Chapter 57
Rune
Rune stood at the edge of the balcony, gazing at the dying sun. He had built the tower long ago in a moment of weakness he would never admit. A single room at the peak of the world, not to command from… but to remember.
The last beams of warm light landed on his face. He clenched his teeth as his skin blistered, smoking faintly along his jaw and collarbone and chest. He stood there because he had to. It was the only thing stopping him from devouring what he couldn’t have.
One pain to erase another.
Because he would rather harm himself than her.
The air shifted.
The shadows rippled behind him with a presence. No one ever dared come here. He turned with a snarl, half-expecting an intrusion or a threat.
But it wasn’t either.
The shadows parted like silk being drawn aside, revealing her.
Rune froze.
Utterly speechless.
She threw her arms around him and pulled him into her. Into the shadows.
The world twisted as the ground vanished beneath his feet. And they landed in his chamber. The doors sealed. The shadows fell still. Alora looked up at him, breath ragged, furious.
Rune forgot how to breathe. He sank to his knees.
She stood before him remade, and yet unmistakably Alora.
The ends of her hair rippled as divine flame.
White light caught within each strand, before darkness threaded through like living ink, shadow claiming what light could not hold alone.
Her eyes glowed red and far more terrible, with a power that did not demand obedience, only recognition.
Shadows leaned toward her without command, flowers bowed and withered in her wake, and the world went still, waiting to hear what she would ask of it.
Her gown seemed woven from the night sky, kissed by starlight.
It fell in soft, fluid layers that caught a pearlescent sheen, neither wholly white nor silver, as if shadow and radiance learned to coexist in its weave.
It was held in place by delicate constellations of silver that wove around her neck and her bodice.
Rune’s chest tightened.
This was not the girl he had stolen from an altar, nor merely the queen he had crowned.
This was more than a goddess standing at the edge of her becoming.
The power in her blood sang to him, holding a strength far beyond his understanding.
She had reclaimed her magic and awoke as she was always meant to be.
The Sovereign of the Netherworld.
Rune’s mouth opened, but nothing came out.
“No.” She lifted a hand. “You will not speak yet.”
Rune snapped his jaw shut, obeying instinctively to the thrall in her voice, to the power surging around her. And the shadows that once obeyed him wrapped around her instead.
Alora reached for his face, gently now, clawed finger delicately brushing across the burn on his jaw. “Why?” she whispered. “Why would you punish yourself for wanting me when you could have simply come to me?”
Rune’s hands trembled at his sides. He realized his glamor had fallen, unveiling the scales on his cheekbones. But Alora didn’t flinch. She looked at him with those soft warm eyes now churning with gentle flame.
“You know not what I am,” he said.
“I do.” Alora cupped his face, her fingers falling over his scales. “Even when you hide behind your glamor, I have always seen you, Rune.”
Rune didn’t move.
Didn’t breathe.
His throat worked around a thousand unsaid things.
Standing, he backed up a step.
“You don’t understand,” he said quietly. “We already lived this life, Alora. And you died from utter terror at the sight of me.”
She reached for him, but he backed further away.
“I felt your soul vanish from this world when you died. I heard your heartbeat stop. And it was the last thing I ever heard from you.” Rune’s hands clenched at his sides, claws sinking into his palms to regain his composure.
“Rune.” Alora lifted his chin. “I have already seen who you are and I am not afraid.”
Rune froze.
Because this was it.
The line between devotion and devastation. If he showed her the truth and she ran, if she died, it would break him. Because out of everything he endured, he couldn’t face that again.
Yet there Alora didn’t waver. Her heartbeat beat steadily, ready.
So Rune took a breath and let go.
Every layer of his glamor fell away.
It started at his hands, shifting, warping, stripping him bare.
Alora went utterly still.
Her lips parted, breath caught somewhere between awe and shock. For a heartbeat, she did not move. Did not flee. Nor reach for him either. She only stared in silence, her gaze slowly roaming over him. He could not read her reaction from her features.
But he couldn’t bear not knowing.
So, he slipped deep into the bond and the world shifted as he saw himself from Alora’s eyes.
He was massive compared her, towering at seven feet.
Large horns curved from his brow like a crown of night, long black hair falling around his face.
His wings were enormous, hooks at each crest, leathery and torn at the edges, stretched wide as if the night itself clung to him, veined with embers of red.
His skin was like ink bleeding into water, giving way to black basalt.
Glowing red paths surfaced along his arms and neck, forming like molten fissures of lava, pulsing with ancient symbols.
Shadows breathed from his form, coiling and uncoiling like living smoke.
Her eyes widened slightly when they lowered to the powerful tail unfurling behind him.
It was long and sinuous, thick at the base and tapering to a cruel, barbed tip.
Obsidian scales overlapped in armored ridges, catching a hint of crimson in what little light there was.
It twitched around his clawed feet with unease.
The barbs at its end were curved and jagged, shaped less for balance and more for eviscerating.
Then her gaze lifted to his eyes. They had blackened completely to an unholy void where light once lived. Red irises burned with eternal flame, slitted with draconic pupils.
Rune didn’t move. Didn’t dare.
He was the terror that lurked in the dark, yet he terrified to lose everything once more.
But Alora only smiled, and that action hit harder than any blow.
Rune slipped out of the bond as she walked around him slowly, taking in his demonic form, her fingers trailing over every detail, the sharp edges, the holy markings, the curve of his wings.
Then she stopped behind him.
He flinched when her hand lightly traced the four scars on his lower back. Four deep, symmetrical grooves beneath where others had once been.
Her voice came soft. Heartbreaking. “You were not born a demon, were you?”
Rune closed his eyes. His voice echoed in the silence like a confession dragged from eternity. “I was born in the Heavens.”
Alora stilled.
“My life was once music and light,” he confessed. “Endless perfection in divinity. I was pure. I was perfect. As glorious as a morning star.” He couldn’t disguise the bitterness lacing through his words and he clenched his jaw. “And such vanity cost me.”
Alora fell quiet a moment, her fingers pausing on his scars. “What happened?”
His teeth hurt from how hard he clenched them.
“My wings were taken from me,” Rune said simply.
Alora’s shock thrummed in his chest, humming down the bond.
Her arms wrapped around his torso and her forehead rested on his spine. The gentleness in her embrace made the back of his throat clench.
Alora’s voice wavered when she asked, “Why?”
He stared out through the balcony doors, at the twilight sky that never quite let the stars shine.
“My father’s parting gift… when he cast me out of the Heavens.” A long silence filled the room. “My punishment for daring to take pride in what I was created to be.”
“But why would he maim you?”
“I was Elyōn’s warrior, and the source of our power is held in our wings.”
When his meaning landed, Alora came out from behind him, gawking at him. “You… were a Seraph.”
Rune’s eyes at last met hers, and for the first time he let her see what the glamor had always concealed. Not shadow, but the absence of something luminous, carved out of him and never returned.
“I was the first.”
Alora’s breath caught as understanding unfurled across her face, threaded with awe and grief.
Light had not failed him.
It abandoned him.
He was never meant to become this.
The phantom ache lingered deep in his bones where his wings had been torn away. Or perhaps it was the unhealed fracture of exile etched into his being.
Through the bond, he felt the grief tighten in her chest because she knew his pain well. He supposed it was one thing they shared.
“Then the shadows…” she whispered.
He looked down at the blank tendrils weaving through his fingers. “I fell from the Heavens like a star…and landed in a realm of darkness. A barren wasteland of ash and stone, crawling with monstrous demons not unlike what I had become.”
His fingers curled slightly, shadows stirring at the movement.
“There was nothing to light that world. No sun. No moon. No warmth. Only fields of glowing spider lilies, burning softly against the dark.” His voice lowered, his brow furrowing with the memory of wandering alone for days.
“Until I found something else waiting in that void. A power born of the darkness itself.” His gaze met hers.
“Vorak had been sealed within the depths of the Abyss, and the shadows had lost their master, so they chose me. They gave me the strength to seize an empty throne… that was never truly mine.”
The statement left a heavy pause.
It was the reason why Dominions didn’t truly accept him as their king. He declared himself a god and stated the kingdom of the damned was his divine right.
A reign built on lies.
Alora rested her hands against his chest without hesitation or disgust. “But you made it yours,” she said firmly. “As I am.”
She truly was a miracle he didn’t deserve. He hadn’t been ashamed of his actions, not until now as he bore it all to her.