Fae prince and how he makes you feel.
It's a danger you can't afford."
That night, I was so focused on the way she'd described the kiss because I was dying to kiss her again.
The Ruskiel attacked hours later, and it was as if everything between Elariya and I changed in ways I could no longer control. Giving someone a piece of your soul will do that to you. But there was already more between us, and she was right—it all began that fateful night when we met at the tavern.
It felt like we'd lived several lifetimes since.
I picked up the journal and set it on the table, then stared at it for a moment longer.
Elariya had recorded her memories in this journal. Memories of me, of Galaythia, and everything that had happened between us. Unlike her other journals in Stormfell, this one captured the details of this reset.
I imagined she'd documented as much information as possible. She'd told me her grandmother would journal, too, back home, for added support.
An idea came to me. A rekindling of something I hadn't done in years.
If the spell failed and her memory reset, she'd lose all trace of us, and I'd become a stranger to her again.
I wanted her to have something. Something from me. My memories of us—the way she looked when we first met, how she felt in my arms, what it meant for her to choose to stay in my darkness.
I wanted her to have my own record of what we'd shared. What she meant to me. What we'd built together in these stolen weeks.
I used to journal in my younger days. My mother encouraged me because, of all her children, I was most like her. "Anything you love needs to be written down. It is your legacy," she'd said.
Those words echoed through my mind again as I glanced at my beautiful girl and knew I had to try.
I moved quietly to my desk and conjured one of my mother's notebooks. I pulled out my quill, some ink, then started writing.
My dearest Elariya, if you're reading this, then I've lost you, but I hope with these words, your heart will remember me.