Chapter 60 Lie of the Dreamer
Chapter sixty
Lie of the Dreamer
-Maris-
Kael’s silver eyes burned, not with anger, but love, raw, trembling, repentant. Alarik’s gaze held steady, storm-bright and aching, as if he could feel every heartbeat trembling inside her ribs.
“I—” she began, voice cracking.
A shudder ripped through her.
Her body jerked back as if yanked by invisible threads. Her breath fled her lungs, her knees gave way and she hit the floor hard, the marble cold against her spine. Her limbs locked. Her voice abandoned her. Her eyes burned like starlight had been poured into her skull.
A voice that wasn’t hers tore from her throat, a voice of future and past, echoing through the throne room like thunder cracking through glass.
“She was never your chosen, Dreammaker. She is your undoing.”
Screams erupted. Metal scraped against stone. Shadows leapt from the walls. But Maris felt none of it. She wasn’t in her body anymore.
She was falling.
Dragged down into the heart of a vision not her own.
It wasn’t the god song she’d heard before. It was something deeper. Older. And it wasn’t kind.
She saw chains.
Golden, celestial, tangled through the cosmos like snares around a great being of light and shadow. A woman, radiant and furious, her eyes gleaming the same white fire that now lived inside Maris.
Eiren.
Not sleeping.
Bound.
Her power seethed beneath the chains, ravenous and searing with hate.
“She lied,” a voice whispered in the void. It wasn’t one voice. It was four. Layered. Weaving in and out of each other like threads in a tapestry. “The Dreammaker is no savior. She is wrath. Scorned. Twisted by what she could not keep.”
Maris’s vision shifted stars cracked like glass, memories unraveled. She saw a fae male with violet eyes and pointed ears, bowing before the goddess. Then turning his back. Choosing another — a vampire.
And from their union the first nightbound was born.
The creation, Eiren hated.
A betrayal she never forgave.
It was vengeance, not vision, that drove her.
“She cursed the realms,” said the voices. “Poisoned the veil. Turned fate to rot. So we wove the threads to create you. A weapon in a girl’s shape. A failsafe in fragile skin.”
“No,” Maris breathed, but even her denial was swallowed by the storm. “No, she gave me power." She recalled the figure who marked her. Not done by Eiren but another —
“We marked you,” said the gods. “The sigil is no gift. It is a key. It will open the final door to your power and purpose. When she does— you must sever her hold on your world, by taking her life.”
The dream burned.
Maris writhed within it.
The threads of her memory caught fire every whisper, every vision, every blessing turned to ash. It had never been protection. Never been divine favor. It had been a cage made to carry a blade. Her.
She was not chosen.
She was made.
And now the ones who forged her were coming, to collect on their creation.
The last thing she saw before darkness swallowed the stars was a flare of white light —a woman's face, eerily like her own, twisted in fury.
Eiren.
Maris screamed as her body twisted on the floor like the gods were trying to tear it open from the inside.
Silence over came the chamber and she collapsed —a broken puppet. The glow faded from her veins and the echo of a terrible truth ringing behind her eyes.
And when she opened them at last, Kael clutched her tightly. Alarik knelt to her right, she realized that neither of them looked at her as they once had.
Something made to unmake.
-Alarik-
The throne room was in gutted silence. Maris lay motionless in Kael's arms, her skin pale, her body still catching breath like a half-drowned thing. But the silence wasn’t for her alone.
It was for what they’d heard.
What they’d all witnessed.
“She was never your chosen, Dreammaker. She is your undoing.”
The words still echoed, more than a voice, a verdict. A divine proclamation that had split the room.
The Dreammaker, the goddess of dreams and mercy, Eiren. She was not their savior.
She was the betrayal.
And Maris, the woman he’d come to worship was never chosen by a goddess at all. She had been forged by the others — those that the priests cursed. The ones the stories had cast in shadow.
A goddess in her own write, forged of the blood and power of four gods to bring Eiren to ruin.
He exhaled slowly, the sound shaking in his chest.
Around him, his court stood stricken. Zairon looked pale. Serenya hadn’t moved an inch, since dodging out to help catch Maris's fall. Even Kael, the king of darknesses cold-eyes looked haunted.
All of Achyron had built faith around a narrative spun by a god whose wrath had twisted history like a blade through silk. They had worshipped her. Pleaded to her as a final hope. And all the while, Eiren had been bound, for her crimes against them.
Imprisoned by the other four.
Not for mercy.
Not for dreams of peace.
But to contain her madness.
Alarik’s gaze dropped to Maris’s hand, still faintly glowing where the sigil burned beneath her skin.
It was the gods’ final answer.
They’d all been too blind to see it.
Too obsessed.
Too possessive.
Too caught up in wanting her for themselves to see what she was.
His stomach twisted.
A thousand years of worship, of lore, of holy texts — and not one mention that the sigil was a weapon.
They’d painted her power as an accident. A gift. A rare spark in a mortal girl.
But it wasn’t rare.
It was designed.
She had been toyed with. Lied to. Pushed toward death times over and still she’d risen.
He looked to Kael.
The other male’s gaze never left Maris.
She was not theirs to hold. She never had been. She was the reckoning. The weapon made to sever an ancient curse and strike down a goddess too twisted by heartbreak to let go.
And Alarik, for all his strategy and poise, felt helpless.
All this time, they had prepared for war. But none of them were ready for this.
-Kael-
He didn’t know how he got to her.
One moment, Maris was standing in the space between him and Alarik, caught between love and ruin and the next, she was falling.
She seized.
Her body arched unnaturally — eyes flared white — and her mouth opening not with her voice.
“She was never your chosen, Dreammaker. She is your undoing.”
A threat from the four gods to the one had weaved a land of nightmares.
And then she dropped like a marionette cut from its strings.
Kael caught her before she hit the floor.
Now he knelt there, stone cold marble beneath his knees, her limp form in his arms.
The air around her still shimmered faintly. Like magic had stained her skin.
But her eyes were closed.
Her breath was shallow.
And Kael could do nothing but hold her.
“Maris,” he whispered, brushing the damp hair from her brow. “Gods please.”
But even as he said it, he realized how useless the plea was.
The gods were already here.
They had done this to her, they had spoken. Unleashed truth like a blade meant to cleave through everything they thought they knew. He looked down at the sigil on her palm no longer glowing, but etched with new meaning now.
A curse forged to end a curse. The irony choked him.
Alarik’s voice rang low and strained. “Let me help.”
Kael’s head snapped up.
The faelight king knelt on her other side with fear.
They were born enemies.
Rivals.
But not in this.
In this, they were simply two broken-hearted creatures watching the love — they both wanted to possess turn out to be a force neither of them could hold.
“She’s burning up,” Alarik murmured, touching her wrist. “Her magic’s still moving inside her.”
Kael nodded mutely, fingers tightening around her waist as if he could anchor her to this world. “Why didn’t I see it?”
Alarik didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
Because neither of them had.
“She trusted us,” Kael said, barely a breath. “And we missed it. We missed everything.”
The room was still. No one dared move.
“I thought she was mine,” Kael whispered, bitterness slicing through him.
“She wasn’t yours,” Alarik snapped not cruel, but honest. “She never was. Just as she’s not mine.”
He remembered every time he’d told her she was strong but only after she’d proved it.
Every time he’d quieted her rage, shielded her under the illusion of protection when really, it was control.
Now he understood.
She hadn’t needed a protector.
She’d needed someone who believed in her before she set the world on fire.
Two kings on their knees.
A Veilbreaker in their arms.
And overhead, the sky crackled with divine unrest, waiting for what she would become when she woke.